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Chinese strategic background
_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. |
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