Bharat Rakshak

Key Findings

Particular challenges to accurate predictive assessments on indigenous Chinese military developments include:
* Information denial and/or deception:6 The PRC exercises secrecy over many aspects of its military affairs, and in some instances puts forth false or misleading information. The lack of transparency in the PRC’s military modernization has been a frequent complaint of U.S. defense officials in recent years.

* Underestimation of changes in China’s defense-industrial sector: Once viewed as a bloated and sclerotic industrial sector incapable of adaptation, in the past decade the PRC defense industry has outperformed the expectations of its critics. While it still faces many problems, the Chinese defense industry is far more capable of producing modern weapons platforms than would have been the case in the 1980s or 1990s.

* Difficulty in understanding the PRC national security decision-making process: The decision-making processes of the Chinese government are opaque, particularly in regards to military policy and national security issues. The public emergence and/or testing of some indigenous PRC weapons platforms has also revealed apparent problems of poor bureaucratic coordination, and the possibility of a civil-military divide at the top levels of Chinese policymaking.

* Underestimation of Beijing’s threat perceptions: Many analysts in media, academia, and the government may have failed to fully appreciate the extent to which the Chinese leadership views the United States as a fundamental threat to China’s security. These threat perceptions have been inflamed by a number of events in recent years, to include the 1996 Taiwan Straits Crisis and the accidental 1999 bombing of the PRC Embassy Annex in Belgrade by U.S. aircraft.

* China’s increased investments in science and technology: China’s intensive efforts over the past two decades to stimulate its indigenous capabilities for scientific research and development (R&D)—whether through science education, state funding for research, seeking technology transfers from foreign companies, or industrial espionage—have significantly increased its ability to produce more advanced weapons systems. Furthermore, China’s increasing knowledge of dual-use technologies (i.e., those with both commercial and military applications) in areas such as electronics has also offered significant cross-over benefits to the defense-industrial sector.

* Inadequate capabilities for and/or attention to the exploitation of open-source Chinese language materials: Some of the past flaws in analysis on China’s weapons program could have been partially corrected by increased attention to open-source materials, particularly in regards to academic technical journals and related publications. Increased attention to the messages in authoritative PRC media and political science publications would also have improved understanding of the worldview of the Chinese leadership.

The trends of past decades are no longer a reliable guide to the performance of China’s defense industries. Furthermore, U.S. observers should not take at face value statements from the Chinese government on military policy, as they could either be deceptive, or simply issued by agencies (e.g., the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that have no real say over military matters. Based on the trends identified in this paper, U.S. analysts and policymakers should expect to see continued advancements in the ability of the PRC to produce modern weapons platforms, and an attendant increase in the operational capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army.