_China's Strategic Seapower: The politics of force modernisation in the
nuclear age_ and _Imagined Enemies: China prepares for uncertain war_.
Both by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, Stanford University Press.

Lewis and Xue have made a profession of studying Chinese
military-political systems for thirty-plus years. They first came to
note with _Chine Builds the Bomb_, an account of the nuclear weapons
programme. Their study of the ICBM programme seems to only have been
published as journal articles, but Strategic Seapower deals with the
SLBM programme and its submarines, and Imagined Enemies deals with the
present-day strategic context, as viewed by China.

The SLBM programme has been going for over 45 years. Since they decided
to go straight to solid fuels, rather than emulating the Soviets, work
was slow; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution both
created large delays. Strategic Seapower concentrates on the politics
and organisation, rather than the details of the technology, and gives
good insight into the slow and painful process of building high-tech
weapons when the requisite high-tech infrastructure has to be created
along with the weapons. The Chinese always seem to have had adequate
supplies of scientific talent, but deploying it, turning its work into
hardware and testing and producing that hardware has been very
difficult; their lack of practical engineering expertise was a problem
for decades, but I'd suggest that their current economic development is
likely to relieve that problem. The book seems likely to give insight
into the problems and delays of other nations trying to produce advanced
weapon systems without an established technology base; assessments
produced by nations that didn't have those difficulties can easily
under-estimate difficulties.

Chinese strategic planning, as recounted in Imagined Enemies, is just
weird. It's grounded in ancient principles - it is easy to forget that
Chinese culture has a far longer continuous intellectual tradition than
anything western - and thus looks amazingly old-fashioned in places.
However, they seem to understand what their strategic issues are, and
many of their approaches to them are grounded in their technological
limitations. Their confidence in their ability to anticipate problems,
and in intentions analysis over capability analysis, seems surprising to
me, but is probably based in their intention of avoiding war, at least
over most issues. There's a fair bit of analysis of their views of
Taiwan, which they reckon is their most likely case of war by a long
way, and a brief account of the Sino-Vietnam war of 1979.

It's serious reading, and quite a bit of it, but well worth the effort.

http://www.amazon.com/China-Builds-S...dp/0804718415/
ref=sr_1_9/105-7816848-2905242?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181484044&sr=1-9

http://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Strateg...ernization/dp/
0804728046/ref=sr_1_1/105-7816848-2905242?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181483975&s
r=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Imagined-Enemi...ain/dp/0804753
911/ref=sr_1_1/105-7816848-2905242?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181483761&sr=1-1

--
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.