Abstract
Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, its military development has been an issue attracting worldwide attention. Three decades of reform after 1978, when Deng Xiaoping launched China’s economic reform and open door policy, have further boosted China’s power, and attention to Chinese military development has been concomitantly heightened. Issues related to military development that have been widely discussed range from doctrinal development, organizational change and hardware deployment to, more recently, defence industry reform. Nevertheless, one link is missing: how decisions about procurement of hardware are made. Yoram Evron’s China’s Military Procurement in the Reform Era: The Setting of New Directions attempts to provide this missing link.
Evron points out that military procurement of hardware systems is a complex process. It involves four interrelated factors, including strategic environment development and threat perception, particularly the urgency of threats as assessed by top leaders; economic performance, which affects the budget allocated to procurement; strategic culture, which shapes preference and direction of procurement; and internal politics, including the status of the top leadership, and inter-agency/political elites bargaining and coalitions.
Employing these four factors, Evron examines five stages in the Chinese military’s procurement history after economic reform and the open door policy, which were introduced in 1978. The five stages are the immediate post-Cultural Revolution era of the late 1970s, the period of declining threat before the end of the Cold War, the immediate post-Cold War era, after the 1995-6 Taiwan Strait crisis and Kosovo bombing crisis, and after the 2008 world financial crisis.
Evron emphatically focuses on five binary elements as the main analytical theme of China’s military procurement decision-making, because these five themes frequently appear in debates leading to the decision-making. The five binary elements are: military procurement vs national priorities, import vs indigenous development, research and development vs production, strategic vs conventional arms, and civil-military integration vs purely military procurement.
After thorough examination of military procurement in the post-1978 reform period, Evron reaches four conclusions which serve as guidelines for analysis: (1) strategic situation plays a dominant role, but the goal of procurement is to repel rather than defeat threats so that self-reliance will not be compromised; (2) relatively weak political leadership tends to give more weight to the military’s demands and pressure so that military support can be won; (3) economic performance is a sufficient factor, together with intensified threat perception, for the military leadership to push for the importation of hardware systems. In the face of unfavourable economic performance, selective procurement with a focus on strategic arms tends to prevail; and (4) strong political leadership can rein in procurement in line with national priorities. All in all, China’s growing overseas outreach will give the military sufficient rationale to build up their hardware.
Evron’s book makes an important contribution to our understanding of military procurement, a significant aspect of China’s national security decision-making. We are not short of publications on China’s deployment of hardware systems; in fact, publications on China’s defence industry development have surged in the past several years, and analyses of China’s perception of external environment are abundant. What Evron does is to make a link between perception of the external environment and deployment of hardware systems.
This book has two major deficiencies – areas which Evron could explore further. First, acquisition and procurement of hardware systems is a lengthy process, and it takes time to develop a system. With an evolving external environment, how does China address acquisition and procurement? For instance, after the 1995/6 Taiwan Strait crisis and the 1999 Kosovo bombing, there was a heightened perception of tension in the external environment. There was a strong perceived need for China to quickly improve its readiness in order to deter the United States from getting involved in the Taiwan Strait. In this context, a budget was allocated, related programmes were put in place, and the amount of hardware to be procured was set. But after 2008, when Ma Ying-Jeou became President of Taiwan and relations across the Taiwan Strait improved, how did China adapt its planned production? China could have chosen to reduce procurement, but the related programmes were already launched and could not be completely terminated. In other words, how did China adapt its procurement to an evolving strategic environment?
Second, Evron could have further examined Admiral Liu Huaqing’s role. Liu worked for a long time under General Zhang Aiping, an advocate of strategic arms procurement and a part of the strategic arms faction. But after being appointed as Commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, Zhang pushed the development aircraft carriers, an item regarded as conventional arms and adamantly opposed by a factional coalition of strategic arms proponents and the defence industry. The question is whether or not Liu switched sides from the strategic arms faction to the conventional arms faction. If Liu did, can we argue that the factional coalition was composed of strategic arms proponents and that the defence industry collapsed? If that was the case, what was Deng Xiaoping’s response?
There are also minor faults in the book. The first regards J-10. According to Dov Zakheim, whom this reviewer has interviewed, the former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger insisted that Israel should abandon its Lavi programme in the early 1990s. According to Zakheim, Lavi was at the conceptual design stage when the programme was destroyed. If this is true, it is probably safe to argue that China did not benefit much from the Lavi programme.
The second regards China’s defence budget. Public sources indicate that there is a special budget allocation for hardware system development, an amount which is apparently not included in the regular defence budget. This implies that more than the expected amount could be allocated to conventional arms development. These weaknesses notwithstanding, Evron’s book contributes to our understanding of China’s military procurement policies and strategies.