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3 One thing China can't offer
Africa By
Bright B Simons, Evans Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe
ACCRA, Ghana - China's success in blowing
up one of its Feng Yun weather satellites with a
ground-based missile has raised the issue of its
ongoing, accelerated, and highly prioritized quest
to modernize its military industry complex.
Although it has made some progress, China's
military industry still faces problems.
China in recent years has built up strong
diplomatic and trade relations in Africa, and
President Hu Jintao is currently on a tour of
eight African nations. China does have some development
experience to share with
Africa, perhaps particularly in the area of
poverty alleviation. But civil-military-industrial
modernization is certainly not one of them.
China's model is much too dependent on the
extravagant profusion of resources and too
unproductive to be of much use. The African
connection in this context is discussed in detail
in the second half of this article.
In the
past decade, China has moved mountains to effect
radical, wholesale changes to the way its defense
industries are organized and their output
calibrated to the global projection needs of its
evolving geopolitical strategy. The impression has
been given that reforms will be bold and sweeping
and will manifest in a clear break from the
traditional approach of melding technical progress
to political priorities in China.
But
clearly, from the results, it does not seem as if
Chinese leaders had been prepared to move
sufficiently away from their comfort zone, because
they have only imported the most bureaucratic,
centralist, crony-based aspects of
military-industrial complexes in operation
elsewhere, so that the long-lamented issue of the
coupling of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA)
bureaucratic inefficiency to a resource-intensive
approach to military innovation has now been
compounded with and magnified by the admission of
private sector's "rent seekers" (corrupt
influences) into the fold.
It makes one
wonder whether China has been taking lessons from
fabulously Dirigiste France. The French
military-industrial complex, which has spawned
white elephants such as the fancy-ballroom
aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is a
perfect study of how anti-competitive,
over-subsidized, crony-dependent, pork-barreled
institutional frameworks can handicap even the
finest engineering and managerial talent.
The extent to which France's Grande Ecole
and Ecole Polytechnique old boys' networks have
become stumbling blocks in the reform of that
country's stagnating defense industry cannot be
summarized here; that the country's defense
industry was nearly bankrupted in the mid-1990s
ought to suffice as a hint.
But the
experience of even the United States, which boasts
some of the grandest military-industrial successes
of this age, from the Xerox copier to the
Internet, is testimony to the fact that a
military-industrial complex, no matter how well
resourced, cannot immunize itself from the threat
of productivity stagnation.
Some very
credible estimates suggest that with increasing
intertwining of the interests of defense
contractors, military bureaucrats and politicians
have faced a situation whereby export subsidies
now total the equivalent of 60% of international
US arms sales. It is testimony to the resilience
of the original institutional architecture that
the late president Dwight Eisenhower warned
against that spinoffs from the US
military-industrial complex continue to greatly
enrich the US innovation system as a whole.
Chinese strategists, all credit to them,
do understand the theoretical approach to building
a successful military-industry complex:
emphasizing the development of dual-use capacities
(skills and technology that can serve both
civilian and military needs), adapting successful
commercial systems to military logistic uses, and
paying particular attention to areas such as
microelectronics that are category-neutral and to
information and communications technologies that
enhance productivity during shifts between
military and civilian contexts (such as
intelligent databases).
Indeed, no less a
personage than Chinese Vice Premier Huang Ju has
said as much. Since 1997, various Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) and government conferences
have laid out a reform agenda aimed at
incorporating the best practices into the present
regime. And in 1998, the Chinese Academy of
Sciences was tasked with developing a Knowledge
Innovation Program, which ostensibly will have
considerable impact on China's modernization
goals.
Where attention to these details
has been meticulous, China has reaped some
impressive results. The country's maritime
industry now ranks behind only Japan and South
Korea, a development that may have something to do
with the increased sophistication of China's
recent submarine outputs (particularly the Song
Class). Engineering-intensive construction
projects and the aerospace sector, especially
commercial and research satellite development (the
Ziyuan series, for instance) and multi-purpose
helicopter technologies, are believed to have
benefited as well.
Sufficient appreciation
also seems to be present in military elite circles
about the importance of the private sector. ZTE,
Lenovo, Huawei and Julong are particularly
mentioned by analysts as playing crucial roles in
sourcing technology for the modernization effort.
In physical-resource terms alone, the pace
of growth has been astonishing. About 1,200 firms
employ 300,000 skilled workers and millions of
other employees. Together these companies endeavor
to supply the entire panoply of high-tech
weaponry, from submachine-guns to nuclear-armed
submarines. No other country in the world has, for
instance, spent more on naval buildup in recent
years, not even the United States.
Yet
given the resources exhausted, skill and capacity
transfers between the industrial and military
systems are far from impressive. The overall
aerospace sector, for example, lags behind far
less resourced competitors in Brazil and even
Spain and, increasingly, Argentina. And this is
even discounting the fact that nearly 85% of the
intellectual property in China's advanced
high-tech sector is owned by foreigners
(interested readers may
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