Customer Reviews

Modernizing China's Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects (A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies)

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OK, anyone who knows anything about the PLA will find this to be a very boring read. With the possible acception of the chapter on the CMC, Shambaugh provides little in the way of original insight and the rest of the book simply rehashes material that could be found in tons of better books like You Ji's the Armed Forces of China, or RAND's The PLA as Organization, which frankly are very good investments.

Furthermore, Shambaugh's book is full of mistakes, including on p.1 where he states that the US use of B-1 bombers was critical to the destruction of Iraq during Desert Storm, which would be news to the US as the B-1 wasn't introduced in combat until Afghanistan. There are also examples of ships being misidentified in pictures. Not a good example of serious scholarly work.

The one good thing that I can say about this book is that the footnotes are incredible.

For a scholar as respected as Shambaugh who spent a decade or two on this, Modernizing China's Military was a really disappointing book,

I read this book for a graduate history class on Mao's China

David Shambaugh's book is a well-written and extremely important resource to anyone who is interested in China's military development, and its implications for Sino-American relations. With China's recent burgeoning economy and explosive military budget, Shambaugh's book could not have come at a better time. Shambaugh's use of very hard to obtain primary source material, as well as extensive use of secondary source and personal interviews with Chinese civilian and military policy-makers is a testament to the quality of the scholarship of this book. Thus, Shambaugh's impressive research, knowledge, and description of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the Chinese Defense Industrial Complex (CDIC), and the political leadership's national defense goals guarantee that his book will serve as an important resource for years to come.

Shambaugh's chapters on "Civil-Military Relations" and "Command, Control, and Force Structure" are most illuminating chapters exposing one of the key elements the Central Military Commission (CMC) and PLA are currently wrestling with; that of the proper mix of civilian and military command and control of the PLA. The civilian and military leadership must solve its command and control structure if it is going to be successful in its goal of modernizing the PLA. Shambaugh noted that currently the PLA command structure is "unlike more modern Western militaries, which devolve a fairly high degree of unit and individual autonomy in combat situations, Leninist militaries are given minimal leeway for independent interpretation of orders" (108). Shambaugh started with the political fallout within the leadership structure of the PLA triggered by the Tiananmen Square uprising to illuminate the current tug-of-war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government rule over the PLA. On May 20, 1989 when martial law was declared, eight generals and admirals signed a petition published in the newspaper asking Deng Xiaoping not to use the PLA to put down the uprising. This "mini-mutiny" caused a panic within the CCP and the government. Within three months, wide spread investigations looking into the loyalty of military commanders above the division level had been conducted. Shambaugh observed that the CCP made concrete moves to insure the "absolute control of the Communist Party over the PLA" (25). These "investigations" culminated in a wholesale purge of the PLA leadership in the 1990's, starting with General Yang Baibing, secretary-general of the Central Military Commission, (CMC) and many of his senior handpicked "cronies." Deng installed the very able and Party loyalist Jiang Zemin in November of 1989. Jiang had retained his chairmanship of the CMC even after becoming the General-Secretary of the CCP and President of China. Thus, the Party under Jiang's leadership has continued to keep a firm control over the PLA; at least up through the publication of Shambaugh's book in 2002. For example, all PLA officers with the rank of colonel and above have to be members of the CCP. Jiang's control of the CMC has been a model of political deftness, which strengthened his own political power base by building relationships within the leadership of the PLA. Thus, "Key elements of Jiang's strategy include: personnel changes, support for military modernization and professionalism. Shambaugh noted that starting in the late 1990's the "Chinese military is moving--or rather being moved--into an entirely new era of civil-military relations and corporate professionalism" (55). However, as Shambaugh astutely recognized, "The organizational reform of the PLA is a work in progress. It is true that the PLA has needed a wholesale makeover, but the sheer process of absorbing so many far-reaching changes at one time has itself been destabilizing" (183). However, Shambaugh found that "there are those in the Chinese high Command today who are convinced that this organizational structure is ill suited to contemporary warfare and who argue in favor of adopting an American-style joint staff and war theater system" (109).

Shambaugh's chapter on "Doctrine and Training" is an important examination of how China's military leadership observed the changing nature of military conflicts around the world, and how they are preparing the PLA to meet the demanding challenges of warfare in the 21st century. Shambaugh astutely realized that doctrine shapes training. Therefore, he started his chapter expounding the doctrinal lessons the PLA's leadership learned from America's involvement in the first Gulf War in 1991 and from the Kosovo Air War in 1999. These two conflicts proved to the PLA and CMC leadership that their forces were woefully ill equipped and ill trained to meet the modern challenges of warfare. "The Gulf War thus had a profound impact on PLA doctrinal thinking about the nature of warfare and defense stimulating comprehensive, far-reaching, fundamental reconsiderations and revisions" (74). Many of the leaders' long standing "lessons learned" from the Korean War were scrapped. Both the PLA and CMC were induced to change their modernization programs from one of quantity to quality; both in personnel and weapons technology, procurement, and production. The leadership understood that technology; such as, precision guided munitions, stealth technology, real time battlefield intelligence, and rapid mobility of ground forces, were going to shape future conflicts, regardless of whether their country was taking a defensive or offensive posture regarding warfare. Thus in 1999, the "lessons learned" promulgated the PLA leadership to initiate a new doctrine known as "the three attacks and three defenses" [san da san fang]. "The `three attacks' are attacking stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, and armed helicopters. The `three defenses' are defending against enemy reconnaissance and surveillance, precision strikes, and electronic interference" (87-88). With this new doctrine in force, the PLA has changed its entire weapons procurement and personnel-training scheme to reflect their doctrinal goals. However, as of the date of the publication of Shambaugh's book, the PLA has met with only limited success in their new goals. In his learned assessment, "There remains a large gap between the theory and aspirations of the PLA's new doctrine of fighting. Although it may appear that the PLA is closing the gap with modern militaries, the opposite is actually the case" (107).

Shambaugh's chapters on "Budget and Finance" and "Defense Industries and Weapons Procurement" revealed China's technological disadvantage, which it continues to suffer from, despite numerous policy decisions to make improvements. Shambaugh found that, "Few areas of Chinese military affairs are more opaque and difficult to research than the revenue/expenditure and budget/finance domains" (184). Part of the difficulty of gaining good information on the military budget is twofold. First, budget and expenditure figures were very tightly controlled items of information. Secondly, the PLA engaged in two budgetary practices that are not permitted in Western militaries. China allowed the PLA to rollover any surplus money from one fiscal year to the next. This made it exceedingly difficult for Western military analysts to see a true picture of the PLA's budgetary rate of growth. In addition, until recently, the PLA has been encouraged to develop and maintain commercial enterprises that generate considerable revenue streams. These commercialization practices were used "to offset and compensate for low levels of state allocations to the PLA" (184). Although many of these enterprises were agricultural in nature, where military units were engaged in growing their own food, some of these enterprises grew into tremendously large conglomerates--employing up to 250,000 people. Most of the money earned stayed with the military unit that generated it and was not plowed back into the general PLA budget. Unfortunately, as these commercial ventures became successful, two deleterious things happened to the PLA which ultimately led to the practice being disbanded. One, it caused soldiers to spend inordinate amounts of time away from their military duties and training to engage in commercial ventures. Military inspection teams found that soldiers were absent from duty for long periods of time--thus unit training and readiness reports were being falsified. In addition, the commercialization ventures also started a black market economy with the selling of military supplies. Since the standard of living was so low for military personnel, including officers, the commercial enterprises fostered corruption in some instances on a fantastic scale involving high-ranking generals. Thus, after several embarrassing incidents of greed and corruption became known, the CMC issued orders for the PLA to divest themselves of their commercial ventures starting in 1998 (202).

Another problem that Shambaugh noted for the PLA budget was the inordinately high allocation of its budget to its personnel account, which is 40% as compared to its other two accounts, Operations and Maintenance at 41% and weapons procurement at 39%. Starting in 1989 with Jiang's chairmanship of the CMC, the leadership had been making strides in increasing and stabilizing growth in the PLA budget. Under Jiang's tutelage, the PLA budget had risen "with an average annual increase of 15.5%" (223). Jiang's leadership on the budget undoubtedly had "purchased" him increasing loyalty from the PLA leadership. Thus, for the year 2000, Shambaugh estimated the PLA defense budget was a little over 31 billion dollars. "This total would rank China third in the world in total military expenditure behind the United States and Russia, and just ahead of France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany" (221). However, "relative to other countries, its `defense burden' nevertheless remains modest in terms of the percentage of GNP...of 1.4%" (223). Thus, Shambaugh's figures were crucial to understanding the PLA's budgetary implications in the future. "The PLA has more money available than ever before and is spending it in a more rational manner, but there is scant financial evidence of a significant military buildup" (224).

Shambaugh's research in China's overall military readiness in his chapter on "Defense Industries and Weapons Procurement," proved to him that, the sector of the PLA's military that is in most need of rapid modernization is its defense industries (225). He made a strong argument that ever since China, in the 1870's, embarked on its policy of "self-strengthening" [zi qiang] its military industry has stymied China's military growth and modernization goals, and has been unable to keep pace with international weapons standards. "The process of trying selectively to graft foreign technologies onto an indigenous Chinese base and achieve autonomy in production capacity has also generally caused more problems than it has solved" (225). The only exception to this fact has been China's impressive development and production of short-range ballistic missiles, which pose a threat primarily to Taiwan. The defense industry in China suffered under the despotic rule of Mao causing some real setbacks during his "Great Leap Forward" campaign and the "Cultural Revolution" years. However, even under more enlightened leadership, China's military industrial complex suffered under communist thinking and management principles of a command economy, which is led from the top down. This economic model has not been conducive to free thought and experimentation in the research and development realm, as well as market force economies gained from a free economic plan. For example, the Saab fighter aircraft plant in Sweden produced more airplanes in one year with 4,000 employees than China's fighter aircraft plant has produced in ten years with over 31,000 employees (248). In addition, China suffered a real blow to its integration of Western technology to its defense industries after those countries severely reduced its transfer of technology after the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. This has forced China to turn primarily to Russia, a country that also lags behind the West, for assistance and weapons procurement. Thus, Shambaugh found that many military analysts think the PLA's conventional capabilities are at least twenty years behind the state of the art, with the gap growing (243).

Shambaugh's last two chapters of his book on "Threat Perceptions" and "Policy Implications" provided important information to anyone interested in current and future Sino-American relations. Shambaugh noted "There is little doubt that Chinese leaders and strategists view the United States as the greatest threat to world peace, as well as China's own national security and foreign policy goals" (289). The Chinese viewed America's protective policy toward Taiwan with great disdain, and resented America's arms sales to the "separatists" Taiwanese. "Clearly, Taiwan is at the top of the PLA's list of potential tensions and possible conflict" (307). Although China has made great strides since the end of the Cold War to improve its relationships with other Asian neighbors, its Sino-Japanese relations remain strained from historical hatred (300). To the North, the Chinese have improved relations with the Russians, but keep an ever-watchful eye on their ambitions to become a world military and economic power again. In his book, Shambaugh pointed out that the policy implications for the United States revolve mainly on possible conflict in the Taiwanese Straits, even though China's military currently, and for some time in the future, lacks the capability to mount a full scale amphibious assault on the island. The area of military advancement that has had the most success is China's short-range ballistic missile arsenal and its cruise missiles. Both of these weapon systems have been developed with the expressed purpose of posing a significant threat to Taiwan, and have dangerous implications for a widening conflict should the United States choose to come to the island's defense (307-311). Thus, U. S. policy officials and historians should read Shambaugh's book because in one volume, it provides the best window into the successes and failures of the PLA.

Recommended for all interested in Asian and military history.

This is a MUST READ Book for EVERY AMERICAN!
Nothing is So Threatening and So Politically Ignored!

Despite some of the mistakes pointed out by past reviewers, I believe the book is still a valuable resource for people not familiar with China's military. What I found particularly useful was Shambaugh's presentation of the Chinese military manufacturing industry and just how weak it is (at least for now). While in no means a comprehensive resource on China's military, its a good book and is worth the read.

Professor Shambaugh's introduction to the Chinese military is an easy to read book full of important detail and predictions. Few books out there provide a full overview of the PLA including topics such as civil-military relations, and PLA budget. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the Chinese military or East Asian security.