ABSTRACT
The way in which the People’s Republic of China will link its growing array of sciences and technology to its future military modernization is a major factor in resolving that country’s strategic destiny. Beijing’s pragmatic leadership faces the challenge of delicately reconciling a national heritage characterized by xenophobia, internecine bureaucratic strife, and ideological factionalization with the necessity to sustain or accelerate the nation’s current momentum in acquiring and assimilating the latest “state of the art” military knowledge and weapons components. The key Chinese task in a strategic sense is therefore to create a formidable indigenous defense infrastructure by gauging their own scientific and economic programs with the overall international trends of technological innovation. From 1977 to 1982, the People’s Liberation Army’s General Political Department served as a self-appointed watchdog over Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernization programs to ensure that economic planning conformed as much as possible to the orthodox tenets of Maoist revolutionary theory.
