ABSTRACT
Arms sales from China, or arms transfers, since some of these trans actions have been donations, are an on-and-off topic because the amounts involved have fluctuated enormously, and also because their political or nuisance value is not always assessed at a very high level. Up to the early 1990s, it has been very much an 'on' topic, because China is the only state that exports missiles of various ranges, and because its conventional arms sales, regardless of their actual quantity, have had a marked impact on the developing world, if not on the armies of industrialized countries. China, moreover, has been consistently ranked among the top five arms exporters to the developing world since the early 1950s -but only as the fifth member of this league until 1980. Up to the mid-1970s, almcst all of it was made up of support to Third World revolutionary movements and new Communist states; most of it was not sold but donated, and the greatest part of the equipment involved consisted of small arms and field communication equipment and other supplies, for which China gained a reputation as a rugged producer. However, their politico-strategic value, or more aptly their nuisance value, was almost limitless in the era of insurgency and people's warfare, and this was sometimes closely linked to China's own participation in Asian land wars such as the Korean and Indochinese conflicts. According to a recent review of the topic, China trained 23 liberation movements, and exported small arms to 45 countries 1 throughout the world, although one must hasten to add that China more often than not also disappointed its revolutionary proteges. Then, the issue was not proliferation or arms trade, but support for movements which antagonized the West, and also the Soviet Union. It is on the strength of arguments (but not proven facts) regarding Chinese arms deliveries by sea to the PKI, Indonesia's Communist party, that a military coup was organized in 1965 which changed the course of Indonesian politics. During the most ebullient years of the Cultural Revolution (and especially 1968), railroad convoys to Indochina were often hijacked through Southern China by rival Red Guard groups who then used the weapons (Russian and Chinese) for their own agenda: these unforeseen consequences inside China almost split the country, until commanders of the PLA reacted to these trends at Wuhan in July 1967, holding hostage an envoy from the Centre in Beijing, and forcing the demilitarization of Cultural Revolution factions. Although the quantities involved were never insignificant, it was the revolutionary upheaval potential that these sales permitted that mattered, not their technology.
