The Oil Weapon: Myth of China's Vulnerability

The geopolitical canvass on which China plots its strategy for energy security displays a ubiquitous presence of one country: the United States. Chinese energy security planners must reckon with America's ravenous consumption of imported oil, its strategic alliances with other heavy importers of oil in Asia, its overseas military operations in the heart of the world's leading oil producing region, its naval dominion over the world's oil transportation routes, and the global domination of U.S. oil companies or multinational oil companies heavily capitalized by American investment. This is the context in which China pursues its energy security, sometimes blandly described as 'conservation and diversification of supply', which masks the nation's real struggle to satisfy its rapidly growing energy needs without exposing its energy lifelines to external forces that may, intentionally or not, betray China's interests

China’s Antiship Ballistic Missile—Developments and Missing Links

That China is interested in an antiship ballistic missile seems a logical and natural outgrowth of its history of robust missile development. At what stage is its development? How near to operational readiness are its key components and technologies? What would be its implications for the U.S. Navy and the naval strategic balance between the United States and China

Civil-Military Integration and the Rise of China’s Techno-Security State: Implications for Great Power Competition with the United States

Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Progra

China’s Defense High-Tech Leadership: Implications for S&T Innovation

Over the last decade or more, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has sought to establish an effective defense high-tech innovation system. The Science and Technology Committee (STC) under the General Armaments Department (GAD) has been a leading institution in this reform process, but its track record has been decidedly mixed. The STC is the most senior body in the PLA and advises on high-tech and strategic platforms. As such, the current STC has become a more professionalized agency with stronger oversight and management functions and less a think tank on cutting-edge technologies compared to its former incarnation under the former Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND). A key drawback of the current STC though is its inability to provide the longterm, strategic vision for future defense innovation that the PLA needs

China’s Efforts in Civil-Military Integration, Its Impact on the Development of China’s Acquisition System, and Implications for the United States

China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, is significantly stepping up its efforts to pursue civil-military integration—or what he calls military-civil fusion (MCF)—as an integral component of its grand development strategy of building a technologically advanced and militarily powerful state within the next one to two decades. This paper examines the making, nature, and implementation of Xi’s grand MCF undertaking. This paper offers an analytical framework that seeks to provide a coherent and holistic view of the many moving parts and disparate elements of MCF through an innovation systems perspective. This framework identifies seven categories of factors that are important in shaping the structure and process of the MCF system: catalytic, input, institutional, organizational, networks, contextual, and output factors. Key dynamics that are examined in detail in the paper include the high-level leadership engagement, the influence of the external threat and technology environments, the application of new financial mechanisms such as hybrid state-private sector investment funds, the role of key state and military agencies, and the evolution of the Chinese defense acquisition system to embrace MCF.Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Progra

China's Civil-Military Integration: National Strategy, Local Politics

Abstract “China’s Civil-Military Integration: National Strategy, Local Politics” How much progress has China made in fulfilling its national strategy to create a high-capacity system that fuses current civilian technological innovation with the military industrial complex in order to advance its military modernization program? The answer to that question lies not only in the ambitious plans of the central leadership but also the local political economies in which civil-military integration (CMI) will be implemented. The China studies field has thus far viewed the national security domain—which includes the powerful, state-owned defense enterprises—as exempt from the political fragmentation and bureaucratic bargaining models that characterize implementation of many other policy baskets. However, the pursuit of CMI alters that assumption by placing the defense technological and industrial base (DTIB) within the broader economy, much of it operated and managed by local governments. As such, CMI effectively links the DTIB and its critical task of arming the PLA—central to China’s military modernization effort—to subnational and local political economies, where the policy implementation environment is a messy process often with uncertain and sub-optimal outcomes. This study tests this hypothesis by examining three distinctive local economies and their ability to carry out CMI activities and finds significant support for the importance of local governments in implementing the policy and their relative inefficiency and ineffectiveness in doing so. Advisor: David M. Lampton Readers: Tai Ming Cheung, Bates Gill, Thomas G. Mahnken and Steven Phillip

China’s Defense High-Tech Leadership: Implications for S&T Innovation

Over the last decade or more, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has sought to establish an effective defense high-tech innovation system. The Science and Technology Committee (STC) under the General Armaments Department (GAD) has been a leading institution in this reform process, but its track record has been decidedly mixed. The STC is the most senior body in the PLA and advises on high-tech and strategic platforms. As such, the current STC has become a more professionalized agency with stronger oversight and management functions and less a think tank on cutting-edge technologies compared to its former incarnation under the former Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND). A key drawback of the current STC though is its inability to provide the longterm, strategic vision for future defense innovation that the PLA needs