ABSTRACT
China’s military modernization began as early as 1985, when China’s then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to make the ‘strategic transition’ from preparing for an ‘early, total and nuclear war’ against a Soviet invasion to ‘peacetime army construction’, resulting in the downsizing of the PLA by 1m. troops (AMS-CDSO 1992). This was accompanied by an intra-PLA debate on what type of war the PLA should be prepared to fight, leading to a 1988 Central Military Commission (CMC) decision that the PLA should make preparations to fight ‘local wars’, or those concerning sovereignty-based territorial disputes on the margins of China (Hu and Xiao 1989: 173–180; Li 1997; Liu 2010: 15). In 1993 China’s new leader Jiang Zemin modified the ‘local war’ concept to ‘local war under high-tech conditions’, translating into a 1995 policy to transform the PLA from a manpower-intensive force to a technology-based one. He then introduced the notion of ‘leapfrogging development’ in 1997 in order to shift the emphasis of military modernization from mechanization (i.e. adding new hardware platforms) to informatization (developing information technology-based network and software) to narrow the technological gap with the more advanced militaries. This concept resulted in a 2002 CMC policy of ‘dual construction’ (referring to mechanization and informatization) (Army Construction Institute of the NDU 2002: 56, 232–244). These technology-based policies led to decisions to downsize the PLA by 500,000 troops in 1997 and by another 200,000 in 2002. By June 2004 Jiang had for the first time called on the PLA to prepare for fighting ‘local war under informatized conditions’ (CDSO 2010: 628).
