Review of Chinese Techno-Warriors: National Security and Strategic Competition from the Nuclear Age to the Information Age. By Evan Feigenbaum. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 339 pp. US$ 55.00. ISBN 0-8047-4601-X.]

China's growing technological capability has become the topic of the day among Western officials concerned with the national security and economic competitiveness implications of China's growing prominence. The publication of a study which attempts to explain how security and competitiveness have been linked in the evolution of Chinese technology policies is therefore quite timely. The effort to locate this linkage in the development of an ideology of techno-nationalism resonates nicely with perceptions – held by many in Western capitals – of a China with a special passion for the acquisition of dual use technology and a determination to use political means to secure economic advantage. The appearance of Evan Feigenbaum's book, which rightly locates China's technological trajectory at the centre of many of the more important questions about the Chinese future, is thus to be welcomed.

Analyses of rural reform in post-Mao China have focused mainly on changes in the production unit, the incentive system and the expanded decision-making power of the rural household in production and marketing. They have largely neglected the evolution in policy toward the- inputs of agricultural production: farm machinery, fertilizer, soil, irrigation, seed and plant improvement, and so on. There have been few studies about the relationship between the changes in rural production organizations and incentive systems on the one hand, and peasant choices among various production input options on the other. On the whole, post-Mao agricultural policies slighted what could be called the mechanical package of agricultural inputs in favour of the biological package. Yet no Western analyses have dealt exclusively with this, which is quite surprising, given the enormous significance attached to the mechanical package in general and mechanized farming in particular during the whole period of Mao's rule.

The Department of Economics at Nanjing University (NanDa) was established over 60 years ago. In 1952, however, when China's universities and colleges were restructured along the Soviet pattern, the department was merged with Fudan University's Economics Department. The combined department was housed in Shanghai. In 1978, after some 26 years, a department was reinstated at NanDa, but none of the university's former faculty returned. At present NanDa has the only Economics Department in Jiangsu Province. Furthermore, there are no institutes of economics and finance in the province as there are in many other provinces and municipalities.

During the period 1952–57 the United States attempted to convince other western states to maintain a “China differential” in their trade with communist states. Washington argued that special export controls should be imposed against the People's Republic of China because Beijing represented a unique threat to the west as a whole and because economic warfare would contribute to the ultimate collapse of Mao Zedong's regime. It became increasingly more difficult for the U.S. to sponsor such a policy in multilateral western forums such as COCOM (the Consultative Group-Co-ordinating Committee) during this five-year period. The opposition to the China differential was organized by Great Britain, which argued that the existing system of joint export controls could not be maintained if members attempted to distinguish between communist states on political grounds. Great Britain also questioned the underlying premise of Washington's argument: that east-west trade could be manipulated for political and strategic purposes. The China differential was formally rejected by most of America's allies in 1957, and Chinese trade with West Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom increased by 338 per cent, 95 per cent, 214 per cent, and 153 per cent respectively from 1956 to 1958.

Since the 1920s the pattern prevailing in the field of primary and secondary education in China has been that of a twelve-year cycle divided into three basic parts—a six-year primary or elementary school followed by a three-year “junior middle” or junior high school and a three-year “senior middle” or senior high. The six-year elementary cycle was further subdivided into four years of junior grades followed by two years of senior grades.

At the beginning of the “Great Leap Forward” campaign of 1958, Mao Tse-tung declared the now much publicised “eight-character constitution of agriculture” for the technical transformation of agriculture. This “constitution” was essentially a condensed and more appealing version of the National Agricultural Development Programme for 1956–67, promulgated in 1956, which contains twelve important measures to improve agricultural production. The eight Chinese characters referred to are: shui, water conservation; fei, fertilisation; t'u, soil conservation; chung, seed selection; mi, dense planting; pao, plant protection; kung, tool improvement; and kuan, field management.

In the five years between the disappearance of Lin Biao in 1971 and the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 the Chinese political scene was highly volatile. Mass campaigns erupted regularly, disrupting and diverting efforts to normalize political, economic and social activities, which had originally been thrown into chaos during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. After the 10th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in August 1973 the question of succession to the ageing Mao and ailing Premier Zhou Enlai became a matter of urgency to the political elite. At issue was the direction China would take in the post-Mao era, central to which was an assessment of the validity of Mao's thesis concerning the continuation of class struggle in socialist society, and his attempt to put into operation the conclusions he drew from this analysis.

The notion of a great power triangle composed of the U.S., U.S.S.R. and PRC, and the “card games” played within this geometric configuration, are now particularly prevalent in the field of international politics. It is the purpose of this analysis to study the relevance of the great power triangle concept for Chinese foreign policy. A primary assumption will be that an understanding of Beijing's previous policies in a tripolar system will be a useful guide to the policies and problems of the present. Therefore we will begin with a review of the development of tripolarity and China's past attitudes. We will then concentrate on some crucial aspects of the triangle, the difficulties facing the Chinese leaders, and some possible policy options derived from our focus on the great power triad.

In January 1935 the harassed, decimated main forces of the Chinese Communist movement paused in the course of their epic Long March from Kiangsi to rest and regroup at Tsunyi in the hills of northern Kweichow. During their brief occupation of this remote, provincial town the top political and military leaders present held a conference which has come to be regarded as the major turning point in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the time, however, no such significance was attached to the stop-over in Tsunyi and, indeed, the very fact that an important political meeting was convened there was not revealed for some years after.

It would be only a mild exaggeration to say that China has been dominating the international conference on Laos. Certainly the weight of the Chinese presence has made itself felt in ways that were not true of the Far Eastern conference held in the same city—Geneva—in 1954. In various respects, indeed, the Chinese seem to have been determined from the start to make an impact on other participants commensurate with their own estimation of China's international stature. To this end, they sent the largest of all the sixteen delegations to Geneva and—though willing on occasion to display a proper co-existential courtesy towards carefully selected other delegations—they have consistently stuck to a line that is, in most respects, markedly more intransigent than the Soviet Union's.