Who's Behind China's High-Technology “Revolution”?

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Who’s Behind China’s Evan A. Feigenbaum High-Technology “Revolution”?

How Bomb Makers Remade Beijing’s Priorities, Policies, and Institutions

For seven years after the Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989, virtually all signiªcant issues in U.S.- China relations became subordinate to concern about human rights and China’s suppression of political dissent. Yet in the three years since China’s 1996 missile exercise in the Taiwan Strait, high-technology issues have come increasingly to replace human rights at the center of the contentious and often politicized discussion that characterizes current debate about U.S.-China policy. Recent allegations concerning satellite exports and nuclear espionage, in particular, demonstrate the centrality of high technology to the debate about China’s place in the world. This makes it especially important to explore links that may bind China’s national technology and industrial policies to its approach to security and development. How has the Chinese understanding of this linkage changed as the past priority of militarized growth has given way to the rapid expansion of a commercial economy since the late 1970s?1 Who is responsible for making important technology decisions in China? How have Chinese technology leaders thought about the relationship between technology and national power during the past twenty years? Has political change affected this worldview? Finally, how has renewed contact with international technical circles since the 1970s affected the Chinese approach to national high-tech strategy and investment?

Evan A. Feigenbaum is a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of Change in Taiwan and Potential Adversity in the Strait (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1995).

This article is based, in large part, on extensive discussions conducted between 1993 and 1999 with specialists in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, China’s military industrial system, the Chinese defense science and engineering complex, and some civilian technicians. For comments on earlier versions of this material, I am grateful to David Bachman, Wendy Frieman, John Holdren, David Holloway, Charles Wayne Hooper, Nicholas Lardy, John Wilson Lewis, Michael May, Barry Naughton, Michel Oksenberg, William Perry, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Ross, Ezra Vogel, Xue Litai, and four anonymous reviewers for International Security.

1. On the past priority of military goals, as well as the impact of military elites, institutions, and ideas on China’s Mao-era (1949–76) political economy, see Evan A. Feigenbaum, “Soldiers, Weap- ons, and Chinese Development Strategy: The Mao-Era Military in China’s Economic and Institu- tional Debate,” China Quarterly, No. 158 (June 1999).

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This article surveys one of the most crucial aspects of China’s recent high- tech transition—the formulation of national investment priorities in areas that the central government and its technical advisers have deemed to be of strategic importance to China’s national security and economic competitiveness. Such efforts by no means represent the only aspect of China’s recent high-tech policy. Indeed, strategic technology programs are just one of ªve main pillars that together support China’s twenty-ªrst-century technology agenda.2 But strategic technology efforts are crucial for four reasons. First, these programs represent perhaps the most explicit connection between national security and economic development issues in China’s policy- making process. In addition, they constitute a critical link between purely domestic economic policy agendas and the international strategic concerns so central to Chinese decisionmakers. Second, for much of the period since 1987, strategic technology programming has comprised the largest source of direct central government ªnance for research and development (R&D) in priority sectors such as space, lasers, and supercomputing. This brand of public investment is not channeled through the intermediary agency of ministry and state corporation budgets, or via the major government banks. It is organized around its own administrative system with a unique set of procedures. National programming is caught up with a wide-ranging debate about the proper role of publicly targeted, as opposed to risk and equity, ªnance in shaping national competitiveness. Third, strategic programming focuses primarily on applied research and medium-term results. National high-tech programs thus lay bare the main military, civilian, and dual-use technical goals of the Chinese state for the early twenty-ªrst century. For this reason, the contents and procedures of such programs are revealing of Chinese aims. Much of what we know about Chi- nese goals reºects the writings or statements of Chinese political leaders, generals, scientists, and businesspeople on technology issues. An understanding of recent strategic technology programming can supplement this discussion by shedding light on points at which concrete investment choices meet rhetorical bluster and wishful musing. Finally, for most of the 1990s, strategic technologies programming has been the purview of China’s most prominent technicians and industrial planners.

2. The other four pillars are (1) acquisition of foreign systems through technology transfer in joint venture, licensing, and coproduction arrangements; (2) promotion of commercial initiative in scientiªc laboratories; (3) creation of a budding venture capital industry to steer equity investment toward innovative technology start-ups; and (4) promotion of a greater role for industrial enterprises in research and development (R&D).

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Today younger specialists in their thirties and forties, many with direct experience in entrepreneurial ventures overseas, have begun to inºuence Chinese R&D debates. But nationally directed strategic approaches still stand front and center on the agenda of the most inºuential members of China’s science and technology (S&T) establishment, including government planners, prominent university scientists, and principal industrial cadres. This article advances three main arguments. The next section suggests that leading military-technical elites, not civilians, provided the initial push that made possible China’s shift from narrowly weapons-focused innovation and investment strategies to more comprehensive strategic technology efforts. The second section surveys the substance of the policy agenda that emerged from this large-scale shift of strategy. This is China’s top-priority critical technologies effort, established in 1986–87 and known as the “863 program” for the year (1986) and month (March) of its origin. A concluding section argues that, although a program such as 863 has real promise, it reºects persistent problems that plague government efforts to close the relative gap that separates China’s high-tech industries from international standards. Most important, 863 represents the persistence of state-centric, highly nationalistic approaches to technology indigenization that contrast starkly with entrepreneurship and the globalization of technological knowledge.

A Crisis of Conªdence Yields New Strategies

To understand the major changes in Chinese high-tech industrial policy since the late 1970s, one must ªrst understand that militarization skewed priorities in national technology strategy away from comprehensive development during the 1950s and 1960s. Weaponization initially became the main focus of China’s high-tech system because of Korean War logistics and equipment problems that dramatized China’s comparative technological backwardness. When China came under repeated threat of external attack during the 1950s, that sense of backwardness intertwined with a survival-state mentality to fuel the growth of a political constituency favoring massive, nationally directed strategic weapons and technology programs. Yet these programs required economic trade-offs, and by 1960–61, China’s decision to pursue the most advanced retaliatory systems, not just a bare minimum nuclear deterrent, brought strategic weapons advocates into debates about national priorities. This agenda survived initial challenges from civilian and conventional weapons–oriented constituencies. But as the 1970s ended, the emphasis on strategic

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weapons as a basis for national high-tech efforts began to erode for three reasons. First, China’s overall strategic environment underwent a critical change. After rapprochement with the United States and Japan in the early 1970s, China cleared away two potential threats while checking Soviet pressure through new strategic partnerships. By 1978, the post-Mao leadership under Deng Xiaoping (1977–97) felt sufªciently conªdent to bet publicly on twenty to ªfty years of comparative security after nearly thirty years in a survival-state posture. This newfound conªdence would enable a focus on the economy. Second, the shift to a focus on national economic development empowered civilian technology elites who now sought greater inºuence over the state’s agenda after three decades of military dominance. Meanwhile, on the weapons-focused side of the R&D system, the Deng coalition decided in December 1977 to emphasize conventional weapons as the main focus of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) acquisition agenda. This shift moved the locus of weapons decisionmaking much closer to its end users. It also increased the importance of what the Chinese term “equipment” (shebei)—which fell under the purview of uniformed service headquarters—at the expense of “technology” (jishu), which had become the formally mandated preserve of China’s defense-technical elite. Not surprisingly, this shift empowered uniformed elites in the PLA’s General Staff, navy, and air force at the expense of once-inºuential weapons scientists.3 Third, China’s defense R&D community began to confront mounting evidence that its Mao-era technical system had ossiªed. From the mid-1960s forward, a dramatic shift in the industrialized world reversed prevalent thinking about the relationship between defense and civilian sectors in spurring innovation. Where military innovation seemed ªrmly in the driver’s seat in the period after World War II, by the late 1970s–80s, largely as a result of the microelectronics revolution that yielded semiconductors and integrated cir- cuits, this ºow of innovation appeared to have changed direction.4 The post-1960s Silicon Valley model reshaped innovation relationships in the West. China, however, missed this change almost entirely. Its technological

3. The Central Military Commission made the shift ofªcial state policy in a formal decision taken jointly with the State Council in December 1977. On these meetings, see Xie Guang, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo de Guofang Keji Shiye [Contemporary China’s national defense science and technology cause] (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 148–154. 4. Jan P. Herring, “U.S. Electronics Industry: Military-Civilian Interdependence,” unpublished manuscript, Motorola Corporation, 1985, cited in Richard J. Samuels, Rich Nation, Strong Army: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 30.

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infrastructure was a good ªfteen years behind that of the places where this shift occurred. More important, the initial stirrings of this revolution in innovation coincided with the violent phase of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966– 71) and initial period of recovery (1971–77). Nineteen years behind the United States in their development of an atomic bomb, Chinese technicians could not confront fundamental innovation issues until tasks from the 1950s and 1960s, such as ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and SLBM (submarine- launched ballistic missile) design projects, were set on the track to deployment. Yet even in the late 1970s, with some of these major tasks still unrealized, information about this change in approaches to innovation began to seep into China. An externally induced crisis of conªdence thereby began to push Chinese defense technicians to reassess their approach to innovation. The proximate cause of this period of self-reºection was the renewal of international S&T exchange at the end of the 1970s. Foreign visitors offered new ideas about the role of high technology in society and economy writ large. Strategic weapons experts, or weaponeers, became the pivotal point of contact for these new approaches because they had dominated most high-end Chinese R&D and precision industry since the late 1950s.

the r&d system stalls For many Chinese technicians, the ªrst stirrings of a post-Mao revolution in approaches to innovation can thus be traced to meetings that built on a series of important speeches given by China’s new paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, to the 1978 National Science Conference.5 Strategic weaponeers emerged at the forefront of Deng’s effort to promote “scientiªc” decision analysis, in part because they had been among the only groups of Chinese technicians ac- quainted with these methodologies and techniques.6 Two of the most prominent players in the post-1978 efforts, Zhang Jingfu and Song Jian, had been critical ªgures in the Mao-era strategic weapons programs.7 Thus, although

5. Deng Xiaoping, “Zai Quanguo Kexue Dahui Kaimoshi Shang de Jianghua” [Speech at the opening ceremony of the National Science Conference], March 18, 1978, in Deng Xiaoping Wenxuan, 1975–1982 [Selected works of Deng Xiaoping, 1975–1982] (Beijing: People’s Press, 1983), pp. 83–84. 6. For instance, Qian Xuesen and Song Jian had experimented with cybernetic theories in the early missile programs. Song later sought to apply these to other problems, especially demography. On missileers and cybernetics during these early years, see Gu Mainan, “Cong Xiao Balu Dao Kexue- jia” [From a little eighth route armyman to a scientist], Liaowang [Outlook], January 5, 1987, pp. 13–16. 7. Zhang Jingfu played a key role in charge of military liaison with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in the late 1950s. Song Jian was deputy chief designer of China’s SLBM program and later became a major ªgure in the missile and space administrative bureaucracy. On Zhang Jingfu, CAS, and defense technology, see Feigenbaum, “Soldiers, Weapons, and Chinese Develop-

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demilitarization and the retirement of leading patrons left their elite ºounder- ing for a stronger political footing in the early 1980s, technical bottlenecks ultimately proved particularly inºuential in shaping the new approach that strategic weaponeers would formulate for a “new era” of strategic planning in R&D. The basis of the weapons elite’s search for new models was a creeping sense that China’s R&D system had ossiªed even in areas where the foundations appeared strong. As strengths, many S&T planners highlighted areas that had been initimately connected to the privileged strategic weapons program, including space and materials science. Major weaknesses included energy technology and transportation systems.8 By the late 1970s, however, strategic weaponeers had begun to reach consensus that a broadened focus would be necessary both to sustain their elite politically and to strengthen Chinese S&T as it attempted to keep pace with global innovation. This consensus required a plea for greater state attention to science, and the political leadership had accepted this argument at the 1978 National Science Conference. But the rapidity of the substitution cycle for military equipment drove home how difªcult it would be for Chinese scientists to keep pace with global trends. To many in the strategic weapons community, this problem would likely be exacerbated by the collapse of defense S&T, as China’s external environment became increasingly stable and national strategy shifted toward economic development. Strictly military-oriented problems therefore came to complement the strategic weaponeers’ growing sense that technology had become increasingly dual- and multiuse in nature. Their initial response to defense cuts was to argue for a policy reversal and new expenditure. But within a few years, many had come around to a different view. On the one hand, force modernization amid shrinking acquisition budgets implied a need for greater attention to

ment Strategy.” See also Zhang Jingfu, “Zhongguo Kexueyuan yu Guofang Kexue Jishu” [The Chinese Academy of Sciences and defense science and technology], in Nie Li and Huai Guomo, eds., Huigu yu Zhanwang: Xin Zhongguo de Guofang Keji Gongye [Retrospect and prospect: new China’s defense science, technology, and industry] (Beijing: Defense Industry Press, 1989), p. 79. For Zhang’s role in the space program, see Jing Cheng, “Shou’ao Cangqiong: Wo Guo Diyi ke Renzao Weixing ‘Dongfanghong-1 Hao’ Shang Tian Ji” [A ªrst trip to the sky: the story of the ascent to the heavens of our country’s ªrst man-made satellite, the “East Is Red–1“], in Political Department of the Ministry of the Space Industry and Space Section of the Magic Sword Literature and Art Society, eds., Hangtian Shiye Sanshi Nian [Thirty years of the space cause] (Beijing: Space Navigation Press, 1986), pp. 22–60. 8. Yang Lizhong, ed., Gao Jishu Zhanlüe: Kua Shiji de Tiaozhan yu Jiyu [High-technology strategy: challenges and opportunities at the turn of the century] (Beijing: Military Sciences Press, 1991), pp. 248–249.

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fundamentals of defense-related S&T. The solution to the problem of developing next- generation military equipment, Defense Minister Zhang Aiping (a key ªgure in Mao-era strategic weapons administration) argued in 1983, would be to involve S&T in new weapons work and “in all its branches, including basic theory, technical sciences, as well as great emphasis on applied technology and [systems] engineering.“9 Yet given the growing interdependence between defense technology and commercial innovation, strategic weaponeers soon took the position that China’s national R&D system, not its defense-technical system, was the real issue at stake. As strategic weapons leaders came to see this problem, endemic stasis in Chinese R&D during the Mao years meant that only the strategic weapons system had created organizational and management institutions conducive to rapid and sustained technical progress at (roughly) international standards. Most nonmilitary R&D had become fragmented, vertical, and compartmentalized. Yet strategic weapons administrators had built cross-system collaborative structures; integrated decisionmakers and staff; promoted explicit competition in design; and institutionalized peer review. Amid secrecy and insulation, this had created a model management structure that contrasted starkly with the political economy of most Chinese industry and science.

foreign influence, new approaches As was also true of their colleagues throughout Chinese S&T, then, the strategic weapons community engaged in turbulent self-reºection during this period. The debates that emerged took on special urgency because of what the strategic weaponeers learned via renewed exchange.10 The opportunity to participate in international symposiums, to travel abroad, and to host overseas colleagues in China had immense shock effects. It served to demonstrate that China’s technical infrastructure had fallen far behind global standards. More important, it drove home to technology policy leaders how anachronistic the simple spin-off conception underlying Mao-era strategic technology policy had become. A ªrst stream of that reassessment took place among scientists and engineers after a series of Sino-American and Sino-European S&T agreements led to

9. Zhang Aiping, “Guanyu Guofang Xiandaihua de Ruogan Wenti” [On certain issues in the modernization of national defense], Hongqi [Red ºag], No. 5 (1983), p. 22. 10. Richard P. Suttmeier, “Scientiªc Cooperation and Conºict Management in U.S.-China Rela- tions, 1978–Present,” in Allison L. de Cerreno and Alexander Keynan, eds., Scientiªc Cooperation, State Conºict: The Role of Scientists in Mitigating International Discord (New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1998), vol. 866.

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working-level exchanges.11 In the late 1970s, for example, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences sponsored a series of delegations to China that jump- started the U.S.-China exchange process. Many of these groups met with key strategic weaponeers, including one of the men who would later propose the 863 program to Deng Xiaoping: the nuclear physicist Wang Ganchang. Wang’s interlocutors, an American nuclear physics delegation, arrived in China in the late spring of 1979. It comprised both theorists and experimentalists and included some of the most prominent physicists in the United States. The group was led by Allan Bromley of Yale, who later became the science adviser to President George Bush. These U.S. delegations proved crucial to the Chinese, ªrst by providing benchmarks against which to assess relative progress and, second, as an intro- duction to the evolution of Western technical ideas.12 The nuclear physicists’ two main interlocutors at the leadership level were both prominent strategic weaponeers: Qian Sanqiang, the group’s ofªcial host and Wang himself, then director of the Institute of Atomic Energy in Beijing.13 Members of the U.S. delegation recount in a post-trip report just how open the Chinese were, not simply with general information about the state of Chinese research but also

11. The Sino-American process grew out of agreements signed during a July 1978 visit to China by the heads of U.S. technical agencies, led by President Jimmy Carter’s science adviser, Frank Press. This led to a trip in the fall of 1978 by Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and to important defense-technical meetings with Undersecretary of Defense William Perry that I treat in greater detail below. For an account of the Press visit, as well as the overall importance of U.S.-China negotiations during this period, see Suttmeier, “Scientiªc Cooperation and Conºict Management in U.S.-China Relations.” 12. For example, on nuclear physics, see D. Allan Bromley and Pierre M. Perolle, Nuclear Science in China, CSCPRC Report no. 10 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1980). On solid state physics, see Anne Fitzgerald and Charles P. Slichter, Solid State Physics in the People’s Republic of China, CSCPRC Report no. 1 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1976). On high-energy physics, see Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, Observations on High Energy Physics in China: Report of a Visit to the People’s Republic (October 5–22, 1976) (Stanford, Calif.: U.S.-China Relations Program, Stanford University, 1977). Panofsky is the founding father of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and was an important member of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Scientiªc Advisory Committee. 13. Qian, indisputably China’s most prominent nuclear physicist of the Mao era, acted as the group’s ofªcial host in his role as vice president of the CAS and president of Zhejiang University. Qian had served as the political leadership’s go-between to China’s nuclear physicists in the start-up years of the atomic bomb program. He had also taken charge of the program’s theoretical division, procured China’s ªrst nuclear instruments in France, and carried a message to Mao from his mentor, the French physicist Frederic Joliot, encouraging China’s initial nuclear ambitions. Wang Ganchang, then serving as director of the Institute of Atomic Energy (IAE), had headed one of four main bomb design groups, played a key role in China’s thermonuclear effort, and was an important administrative ªgure in Sino-Soviet collaboration at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. On the important role of the IAE in the Chinese nuclear weapons program, see John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). This institute had the code name “Institute 601” (later “401”).

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about the manifold weaknesses of (and their consequent frustrations with) the Chinese R&D system. Wang was particularly adamant that he wanted technical criticism of his research program, not merely of his institute’s equipment.14 In addition to the weapons community’s meetings with “purely” scientiªc groups, such as Bromley’s, program managers began a parallel round of talks with overseas defense-technology innovators. These discussions grew out of the normalization of military-to-military exchanges. And this ultimately proved to be important because the strictly military context of these sessions automatically excluded nonweapons scientists and left strategic weaponeers as the main point of Chinese contact with administrative innovators who had themselves wrestled with new patterns and modes of innovation. Perhaps the most important of these sessions were held with William Perry, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for research and engineering (1977–81), a pioneer of “smart” weapons and “stealth” systems in private industry and government, and a future U.S. secretary of defense.15 Perry’s meetings in China grew out of concern over the large-scale Soviet military buildup in the Far East during the 1970s. For the Carter administration, this strategic consideration supplemented diplomatic and economic efforts by offering a compelling rationale for defense and security cooperation with China. Ultimately, however, Perry’s exchanges would have a broad-based and long-lasting impact within China itself. His comments about technology—some casual, many offhanded— resonated in powerful ways with a Chinese military R&D community that had begun to struggle with innovation problems long before Perry and his colleagues visited Beijing. As with Bromley, Perry’s hosts were prominent strategic weaponeers, including two ofªcers who had been among the three to ªve leading administrators of the Mao-era strategic weapons programs: General Zhang Aiping, who worked with Perry during his time in Beijing, and General Liu Huaqing, who traveled with the delegation and carried on more informal discussions during site visits and inspections.16

14. See Bromley, Nuclear Science in China, pp. 87–100. 15. The primary source for this history is personal communication with William Perry and interviews in China. On defense normalization more generally, see Jonathan D. Pollack, The Lessons of Coalition Politics: Sino-American Security Relations, R-3133-RF (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1984). 16. Zhang Aiping played many roles in the defense technology programs from the 1950s to the 1980s, particularly the strategic weapons effort. After serving as deputy chief of the General Staff (GSD) in charge of equipment, Zhang moved into S&T circles as director of the GSD’s Research and Development Ofªce. He was an original member of the top strategic weapons oversight committee, the Central Special Commission; served as director of the ªrst atomic bomb test committee and commander of the ªrst test on-site headquarters; and then became a program administrator. After a Cultural Revolution hiatus, he reemerged to oversee all strategic organs involved in the nuclear submarine and missile programs. Shortly after Perry’s visit, Zhang became

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Perry concluded a 1980 visit by bluntly informing the Chinese that their ambitions were unrealistic. Broad-based defense technology cooperation, he told them (as well as his superiors in Washington), would prove unfeasible because of China’s low technical level in areas identiªed for collaboration by Beijing. The rank backwardness of China’s R&D system exacerbated inter- operability problems. Thus, as an alternative to China’s ambitious plan for defense technology licenses, Perry suggested a longer-range, less military- speciªc, more broadly based program of technology cooperation across a spectrum of building-block areas. “If I were Chinese,” Perry remembers having told Zhang and Liu in off-the-record private sessions, “I simply wouldn’t go about doing it your way. Your real need is to build a national technology infrastructure which, if you do it right, may give you some dual-use potential.” A purely military technology base, Perry added, would simply be too narrow a foundation upon which to modernize China’s industry, much less to overhaul its backward conventional armed forces.17 Interviews and Chinese primary accounts make clear that Perry’s visit, supplemented by private contacts he had with Zhang, Liu, and others after leaving government to return to California, sharply altered the framework through which leading strategic weaponeers debated high-tech issues. First, the Perry meetings—supplemented by other contacts with foreign defense technology ofªcials—introduced Chinese strategic weapons technicians to the large-scale shift of focus away from complete “systems” toward subsystem- level components (microelectronics and information technologies), and from hardware toward a growing emphasis on software-based “processes.” From both shifts—systems to components, and hardware to software—the Chinese took away one extraordinarily important lesson: clearly, system-level improvements had become increasingly incremental; thus component and software improvements bulked larger in U.S. and European approaches to force modernization. Yet in the West, these improvements had come about through primarily civilian-focused processes of innovation in the computing and electronics industries. As Perry and other foreign interlocutors told their hosts, the relation-

China’s defense minister. Liu Huaqing, China’s top military ofªcer from 1992 to 1997, also cut his teeth in strategic weapons work. From 1961 to 1965, he served as director of the navy’s Seventh Academy (warship design). He then became vice minister of the Sixth Ministry of Machine Building (shipbuilding), and, as deputy director of the defense S&T commission, played a key role when program leaders came under attack during the Cultural Revolution. 17. Based on personal communication with William Perry.

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ship between defense and more comprehensive “national” industries had increased in complexity and changed shape since the mid-1960s. In the United States, in particular, this shift had been associated with the growth of start-up companies, sometimes relying on government contracts, but with strong entrepreneurial tendencies nonetheless. While the Chinese were certainly aware of the increasingly entrepreneurial bent of U.S. electronics, given the scope of Chinese backwardness and the scarcity of available resources, the strategic weaponeers now made a deliberate choice to pursue a shift in focus through continued reliance on state planning and target setting. Indeed, despite all the talk of entrepreneurialism in U.S. industry, the Chinese were reinforced in this view by their reading of the paradoxical evidence that at least some U.S. elites continued to regard state- directed strategic technology programming as important. The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) became the main piece of evidence in support of this argument. By 1985–86, many weaponeers had come to view SDI as a clear signal that state-directed S&T planning retained force wherever R&D risk supplemented comparatively long lead times from research to application, commercial viability, and deployment. Thus, despite Chinese politicians’ insistence that defense conversion was the main issue confronting military R&D in the 1980s, prominent strategic weaponeers chose to direct their main attention elsewhere. For them, the key issue was not “conversion,” but the much more fundamental relationship between technology and organizational culture. Their reasoning ran thus: even if one accepted the conversion argument—the need to foster and diffuse multiple-use technical knowledge—vastly different organizational cultures between weapons- and nonweapons-oriented R&D sectors would inevitably make coordination and absorption difªcult.18 In practice, this meant that former strategic weapons administrators and their onetime scientiªc cadre would come to question some of the most fundamental assumptions underlying China’s effort at the “conversion” of defense R&D. Put simply, this was the notion that diffusion would simply be a matter

18. This has been a problem elsewhere, including the United States. See John A. Alic, Lewis M. Branscomb, Harvey Brooks, Ashton B. Carter, and Gerald L. Epstein, Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992), pp. 4–5. Chinese defense conversion has received sustained attention over the past decade. John Franken- stein has shown why it has been such an ambiguous process with many layers of meaning. See Jörn Brömmelhörster and John Frankenstein, eds., Mixed Motives, Uncertain Outcomes: Chinese Defense Conversion (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1997); and Cao Shixin, ed., Zhongguo Junzhuan- min [China’s defense conversion] (Beijing: Economic Press, 1994).

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of reorientation and political will. To many strategic weaponeers, the real problem seemed altogether different: if technologies could not be easily trans- ferred irrespective of their multiple-use nature, the gap between civilian and military organizational cultures could be bridged only through the creation of institutions conducive to multiple-use diffusion. To many, however, what might make this possible was clearly the out-and-out diversiªcation of the strategic weapons elite itself. On some level, the decision to diversify reºected a political calculation; this elite, after all, was attempting to cope with civilianization and the shift of the acquisition agenda. But this diversiªcation strategy also relied on fairly straightforward managerial reasoning: since the Mao-era strategic weapons programs had developed the framework of cross-system nonhierarchical coordination that Deng now promoted as a national model, the best way to solve the “cultural” problem would be for strategic weaponeers themselves to pene- trate nonweapons-oriented spheres of activity. If the right kinds of institutions were subsequently set into place to manage cross-system coordination, so much the better. Collaborative efforts between strategic weaponeers still in the defense technology system and their (former) colleagues now focused on primarily nondefense work could ease the transfer process while helping to build a cooperative managerial infrastructure better able to channel the multiple-use nature of “new era” high technology.

A New Era: “Old” Institutions, New Programs

By early 1986, leading strategic weaponeers had begun to formulate a new political initiative, seeking to couple civilian and dual-use focuses to create a combination of mobilizational targeting and the ºexible institutional principles of Mao-era strategic weapons science.

focal points and new emphases General Liu Huaqing, Perry’s traveling host, gave voice to this 1980s thinking in a series of interviews he conducted during the ªrst half of the 1990s. In the face of so many competing Deng-era spending priorities, Liu argued, stark limits on available R&D expenditure precluded an all-out effort, such as the Mao-era nuclear weapons program. But this did not vitiate the need for mobilization; rather, it suggested the need for a different approach: a concen-

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tration of funds and a choice of speciªc focal areas so that government monies would not fall through systemic cracks or be spent haphazardly.19 This new mobilizational argument for state programming complemented a parallel economic argument: the notion of market failure as a rationale for public technology investment. Advocates of this view agreed with Liu’s emphasis on government direction and targeting. Yet they did so for a slightly different reason. Technology development, they suggested, was burdened by endemic market failures that had led to public R&D investment even in highly developed capitalist economies.20 Given notoriously long R&D cycles, laboratories and industry must absorb high costs over long periods of time before the fruits of their work become commercially viable. State support for key projects was therefore necessary even if R&D became marketized. For in the absence of state support, research institutions and high-tech enterprises would have little incentive to enter niches from which they would be unlikely to reap a near-term reward. On two different bases, then, strategic weaponeers rearticulated a focal point concept. In part, this was a reºexive fallback on socialist-type targeted S&T strategies of the past. Yet it occurred primarily because leading weaponeers came to believe that the government must ªnance and set technology agendas in areas critical to the state. In particular, they believed, the focus must be placed on the central government speciªcally, not on provinces and local levels of government: despite decentralizing tendencies in Chinese science and industry, this burden must fall on Beijing because provincial, local, and enterprise-level authorities had few incentives to ªnance R&D projects unlikely to

19. Lin Yushu, Liu Yuren, and Zheng Wenyi, “Rely on Scientiªc and Technical Progress to Promote Defense Construction,” an interview with Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Liu Huaqing, Keji Ribao [Science and technology daily], March 14, 1992, pp. 1–2. Translated and reprinted in Joint Publications Research Service, China Science and Technology Series, June 19, 1992, pp. 21–24. 20. It is worth noting here that Chinese defense industrialists do not use the economist’s term “market failure” to express this idea. But they do refer to the concept almost precisely (albeit descriptively) when they explain in extraordinary detail why they cannot bear long-term R&D risks. As one chief engineer of a major military industrial facility told me, “Pressure for immediate commercial return makes it impossible for us to invest our R&D resources in forward-looking (yuanjian) ways; this is the most important technical reason why we require state support.” Despite hints of a coming reform from Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, this situation is still compounded by the fact that ªrm-level budgeters must spend working capital on “iron rice bowl” beneªts, such as worker housing and clinic facilities. This puts an even greater strain on capital that could conceivably be invested in R&D. When one combines these technical and political limitations, many interviewees told me, it is nearly impossible to behave in “future-oriented” ways vis-à-vis ªrm-level investments in R&D.

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yield almost immediate commercial returns. Moreover, these entities lacked the central government’s all-critical capacity to call upon the services of a community of technical depth, disciplinary breadth, and high public prestige. Strategic weapons institutions were already in place to facilitate the reorientation of that partnership toward new challenges. Through these scientiªc pioneers, advocates of such strategies also hoped to co-opt a new generation into the service of the state’s key R&D goals.

big pushes On one level, this type of “big push” concept had become anachronistic in China by the mid-1980s. At their most crude, such pushes were associated with the development ideas of the Great Leap Forward and, in military circles, with largely unproductive military industrial investments in China’s deep interior during the 1960s.21 But strategic weaponeers had attached to the concept institutional peculiarities that came to parallel comparatively straightforward resource commitment and top-down guidance. In their ªnal form, the programs were not merely showplaces through which to highlight the regime’s achievements. They were based, too, on the series of intermediate management institutions that the programs’ PLA patrons had attached to the push and successfully persuaded China’s senior political decisionmakers to endorse and guarantee.22 In their essentials, these institutions depended on tacit acceptance by leading politicians of a unique organizational style: the topmost political leadership should engage with experts directly and in great detail on technical, not merely policy, issues, and regularly, not merely on an ad hoc basis; politicians should commit to the primacy of technical solutions; the leadership should facilitate the institutionalization of routines that would make technical assessment and continuing leadership-expert contact possible; and, ªnally, the leadership should commit resources to the targets speciªed in the experts’ debates in the context of major guideline and policy meetings. In this way, the Mao-era strategic weapons programs became premised on a series of tacit commitments by senior political leaders that went beyond the

21. Barry Naughton, “The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in the Chinese Interior,” China Quarterly, No. 115 (September 1988), pp. 351–386; and Naughton, “Industrial Policy during the Cultural Revolution: Military Preparation, Decentralization, and Leaps Forward,” in William A. Joseph, Christine P.W. Wong, and David Zweig, eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991), pp. 153–181. 22. Feigenbaum, “Soldiers, Weapons, and Chinese Development Strategy,” explores more exten- sively the workings of these institutions within the programs.

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speciªcation of a set of focal targets or the assumptions of Stalinist-type gigantism. Rather, the “conditional big push” concept presupposed leadership engagement, not merely a commitment to provide resources, and attempted to check political interference by working to ensure that such contact would be based on explicitly technical assumptions. Like their onetime colleagues among the strategic weapons technical cadre, administrators such as Liu had taken from their experience a commitment to parallel managerial legacies that had enduring relevance even as the scale of resource commitments changed. This involved, ªrst, a leadership commitment to targeted strategies. But these could be sustained only by speciªc types of institutional and political guarantees. As the locus of Chinese technical innovation began to devolve to local and nonstate agents in the reform era, then, former weaponeers retained faith in the guided development of strategic technologies by the center.

the development of the 863 program This debate reached its climax in March 1986, when four of the most prominent strategic weapons elders ªnally formulated a response to the arguments of the ªrst half of the 1980s. On March 3, the space program’s most prominent optical physicist, Wang Daheng, joined three colleagues to approach paramount leader Deng Xiaoping with a proposed response to the “new technological revolution.”23 Wang’s three colleagues were the nuclear physicist Wang Ganchang, the radio electronics engineer Chen Fangyun, and the electrical engineer Yang Jiachi. Together, the group traded on its collective status and standing with the political leadership, circumvented “routine” bureaucratic channels, and took their case directly to Deng on an essentially personal basis. These men ranked among the small core of Chinese strategic weapons pioneers of the glory years under Mao. Wang Daheng, Wang Ganchang, and Chen Fangyun stand as virtual founding fathers of China’s optical physics, nuclear physics, and radio electronics ªelds, respectively. Yang Jiachi is rou- tinely hailed in histories of the missile and space industries as one of a handful of “chiefs”—a special term of respect—of China’s astronautics sector.24 As such,

23. The concept of the “new technological revolution” captivated many Chinese leaders, including the reformers Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. It was a topic of wide-ranging discussion at high political levels throughout the 1980s. 24. The term “chief” is often used in PLA circles to refer to the ten “old marshals” created in the years after the Chinese Revolution. No one has since been appointed to this rank, which is why the term “chief” has special resonance in Chinese military communities. For more on the personal histories of these four 863 scientists, see the discussion based on Chinese sources in Evan A.

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these men possessed a degree of prestige and credibility with Deng and the Politburo that only strategic weaponeers, among China’s large scientiªc community, could likely leverage into a high-priority, well-funded R&D program on the strategic weapons organizational model. In particular, that status gave them a special connection to Deng, who had been present at the Politburo’s ªrst technical brieªng on nuclear weapons in 1955 and involved with strategic weapons scientists in various ways thereafter.25 The group’s personal appeal to China’s paramount leader was thus part of the strategic weapons elite’s response to two larger shifts: domestically, to a change in the acquisition agenda and the civilianization of the nation’s S&T agenda; externally, to technological change, shifts in the strategic balance, and the increasingly important role of economic competition as a basis of state power in the international system. In their proposal to Deng, the Wang group called for a targeted attack on key deªciencies in the seven ªelds that they regarded as most critical to China’s long-range national security and economic competitiveness: automation, biotechnology, energy, information technology, lasers, new materials, and space technology.26 The scientists explicitly evoked China’s past achievements in strategic weapons, as well as the organizational model in which they had come of age in the 1950s–70s. Throughout they attempted to assess for the leadership the ways in which high-tech development changed the stakes of international competition.

Feigenbaum, “The Military Transforms China: The Politics of Strategic Technology from the Nuclear to the Information Age,” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1997, chap. 8. 25. This seminar on January 15, 1955, was the ªrst example of strategic weapons leadership- scientist contact on exclusively technical matters. For more on this seminar, see Lewis and Xue, China Builds the Bomb, pp. 37–39, and Li Jue, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo de He Gongye [Contemporary China’s nuclear industry] (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Press, Contemporary China Series, 1987), pp. 13–14. 26. The main areas covered in each ªeld are (1) automation: (a) computer-integrated manufacturing, (b) intelligent robotics; (2) biotechnology: (a) foodstuffs, (b) medicine, (c) protein engineering; (3) energy: (a) coal magnetic technology, (b) nuclear reactors; (4) information technology: (a) optoelectronics and system integration, (b) artiªcial intelligence and high-performance computing, (c) information acquisition, processing, and automation, (d) telecommunications (including subgroups for nodes and switches, information superhighway issues, personal communication network, ªber optics, multimedia, and broadband); (5) lasers: (a) pulsed power, (b) plasma technology, (c) laser spectroscopy, (d) laser-based materials; (6) new materials: (a) optoelectronics and information technology materials, (b) high-performance, anticorrosion, and light structural materials, (c) special function materials, (d) high-temperature-resistant, composite materials, (e) microstruc- ture theory-based materials development; and (7) space technology: (a) carrier rockets. All of these ªrst-tier subgroups oversee smaller, topic-focused substructures. For detail on priority targets in some of these areas, see Feigenbaum, “The Military Transforms China,” appendix 4.

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The group sought, ªrst, to explain to the Politburo that the process of technological innovation in the industrialized world now depended on structural changes that China had yet to assimilate. Not only did China risk being left back as it fell behind global trends. The dominant trends, they argued, were themselves changing faster than China’s R&D system could keep pace. The development of strategic military technology was no longer sufªcient to meet the challenge posed by such a “revolution.” The scientists thus evoked the importance of technical talent and of science in the development of the national economy. High technology, they argued, must become the main battleground for China’s long-range economic construction. The seven sectors on which they focused Deng’s attention would make or break the country’s long-range development prospects, especially because these were integral to many “system- level” industries. Moreover, the military-focused development package that had dominated the Wang group’s formative professional years from the 1950s to the 1970s, while appropriate to the conditions of the nuclear age, was clearly the wrong solution for the new challenges of a nascent information age. Finally, the scientists urged political leaders to undertake a concerted push in these seven areas. They invoked two metaphors that were prominent in the strategic weapons effort: a “concentration of forces” and a “uniªed command.” In short, they staked out ground on behalf of a modiªed big push: with the focus now in a nonmilitary direction, underpinned by explicitly strategic rationales and premised on institutional prerequisites lifted lock, stock, and barrel—and largely unchanged—from the strategic weapons era.27

elite diversification as “grease” to renewed dominance This process of elite diversiªcation owed much to the weaponeers’ success at spreading from the military science and industrial complex to other important bureaucratic systems. The elite succeeded so well that by the end of the 1980s, strategic weapons alumni sat at the top of nearly every ofªce in the Chinese government concerned with science and technology policy. These included all key S&T and high-tech industrial planning bureaucracies, as well as policy bureaus one level down the hierarchy.28 When the Wang group’s proposal

27. Unspoken, but no doubt clear to Deng and his colleagues, was the fact that strategic weaponeers also hoped that they themselves would play the leading role in plan formulation and implementation, especially in light of the shift to a conventional weapons acquisition regime and the general civilianization of Chinese S&T policy. Both trends had undercut the weaponeers’ collective political standing. 28. These included the State Science and Technology Commission, led by Song Jian, a missile

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became institutionalized in the 863 plan, all major interagency leading committees were, as a result, dominated by program alumni. This proved important because these men shared an intrinsically strategic vision of national high-tech programming. They were bound by a common professional heritage, extensive personal and career ties, and a deep commitment to the managerial practices ªrst tested in large-scale military programs of the 1950s and 1960s. Such connections reveal much about why strategic weaponeers could build 863 in an image that they knew and valued: it eased coordination among agencies that have long been rivals. Particularly on the issue of how to apportion budget monies, informal social and professional connections controlled much of the contention that normally characterizes the Chinese appropriations process.29 This also provided a rapid, wholly informal communications channel that allowed leaders of relevant agencies to circumvent the maddeningly incremental process of interagency coordination and decisionmaking in China.30 Powerful interagency liaison groups that normally

guidance engineer who was deputy chief designer of China’s SLBM; the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Zhou Guangzhao, a nuclear physicist who worked in the bomb program’s theoretical division, performed the ªnal check of calculations for China’s ªrst atomic bomb test, and directed the Ninth Academy, “China’s Los Alamos”; the Commission of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND), led by Ding Henggao, a missile optics engineer and son-in-law of Marshal Nie Rongzhen (the founding father of China’s strategic weapons programs); and the State Planning Commission (SPC), led by Zou Jiahua, a former conventional weapons administrator and son-in-law of Marshal Ye Jianying (who had played a major role in setting the strategic weapons programs back on track after Cultural Revolution disruptions). Although Zou himself thus had a somewhat different career from these various strategic weaponeers, he nonetheless had deep experience in the Chinese defense industry and social ties to the strategic programs and their leaders. Down the hierarchy at the bureau level, these included the SPC’s S&T department, led by Vice Minister Gan Ziyu, Nie’s personal secretary in Mao-era S&T; the SPC’s ªnancial liaison departments, led by Vice Minister Sheng Shuren, who had spent virtually his entire career in the military industrial system, including more than a decade in the nuclear industry bureaucracy; and the high-tech department of the CAS (the Department of Technical Sciences), led by a group of scientists that included Wang Daheng, the military metal- lurgist Shi Changxu, China’s cruise missile chief designer Liang Shoupan, and its military super- computer pioneer Ci Yungui. 29. This assertion is based on multiple interviews in China. The importance of this type of coordination is reinforced in counterexamples cited by some interviewees of cases where repre- sentatives of the defense and civilian S&T commissions that cooperated when former strategic weaponeers worked together did not do so when no such informal tie was in place to mediate the contentious formal relationship between these bureaucracies. In these cases, showdowns over the division of appropriations were routine. 30. Informality can eliminate ambiguity about who is responsible for a problem. See Donald Chisholm, Coordination without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multi-Organizational Systems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 65. On China (against the backdrop of a shortage-based political economy), see Mayfair Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). On politics, see Lucian Pye, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn, and Hain, 1981).

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serve to reconcile contending interests could instead be leveraged by their members on behalf of a shared agenda.31 Two days after receiving the Wang group’s proposal, Deng scribbled on his copy of the report, “Action must be taken on this now; it cannot be put off!”32 Within months the Politburo approved the plan. By 1988 it had become China’s premier industrial R&D program, insulated from sustained opposition because of Deng’s personal imprimatur.33

rationales and asssumptions The 863 program enshrines in a single, top-priority program four main state goals. All focus on applied science, although some basic work receives 863 funding. As the Wang group’s rationales imply, 863 seeks above all to yoke technological achievements to strategic goals of the state. These no longer touch national security alone. They also focus on long-range economic competitiveness. Yet they have become increasingly inseparable, and 863 is premised on a partnership between political and technical elites. Program designers intended, ªrst, that 863 should anchor China’s effort to close the gap separating its technology base from the international state of the art in the seven areas of focus under the program. The plan thus “aims at the high-tech industries of the late 20th and early 21st centuries” and at “leading- edge ªelds.” Second, 863 has a focus that the Chinese view as “strategic”: it targets seed money at projects with direct implications for long-range industrial competitiveness and military strength. Unlike other programs that seek to diffuse

31. On the way these groups normally function, see Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), chap. 4. 32. Quoted in Yang Lizhong, Gao Jishu Zhanlüe, p. 226. 33. The 863 proposal came at a time of widespread debate about the need to decentralize the Chinese S&T system. Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, and many others strongly supported such a view. I have no evidence of direct opposition to the 863 idea that might have emerged during the critical months leading up to Politburo approval of the program. But the 863 discussion came at a time when virtually all debate about S&T in China suggested that centralization and targeting were partially responsible for the backwardness of China’s commercial technology base. In this light, Deng’s active engagement in the start-up effort and initial years of the 863 program probably proved crucial. And it squares with what is known about the role of leadership in Chinese politics: although Deng’s authority was less charismatic than Mao’s, Chinese sources repeatedly stress that Deng considered 863 to be among his pet projects. Such a role mirrors that of leading politicians in the strategic weapons experience of the Mao era; Mao and Zhou often overruled opposition, particularly in the early 1960s. Indeed, in a scene reminiscent of the Central Secretariat meeting at which Mao’s Politburo took its 1955 atomic bomb decision, the Deng-led Politburo convened to approve the 863 program at the highest level in October 1986.

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technologies to poor areas or to commercialize various gadgets, 863 focuses on China’s relative position in high-tech ªelds. Thus Zhu Lilan, the civilian chem- ist who oversaw daily aspects of the program before becoming China’s minister of S&T in 1997, argues that “the [S&T] challenge for us today is one of system versus system and nation versus nation. We must respond to this historic transformation [through a strategy that] guarantees that the disparity with the developed countries in S&T and economic sectors will steadily shrink.” Zhu calls for greater efforts to track international standards and to ensure breakthroughs. China, she argues, must use 863 to “set the foundation for a closing of the gap across the board.”34 Third, 863 aims to fashion a symbiotic connection between basic and applied work. Like the strategic weapons effort, 863 emphasizes applied R&D. But the earlier effort presupposed at least some basic research, particularly in engineering as applied to delivery systems. China does run the risk of developing a cadre of specialists who understand what a 1989 U.S. biotechnology delegation termed the “mechanics” of relevant ªelds “but not the underlying science or the road ahead.”35 Yet 863 allocates between 2 percent and 5 percent of its budget to basic research36 to support exploration into such topics as Einstein’s special relativity and space-time postulates; these, it is hoped, will contribute insights on the physics of high dynamic ºight.37

34. Zhu’s career has been civilian, but she is widely acknowledged to have risen through the Chinese science administration system through the patronage of Song Jian, to whom she reported on 863 matters before replacing Song at the top of China’s S&T bureaucracy upon his retirement from the position in 1997. As one of Song’s vice ministers, Zhu was charged primarily with overseeing the 863 effort. Quotations in both this paragraph and the last are from Zhu Lilan, “Development of High Tech, Basic Research Explored,” Zhongguo Keji Luntan [Forum on science and technology in China], No. 3 (May 1989), pp. 4–5, 7. Translated and reprinted in Joint Publica- tions Research Service, China Science and Technology Series, September 26, 1989, pp. 1–2. 35. Dean H. Hamer and Shain-dow Kung, Biotechnology in China (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1989), p. 77. 36. In so doing, it has a complement in a national basic research plan, as well as regular basic science funding mechanisms of the CAS and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Within the 863 context, funding for pure science follows a logic internal to the scientiªc disciplines. This makes it different from most 863 funding decisions, which follow the more applied logic of state goals. Yet basic research funding under the plan does assume, as did U.S. military funding of pure science after World War II, that theoretical debates can potentially yield applied technologies. See, for instance, Daniel J. Kevles, “K1S2: Korea, Science, and the State,” in Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, eds., Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 1992), p. 313. 37. Lin Jin, “Hangtian Daohang Dingwei Lilun Jichu: Shijian he Kongjian Lilun Zai Cikao” [The theoretical foundations of navigation in space: a reexamination of the theory of space and time], unpublished manuscript, First Academy of the Missile and Space R&D System, 1993. The Lin group had various sources of funding to purchase nanosecond-accurate hydrogen clocks in the United States. Lin is a former Chinese missile and space scientist who, like Song Jian, worked in

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Finally, 863 seeks to fashion a symbiosis between science, engineering, and industrialization. It forces scientists to think in applied terms when seeking grants. It forces engineers to consider topics of longer-range signiªcance. The program also seeks to promote diffusion by opening to contract bids areas that include aids to production, such as computer-integrated manufacturing systems (CIMS), comprised of computer-aided design (CAD) and manufacture (CAM).

863 and state-led s&t The 863 program’s allocation procedures are akin, in many respects, to contract R&D in the United States. Expert groups comprised of leaders in each focal area set state goals, invite bids, and then choose “winners” who receive 863- related largesse to fulªll the contract. Proposals and bids are peer reviewed by a separate subcommittee of specialists in each area and then approved by panels selected by the top S&T bureaucracies. Competitive bidding empowers these small groups of specialists because they have additional responsibility for conducting inspections to monitor performance and contract fulªllment. The 863 program’s grants, both to individu- als and corporate entities, have consistently been among the largest in China. In the ªrst year of the program (1987), when S&T grants were smaller, biotechnology groups typically awarded four-year grants of 500,000 to 2 million yuan (at a rate of exchange of 3.71 yuan to U.S.$1).38 Although these numbers are small, biotechnology has among the lower gross funding thresholds, and in 1987 these grants were considered large. Sometimes, scientists have found themselves playing politics: certain 863 expert groups have been accused of using purse power to direct contracts to fellows, a phenomenon that intensiªed as competition over technology sectors deepened. Yet, despite the intrinsically political nature of the program and its connection to state goals, technical criteria appear to govern most decisionmaking.

the ªeld of missile guidance. During the 1960s, Lin helped to pioneer ªrst-generation guidance systems for China’s Long March-1 booster rocket. See Zhang Jun, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo de Hangtian Shiye [Contemporary China’s space cause] (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Press, Contemporary China Series, 1986), p. 165. He currently works in the First Academy (general conªguration and rocket engines) of the former missile ministry. 38. These were large grants by 1987 standards; today the numbers are larger. In any case, although proportionally biotech is among the larger 863 ªelds, the size of single block grants in other areas (for instance, lasers, which has been military administered) is considerably larger than in biotech; it appears to spread smaller amounts among a wider array of recipients. Substantive quantitative budget data have been hard to come by. The 1987 biotech ªgure is from Hamer and Kung, Biotechnology in China, p. 8.

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Competition is also the norm in the 863 program. In one contract area—the application of “state-of-the-art” CIMS automation techniques to industry—one hundred bidders were narrowed to ten successful contractors, including Chengdu Aircraft, one of China’s largest production facilities for airplanes.39 In 1987 ªve hundred biotechnology bids were narrowed to one hundred contractors, distributed in a ratio of 40 percent for agriculture, 40 percent for medicine, and 20 percent for protein engineering.40 The expert topic groups that make targeting and contractor decisions report to managerial staffs in the seven main 863 ªelds. Two of these staffs—lasers and aerospace—lie on the weapons-focused side of the Chinese organization chart; ªve have almost completely civilian staffs: automation, biotechnology, energy, information technology, and new materials.41 This does not imply that all work on lasers and aerospace is weapons related; particularly in aerospace, design and production improvements affecting commercial aircraft development are a major goal of the program. Yet it also does not imply a lack of deep military interest in the ªve “civilian” ªelds; it is clear, for example, that leading PLA technology planners are interested in information technology,42 and Chi- nese interviewees have conªrmed the existence of a command, control, communications, and intelligence technologies project group within the defense R&D system.43 Yet the strenuous (and unsuccessful) efforts of former defense industry elites to break into commercial telecommunications sectors conªrms

39. Based on multiple interviews with Chinese bidders, including senior managers from the Chengdu facility (which bid successfully). 40. Hamer and Kung, Biotechnology in China, p. 8. 41. Based on multiple interviews with Chinese specialists. For published conªrmation in open Chinese sources of the military orientation of the laser and aerospace ªelds, see Chen Jianping, “863 Jihua: Huihuang de Shi Nian” [The 863 plan: ten glorious years], Xiandai Junshi [Contempo- rary military affairs], No. 6 (June 1996), p. 4. 42. The Chinese essays translated in Michael Pillsbury, ed., Chinese Views of Future Warfare (Wash- ington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1996), make interesting reading in this regard. See also Zhu Youwen, Feng Yi, and Xu Dechi, Gao Jishu Tiaojian Xia de Xinxi Zhan [Information warfare under high-technology conditions] (Beijing: Military Sciences Press, 1994); and Liu Yichang, ed., Gao Jishu Zhanzheng Lun [On high-technology war], a volume from the Academy of Military Sciences series on high-tech warfare (Beijing: Military Sciences Press, 1993). 43. This group fell under the authority of the defense technology commission’s (COSTIND) Science and Technology Committee (STC). There have been some major changes to the Chinese defense technology bureaucracy since 1997, with the COSTIND being split into a General Armaments Department under the PLA (for long-range planning of R&D, as well as weapons testing) and a new industrial commission (for production) under the civilian State Council that oversees industrial sectors with military implications. This attempt at civilianization reºects the new leadership’s overall program of demilitarization and streamlining of the state administrative apparatus. But the former arrangement, which prevailed at the time, sheds light on why and how 863 went into high gear in the late 1980s. The STC was a highly autonomous body of leading military scientists and cadres of very high political and technical prestige. Its director, the physicist Zhu Guangya, held a bureaucratic rank equivalent to that of the COSTIND’s director. This meant that Zhu could

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that commercial goals remain paramount in most information technology spheres in China. The 863 program is funded as a special budget item outside the normal allocation system for R&D. Usually, Chinese R&D funding follows three patterns. It can fall under regular S&T line items on ministerial or state corporation budgets. Sometimes, block grants are allocated to these organizations. Finally, labs and enterprises can establish commercial ventures to raise money, with parent units providing the capital off budgets or via bank loans.44 In the 863 system, by contrast, monies are allocated not through the bureaucratic system but to the 863 expert groups, which channel this investment downward on the basis of bid decisions. In the 1980s, this created a cross-system, extramin- isterial arrangement outside normal lines of competition and command in the Chinese R&D process, and this lent salience to informal network coordination. No ªgures support an estimate of how much money is allocated to the 863 system as a whole. But as early as 1989, it comprised the largest source of research grants in China’s biotechnology industry.45 More important than numbers, then, is 863’s organizational inºuence, which has reshaped China’s entire state-directed R&D system as technology planners systemwide assimilate key managerial elements of the program. This was precisely what the Wang group intended when it offered an alternative to the compartmentalized “ministerial- style” R&D system that predominated from the 1950s on.

circumvent his nominal boss by invoking rank to appeal to the commission’s oversight bodies: the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission (China’s top defense body), and the State Council (led by the prime minister). The new PLA armaments department is much less cosmo- politan than the old COSTIND. But, given the stature of the advisers involved, it is plausible that its technical advisers, too, can report directly to the chief of the General Staff or to the premier’s ofªce. In the past, this meant that the STC was not a “regular” part of the defense industrial bureaucracy; thus “normal” oversight fell under the much less powerful Science and Technology Department (bu) of the COSTIND. Zhu’s committee (wei), subsumed area-speciªc planning groups whose leaders functioned as the leaders of these systems nationally. Thus Major General Qian Shaojun (a physicist and former commander of the nuclear test base at Lop Nur) exercised de facto oversight over the entire Chinese nuclear weapons R&D complex from his perch as director of the nuclear group under Zhu’s STC. It is not difªcult to imagine how this became a basis for informal network coordination on 863 matters. 44. This last arrangement compensates for undeveloped capital markets by shifting ªrm capital from the state sector, which follows the plan, to the commercial sector, where product mix is guided by the market. But, of course, such decisions can run into the market-failure problem characteristic of long-range R&D. See Corinna-Barbara Francis, “Reproduction of Danwei Institutional Features in the Context of China’s Market Economy: The Case of Haidian District’s High-Tech Sector,” China Quarterly, No. 147 (September 1996), pp. 839–859. Meanwhile, at least one state personal computer maker has learned how to outcompete multinationals through successful branding; it has a 13 percent local market share, nearly double that of its nearest competitor, IBM. See Dexter Roberts, “How Legend Lives Up to Its Name,” Business Week, February 15, 1999, pp. 75–78. 45. Hamer and Kung, Biotechnology in China.

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Although China continues to lag behind international trends, its entire programming system is now set up on the basis of institutions that produced tangible results in earlier large-scale projects. The “ministerial” systems that Wang’s group sought to remake were largely self-contained, encapsulated, and fragmented from other parts of the R&D complex. Strategic weapons programs spanned the national system. Yet nonweapons (and even many conventional weapons) sectors and programs tended to recruit from their own schools, source equipment from their own factories, and assign virtually all phases of R&D to their own laboratories. The more powerful civilian ministerial systems, such as telecommunications and pharmaceuticals, are also notoriously nonco- operative: monopolistic about sharing responsibility for their purviews, and deeply reluctant to engage in cooperative R&D with “outsiders.” Some military industrialists, then, clearly regarded “cooperative” R&D as a euphemism for monopoly breaking.46 Yet the more important legacy of 863 is to drastically reduce a large amount of compartmentalized R&D. It has spread institutions and practices once conªned to the strategic weapons sphere throughout China’s state-led civilian R&D complex. This is most obviously manifest in the devolution on technicians of budget patronage, and 863’s competitive process now bears a rough resemblance to contract R&D. But as facilities submit their bids, it is the state-organized task forces of technical leaders that make ªnal budgeting and contract decisions. This represents an extraordinary change in the power of Chinese technicians. Its inºuence can perhaps best be seen in three areas: decision modes, coordination, and organizational design.

who decides? Patronage and allocation functions in 863 include control over the direction of state investment; the right to select winners and losers in the competition for ªnancial, contractual, or political largesse; the right to award extremely high- priority national contracts to laboratories and enterprises jockeying for that largesse; and the power to set goals and targets that essentially determine the

46. This became especially evident in telecommunications, where defense industrial elites forged political alliances with other rivals of the powerful Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) in an effort to muscle in on MPT-dominated service and equipment businesses, as well as planning for China’s information-technology expansion efforts. The results of these monopoly- breaking efforts have been uneven and, in a political sense, have utterly failed. The old MPT elite dominates the new system. For an account of the cleavage between electronics and telecommunications elites prior to the recent merger of their two systems into a new Ministry of the Information Industry, see Feigenbaum, “The Military Transforms China,” chap. 9.

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direction of state investment in the highest-priority S&T and industrial policy arenas. This devolution on technical personnel of patronage and purse, as opposed merely to advisory, power is an extraordinary departure from the business of politics in post-1949 China. For instance, 863-related start-up ventures appear to possess authority to circumvent normal contract and licensing provisions governing Chinese business activity. This is an explicitly political development that touches core issues of commercial competition, especially where foreign partners who can provide licenses and transfers are involved. In this way, technicians in 863 settings have gained previously unheard-of patronage opportunities: the right to allocate state contracts involving large on-budget investment; access to infrastructure and priority materials supply; and assistance in expediting legal arrangements from contract and venture approval to labor issues. This is coupled with competition for the right to fulªll 863 contracts and targets: R&D allocations are now explicitly competitive, but the political authority to award these contracts has devolved upon experts themselves. State agents in contractor selection are no longer exclusively (or even primarily) from state planning or ªnancial committees; they are instead leading specialists in a given technical ªeld.

the structure of power Strategic weapons and 863 precedents also lend at least a conditional lie to a widely held view of Chinese politics that initiative and decisive resource allocation are well nigh impossible in an “overbureaucratized” political process that becomes incremental wherever one ªnds organizational pluralism.47 One reason that strategic weaponeers have been so inºuential is that they and their patrons built links to the political elite that enabled them to sell “non- routine” programs and thus enshrine as a national model a structure of power that aims at cooperative, yet still authoritative, solutions to critical problems of industrial modernization in contemporary China. This is not based on rigid commands from the top down. Nor does it depend primarily on the bottom-up bureaucratic bargaining that makes the Chinese policy process so incremental. Rather, it blends cooperative with authoritative mechanisms. In its establishment phase, the program depended heavily upon informal network-type

47. See Suisheng Zhao, “The Structure of Authority and Decision-Making: A Theoretical Frame- work,” in Carol Lee Hamrin and Suisheng Zhao, eds., Decision-Making in Deng’s China: Perspectives from Insiders (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), p. 242.

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connections among its founding advocates to mediate the endemic formal constraints so common in Chinese politics. Because the Chinese policy process is compartmentalized, most efforts at policy formulation and implementation take place within bureaucracies and through bargaining among central formal agencies. In the early years of the 863 system, informal network connections bridged this chasm of bureaucratic verticalism, and by the early 1990s, comparatively unstable informality had given way to a more controlled and institutionalized horizontalism. This was manifest in two 863 institutions: the diverse array of 863 expert groups vested by politicians with decision power over goal formulation and purse strings, and a variety of national research coordinating centers and information/ standards clearinghouses that 863 designers modeled explicitly on strategic weapons precedents from the 1950s and 1960s. There are currently eight such 863 “national research centers.”48 These conduct research, integrate results from contracts awarded under the program, train personnel, organize national meetings, procure state-of-the-art supplies (particularly through overseas pur- chases), and promote standardization and knowledge diffusion via the establishment of “high-tech R&D basements.” The eight centers report directly to the relevant 863 expert groups. Thus the director of the 863 center for intelligent computing, Li Guojie, serves concurrently as deputy director of the artiªcial intelligence group under the 863 information technology ªeld.49

flattening hierarchy During the Mao years, a unique combination of political commitment and the scientists’ effectiveness at explaining technical requirements to Chinese politicians sustained the strategic weapons imperative in the face of opposition. Yet without institutionalized channels of access, this bi-directional communication

48. These are optoelectronics (information technology ªeld), artiªcial intelligence and high-performance computing (information technology), the genetic engineering of vaccines (biotechnology), computer-integrated manufacturing systems and experimental engineering (automation), intelligent robotics (automation), the genetic engineering of pharmaceuticals (biotechnology), genetically engineered biological products (biotechnology), artiªcial crystals (new materials), and photoelec- tric technology (lasers). 49. Li is also a member of the Institute of Computing Technology under the CAS. His center is neither the only supercomputing facility in China (Qinghua University has another) nor the only recipient of 863 money in this area. Moreover, its main focus is not the extensive personal computer and software sector that now dominates the Chinese computer market. Rather, it serves as the clearinghouse and coordinator for government investment programs in parallel and symmetrical multiprocessing. See Li Guojie, “Wo Guo Jisuanji Chanye Fazhan Fangxiang yu Shiming” [The development direction and mission of our country’s computer industry], Renmin Ribao [People’s daily], May 7, 1996, p. 3.

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process would surely have broken down. The strategic weapons programs depended on “ºat” organizations not just because socialist-type hierarchy seems so often to be endemically inefªcient. Such forms were also the essential organizational prerequisite to success because they presupposed a symbiosis between political and technical will. When strategic weapons alumni sought to build a national program for the post-Mao era, they focused special attention on this institution. On paper, 863 appears to have been built around comparatively rigid organizational layers: a high-level leading group; seven focal ªeld managerial groups; ªrst-tier expert groups; and second-tier topic groups. Yet in practice, communication across levels has been comparatively ºuid: leading experts from the topic groups are required to engage with the recipients of 863 support. New topics are added and old focuses adjusted via coordination across levels. Experts at all levels converge on the national research centers for information exchange and technology planning. Most important, China’s leading politicians have been engaged in programmatic issues, and 863’s top decisionmaking structure—the leading group—was vested in the program’s establishment phase with limited proprietary rights on resources and infrastructure. The close involvement of state planners in 863 politics facilitates the exercise of these rights because 863 assumes “equal” engagement of experts with managers at all levels of program planning, implementation, and oversight. The 863 program’s “hierarchy” is, for this reason, designed to divide expert labor among various groups for the evaluation of complex technologies. These are broken down into constituent focal areas and then amalgamated in the formulation of programmatic goals. Fluid communication can take place across levels because specialists focus less on different areas of responsibility than on different parts of the same problem. Administratively, this means that a telecommunications committee leads a ªber-optics committee, which in turn leads groups charged with broadband, nodes and switches, and so on. Communica- tion across levels is ºuid and ºat: hierarchy is established for convenience, not command. This has not always worked perfectly. But in China, the institution is viewed as a transformative effort to reorganize goal setting, implementation, and administrative oversight within the policy process.

Can the 863 Model Sustain China’s Ambitions?

From the standpoint of the Chinese state, this new strategic technology effort has been quite promising. It allows the central government to guarantee core

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technical priorities and directly addresses the variety of market failures associated with long lead times from research to commercialization. The government has also been able to support laboratories and enterprises unwilling to invest scarce monies in risky R&D efforts. On balance, then, the transition from strategic weapons to 863 in Chinese critical technologies programming seems signiªcant. There is little doubt that the program encompasses important defense technology goals that, to skepti- cal commentators on Chinese technology strategy, will seem problematic. To some, the largely civilian, “national” high-tech focuses enshrined in 863 may seem dubious, less a demilitarization of the country than a new way of organizing defense modernization—in short, a transition from the strategic weapons–era model of spin-off to a subtle, if more technically broad-ranging, effort at commercial-to-military “spin-on.” Yet this interpretation fails to capture important nuances in 863. When Chinese strategic weaponeers accepted the vision ªrst articulated to them by international counterparts in the 1970s, they accepted, too, that China’s innovation system required a dramatic overhaul that would reºect new patterns of military-commercial interaction characteristic of a post-1960s industrialized world. With Silicon Valley as his point of reference, William Perry told his Chinese interlocutors that they were “doing it wrong” by placing military innovation in the driver’s seat. But if one follows the logic of Perry’s argument—were the Chinese instead to “do it right”—then it is clearly to be expected that their national R&D system should eventually come to resemble the pattern of commercially driven innovation (sometimes with direct government ªnancial support) that has emerged since the mid-1960s. This is precisely what began to happen in China as a result of 863. And that shift of focus is now supplemented by a broader emphasis on entrepreneurialism and venture ªnance, both of which are commercially oriented. The 863 effort thus makes clear that Chinese technology programmers now understand defense requirements as thoroughly derivative of developments in the commercial sphere. This is important for two reasons: it represents a decisive shift of Chinese strategic technology goals; at the same time, it makes it less likely than ever that U.S. export controls can be used to attenuate Chinese progress. Increasingly, the regionalization of international politics in the post–Cold War world has made multilateral control efforts an empty shell. Chinese technology planners have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to purchase key systems from other vendors when U.S. export laws prevent American ªrms from selling. Although it is clearly unrealistic in the context

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of current U.S. domestic politics to remove controls on many dual-use items that the Chinese can, have, and will continue to purchase from others, such efforts to control the uncontrollable make little sense in purely strategic terms. For Americans, the main brake on technology trade continues to be the presence of prominent defense goals even within ostensibly “commercial” aspects of programs such as 863. And yet this is probably unavoidable: it is simply unrealistic to expect a country of China’s size, historical signiªcance, pridefulness, and economic potential to forgo a technological overhaul of a military that relies, in certain areas, on equipment of 1970s’ (and even 1960s’) vintage. Americans should be under no illusions about what motivates 863 and other programs. The mere fact of weakness makes Chinese planners uncom- fortable. With a technology base that remains ten to twenty years behind international standards in most areas, strategists must hedge against uncertain- ties in an Asia whose international politics could change radically in just three to ten years. The pressure that strategists put on industrial planners to fulªll the technical requirements of the hedge thereby intensifies, shaping the none- too-subtle dual-use ºavor of programs such as 863. Clearly, the United States and Japan are being benchmarked, and quite explicitly. But given how problematic export controls have become, a response that invests heavily in the United States’ own capabilities, rather than seeking to attenuate Chinese progress, except in areas that have unidimensional military signiªcance, is perhaps the best strategy for maintaining America’s edge. The program’s various defense goals must therefore be understood in the context of the dramatically changed Chinese sense of what makes and sustains a technology base. In the event, the 863 model is also problematic for concerned Chinese who think systemically about efforts to modernize their national industrial system. Chinese planners clearly recognize the limits and boundaries of targeted industrial policies. Thus the S&T reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have yielded parallels to the 863 effort: signiªcant institutional changes designed to intro- duce markets, promote entrepreneurialism, and use the hand of government to foster an environment conducive to innovation rather than to target innovation directly, as in the 863 program. Chinese planners clearly recognize just how far-reaching their S&T and industrial reforms must be. They also appear to recognize the inherent limits of an effort that focuses on key sectors and places its faith, even amid intraprogram competition, in top-down solutions to technical problems.

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markets and finance China has only just begun to create the underpinnings of a genuine technology market, where consumer considerations will drive ªrm decisions on the de- mand side and noncentral government actors seek to innovate as an alternative to continuing reliance on the purse strings of the state. The record of state- sector innovation is not at all promising. One recent study of China’s place in the regional division of labor for electronics convincingly showed that all efforts to make the state sector more efªcient and innovative in this regard have failed dramatically.50 The “second-stage” spin-off sector may offer some promise, and top Chinese policymakers have also begun to stress venture ªnance as an alternative to public R&D investment. But efforts in the former category mostly represent basic consumer products. In the latter, nongovern- mental funds for risk investment have traditionally sat in banks as indirect public ªnance, and new venture-style ªnance involving an equity stake is still dwarfed ten to one by this type of capital (as opposed to a one to one or higher ratio in the United States).51 Meanwhile, the larger Chinese system remains endemically noninnovative. From the standpoint of the central state, it is ªne for 863 programmers to guarantee that strategic needs do not fall through cracks in the marketplace. But 863 alone cannot (and does not even seek to) promote long-range technological competitiveness or large-scale technological diffusion across the economy. Alternatives to the government as a basis for innovation must clearly begin to emerge.

status The 863 effort also reºects a continuing—and almost reºexive—fascination with the “latest” technology that belies the huge gaps continuing to plague

50. Barry Naughton, ed., The China Circle: Economics and Electronics in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1998), especially chap. 8 by Jean François Huchet, “The China Circle and Technological Development in the Chinese Electronics Industry.” 51. “Ofªcial Calls for Acceleration of Risk Investment,” Asia Pulse, October 1, 1998. Part of the problem for venture ªnance in China lies in the continued weakness of its capital markets, as well as a lack of legal and property rights guarantees. This is tied to the problem of unreformed corporate governance. But although the concept is a new one for Chinese ªnanciers, they are clearly learning. In 1993 one ªnance center in Chengdu invested U.S.$24,920 in a pharmaceutical ªrm that now has net assets of U.S.$2.029 million. San Francisco–based Hambrecht & Quist Group, a major source of Silicon Valley venture capital, launched a China dynamic growth fund in 1995 with total investment of U.S.$41 million and capital commitments of U.S.$85 million. In 1998, W.I. Harper of San Francisco established a U.S.$50 million fund for U.S.-based extpatriate Chinese high-tech start-ups to form strategic alliances with partners in China.

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China’s industrial base. In moments of candor, Chinese technology planners recognize this. But such issues are still politicized in China. And although this can help to keep politicians engaged with technological problems, it runs the risk of bogging down the system in the worst kind of political-scientiªc enterprise. As a U.S. biotechnology delegation argued as early as 1989, “Many Americans have been lulled into thinking that China is becoming progressively less ideological and political. In fact, today’s idea of ‘serving the economy’ is no less rigorously pursued than was the idea of ‘serving the people’” during the Mao era.52 The process focus of 863, particularly in automation and computer modeling techniques, is promising in this regard. But such promise can be realized only if better diffusion structures are created within the economy and if bottom-up innovators, not merely 863 contractors, are able to exploit such efforts.

industry Despite the incorporation of enterprises as contractors under the program, 863 has few implications for the continuing problem of weak enterprise-level R&D investment. It is promising that enterprises, not merely laboratories, receive 863 support. But the problem of divided research and production remains: in China only 27 percent of R&D spending is done by industrial enterprises, in contrast to the 70–80 percent in the United States and other industrialized countries.53

politics The 863 program, like the strategic weapons efforts, assumes leadership commitment and some type of political-technical symbiosis. But one wonders whether ªber-optic telecommunications, for example, will have the same “pull” for political leaders plagued by an attention span problem as did nuclear weapons and strategic missiles in decades past. China’s leaders are no longer soldiers; they are economic technicians. Yet the political appeal of weapons is profound, and protein-engineered vaccines and high-performance computers seem far less compelling on the surface as a basis for political engagement and excitement. For political reasons alone, this could push the focus even in many commercial areas toward systems with direct military

52. Hamer and Kung, Biotechnology in China, p. 77. 53. U.S. Embassy, Beijing, “Chinese Challenges in Absorbing and Producing New Technology,” report of the Science and Technology Section (December 1996).

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signiªcance. As a result, it could scuttle efforts to use the mobilizational powers embedded in a program such as 863 to modernize China’s underlying industrial base. To focus strategic technology programs so narrowly might well aid a limited range of defense modernization, but it would defeat efforts to prime the Chinese system for a march toward parity with the great industrial powers. This provides a sense of how political pressures force Chinese agenda setters to think in terms of trade-offs. It also shows just how integrated commercial and military modernization have become in contemporary China. Clearly, foreign ideas have had a decisive impact on China’s shift from weapons to more complex types of critical technologies planning; no one should underes- timate outsiders’ potentially profound inºuence on Chinese thinking. Yet neither can observers afford to misconstrue the commitment of China’s leaders to redress their country’s weakness. As with the strategic weapons effort, 863 proves once again that this commitment is total.

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