In recent years, Western and Asian countries have been warning, and warned, against the so-called ”China threat.” These warnings reflect Beijing's military-related policies, primarily the consistent increase in China's defence expenditures since the early 1990s, its resumed acquisition of arms from the former Soviet Union, its continued nuclear tests, and its contribution to the proliferation of conventional, semi-conventional and, allegedly, non-conventional weapons. In their repeated attempts to refute the “China threat” syndrome, Chinese leaders stress, among other things, the 25 per cent cut of about one million troops in the size of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), announced in the mid-1980s. Reportedly slicing it from about 4.2 million to about 3.2 million, this massive demobilization is usually treated, not only byChina watchers but also by the Chinese themselves, as an essential aspect of their ongoing defence reform which goes hand-in-hand with military-tocivilian conversion.

In the late spring of 1985, shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the former USSR, the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party (CMC) directed a radical change in the armed forces′ training and preparation for war. The Chinese People′s Liberation Army (PLA-as all the military services and branches are collectively designated) was instructed that it was no longer necessary to prepare for an “early, major and nuclear war” with the Soviet Union. Henceforth, the PLA′s doctrine, strategy and operational concepts would be focused on preparing for the most probable form of future conflict: local, limited war (jubu zhanzheng) around China′s periphery.1 The decade following the CMC′s directive has seen the Chinese armed forces begin the transition towards a more modern, flexible military force as they′changed their organizational structure, command and control, and training to focus on possibly unexpected, potentially intensive military conflict along China′s borders and maritime territories. These changes paralleled the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which eliminated any significant military threat to China′s northern borders for at least another decade. Nevertheless, and even as Beijing′s security analysts were publicly acknowledging that China′s military security was more assured than it had been for the past 50 years, the defence expenditures of the People′s Republic entered a period of rapid growth that continues to this day.

The fundamental questions are simple. Can the Chinese defence industries make what the People's Liberation Army (PLA) needs? Can they develop and produce systems to allow the PLA first to overcome its problem of “short arms and slow legs,” secondly to move from brownwater coastal defence to green-water offshore defence (and eventually blue-water power projection), and thirdly successfully to conduct “limited wars under high-tech conditions”? Indeed, in a larger sense, can the defence industry, under the conditions and pressures of economic reform, survive except by “converting”? The answers, however, are not as simple as might be thought.

The decentralization of fiscal and administrative powers to lower echelons of government is arguably the most outstanding facet of the economic reforms of the past decade and a half. Following this move, the relationship between the centralgovernment and the localities – which has certainly undergone shifts of some sort since 1980 – has been the subject of endless analysis and conjecture, both scholarly and in the press.

One of many things that Joseph V. Stalin and Mao Zedong had in common, according to Chinese official perceptions, was that late in life they “committed almost identical errors.” Both men supposedly “ignored the socialist democratic and legal systems and destroyed the democratic life inside the party....” Western historians may be prepared to go along with the substance of this assessment, allowing for minor qualifications and the use of a different terminology. Closer scrutiny of what took place in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge and in China during the “Great Cultural Revolution,” however, does point to some interesting differences. These differences, as Stuart R. Schram has suggested, lay not so much in the amount of extreme violence the leaders of the two Communist countries sanctioned, but in their preferences for different “modes” of violence.

With Deng Xiaoping preparing to “meet Marx,” speculation over the future shape and stability of the Chinese polity has mounted steadily. In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen crisis some observers predicted the early demise of China's Communist regime, triggered by a dramatic breakthrough on the part of resurgent democratic forces.1 When the regime failed to collapse as expected, attention was drawn to the apparent absence of such putative prerequisites of “civil society” as semi–autonomous social forces, civic associations and a well–defined “public sphere.” China, it seemed, wasn't quite ready for democracy after all.