Zhang Zheng's Page

Part 1：

p. 19: However, according to the research of Shen Zhihua, China and the Soviet Union never reached a consensus on the matter of a nuclear protection umbrella; nor did the Chinese side ever attempt to gain security through Soviet protection. On the contrary, from the very beginning, China hoped to obtain Soviet assistance in developing its own nuclear weapons.

In fact, the modernization of China’s military began much earlier. The importance of science and technology was recognized as early as the Second Sino-Japanese War (War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression), evidenced by the establishment of institutions like the Yan’an Academy of Natural Sciences.

What came from the Soviet Union was perhaps not “suspicion” (Feigenbaum, 2003, p. 19), but rather the fact that Mao Zedong never truly trusted the Soviets. He sought to become the Stalin of the East.

The Korean War had three major impacts:

1. It increased China’s reliance on Soviet aid while simultaneously intensifying its desire to develop its own domestic science and technology.
2. The domestic reflections and debates on the Korean War created a space for the emergence of a military elite dedicated to technological advancement.
3. Dissatisfaction with Soviet aid and the subsequent determination to develop strategic nuclear weapons provided sustained support for military technology. The advancement of military technology, in turn, was expected to increase national wealth, thus becoming a development strategy that also consolidated the status of its proponents.

Liu Bocheng consistently emphasized the need to equip the army with advanced technology, using his position at the military academies to counteract Maoist ideas of “People’s War” and the notion that “man can conquer nature.”

Between 1953 and 1955, external changes shifted the thinking from gradual military modernization to rapid modernization. The resources required for this process consumed a significant portion of those allocated for public economic plans.

Nie Rongzhen’s proposal evolved from a simple strategic weapons development plan into a broader strategic technology development plan, which would address both military and civilian needs. This shift was prompted, on the one hand, by the economic difficulties resulting from the Great Leap Forward and, on the other, by the downfall of Peng Dehuai.

China’s technological development strategy was composed of two key elements: techno-nationalism and a specific organizational and management style.

China’s techno-nationalism inherently assumes that its leaders will link technological achievements to the nation’s standing in the world.

Techno-nationalism was a concept originally used to describe Japan’s development philosophy, where technology is seen as a form of national security. This philosophy pursues technological advancement through a path of importation, diffusion, and finally, indigenous creation, thereby ensuring national security.

Under Nie Rongzhen’s leadership, a management style emerged that differed from the rigid, Stalinist system of the Mao era. It was characterized by four main features:

1. Decentralization of authority: Management power was delegated from the Party and administrative apparatus to high-level scientists and experts.
2. Systematization of inter-departmental and inter-system cooperation: This served as a corrective to the long-standing problem of departmentalism and localism that plagued the Chinese bureaucracy.
3. Introduction of flatter, non-hierarchical organizational structures: This was achieved through establishing connections, coordination, and decision-making processes that linked the top to the bottom, the central to the local, and leadership to staff.
4. Application of performance evaluation: This was based on unified standards and strict benchmarking against international technological progress.

Although the strategic weapons program retained its top-down, mobilizational character, the broader military science and technology system adopted a relatively flexible organizational and management approach. This method became an important legacy, continuously influencing China’s development.

This approach would bequeath four legacies, forming the backbone of China’s state-led technological system:

1. It reflected a series of successful, popular international models of state-industry-science organization commonly found in Japan and the West.
2. It produced the greatest scientific and technological achievements in the first 40 years of the PRC’s history.
3. It created managerial and expert role models within an organization that revered scientific, engineering, and technical talent.
4. Most importantly, it provided a cooperative, open, and networked path forward within a Chinese technological system that was otherwise highly hierarchical, vertical, and siloed.

Nie Rongzhen established a dual-track system. The essence of this system was to empower technical personnel. Under this dual-track system, the management track and the technical track were originally staffed by individuals from different backgrounds. However, to counter the adverse effects of the Great Leap Forward, an increasing number of experts with technical backgrounds were transferred to management positions.

Some civilian projects also studied and emulated this model of two-way communication between high-level leadership and technical personnel established by Marshal Nie, such as the Three Gorges Dam project. However, many more projects failed because they could not attract the interest of top leaders or failed to establish institutionalized meetings with them.

Central-level ad-hoc commissions were established to oversee and coordinate specific inter-departmental work.

By establishing a series of administrations to bypass the vertical, fragmented, and siloed bureaucratic organizations, and by holding regular, institutionalized meetings with top leaders, projects could receive maximum attention and resources. However, this very fact demonstrated that the attention from the top was contingent and, therefore, unstable.

In 1961, Zhou Enlai began to doubt whether Nie Rongzhen could achieve a successful atomic bomb test by 1964. This ultimately led to the establishment of the Central Special Commission (CSC).

This is reminiscent of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development process: the development of the most advanced weaponry is not necessarily linked to economic conditions but is more closely related to knowledge and determination.

Part 3

The state-mobilized system for nuclear weapons R&D faced challenges in the political atmosphere of the 1970s. Although it provided China with a nuclear deterrent, the original goal of driving economic growth through nuclear technology research was not achieved; the civilian economy did not improve as a result.

Deng Xiaoping had been a strong supporter of these military technology elites in the 1950s and 1960s, which gave him a political advantage when he sought to reform their agenda in the 1970s. Furthermore, he himself held considerable prestige within the military as the former political commissar of the New Fourth Army. Most importantly, after Mao’s death, he secured the support of Ye Jianying, the de facto commander of the military.

Ye Jianying was the Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission after the fall of Lin Biao and the actual controller of the armed forces.

Although Deng Xiaoping’s attitude toward scientific experts was quite consistent with Nie Rongzhen’s, his strategies on specific matters differed significantly. This was evident in investment and R&D priorities, which shifted from strategic nuclear deterrents to conventional weapons.

In 1977, although the CSC—composed of Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying, and Li Xiannian—publicly and repeatedly emphasized the importance of strategic weapons, in actual procurement, it was clearly stated that the problem of conventional weaponry needed to be solved and that new conventional weapon systems should be adopted.

Could the upgrade of conventional weapons have been related to the preparations for the Sino-Vietnamese War? Did the urgency for upgrading conventional arms arise only after predicting the need for a conventional war to prove allegiance? Or was the war a means for Deng to secure a higher status within the military? Or was it a form of “education” for the public and the technology elite?

In shifting the national defense focus from strategic to conventional weapons, Deng Xiaoping must have had the support of at least Zhang Aiping, one of Nie Rongzhen’s protégés. He also brought Luo Ruiqing, Hong Xuezhi, Wang Zhen, and Yang Yong into his reform plan.

In an effort to secure their position, the experts from the strategic weapons program introduced the field of microelectronics, which was relevant to both strategic and new conventional weapons. Promoting this field would not only preserve their status but also advance the R&D of new conventional weapons, thus maintaining their influence.

Within microelectronics, the strategic weapons faction focused on three areas: C³I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence), missile and satellite tracking and control, and supercomputing.

Vice Premier Fang Yi led a research study, and Deng Xiaoping ultimately confirmed that the supercomputer project would be a military, not civilian, task. The project was to be led by strategic weapons experts, specifically the Changsha Institute of Technology, which fell under the National Defense Science and Technology Commission (NDSTC).

The strategic weapons experts hoped to influence the development of conventional weapons, and the supercomputer was seen as a prime opportunity to apply their experience in changing traditional organizational forms.

The elite image of the strategic weapons experts and Nie Rongzhen’s flexible, open, and networked organizational model stood in stark contrast to the rigid, Red Guard-style organizations of the Mao era. The success of the strategic weapons program thus became an important tool for Deng to de-legitimize the experiences of the Mao era.

Therefore, once Deng Xiaoping’s development strategy gained support, he vigorously promoted the experience of the weapons experts—including experimentation, cooperation, and flexibility—packaging these practices as something new and distinct from the Mao era.

In reality, although the Central Military Commission decided to shift toward conventional weapons, the production conditions for conventional weapons suppliers did not improve. On one hand, the army received attention in the early 1980s, but from the mid-1980s, the priority quickly shifted to the navy and air force. Because many production bases were located deep in China’s interior and industrial production capacity was not fully utilized, suppliers did not benefit, which in turn did not aid the modernization of conventional weapons.

For Deng Xiaoping, Nie Rongzhen’s path of using military industrialization to drive economic development was wrong. Nie never argued that military industrial development alone could build the nation’s high-tech base, but he did believe that strategic military technology should serve development, not just the goal of national security. This was precisely what Deng Xiaoping opposed.

Was Deng Xiaoping’s judgment that the “external environment has improved” a genuine assessment or a pretext for his reforms? I lean toward the latter. For a China in the extremist Cultural Revolution era, whether the external environment could improve was largely a matter of its own choices.

Under Deng Xiaoping’s policy shift, the total output of military-industrial enterprises grew enormously while their military output remained relatively constant. There were three reasons for this:

1. A significant rebalancing of production occurred within military enterprises. Much of the production capacity was shifted from military to civilian goods.
2. Some military enterprises, such as in aviation, shifted to new areas, including launching commercial satellites. The income from this was partly reinvested into new production, but more was used to improve employee welfare. Few leaders of military enterprises were inclined to reinvest in military contracts or production.
3. The strategic nuclear weapons industry transitioned to dual-use technologies, such as fiber optics and metallurgy. The nuclear industry shifted toward civilian nuclear power plants.

Deng Xiaoping merged the departments responsible for R&D of strategic and conventional weapons into the Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND), which was subordinate to both the Central Military Commission and the State Council. Since both original departments faced the challenge of budget cuts, the merger was intended to unify leadership, create common interests, and reduce friction.

The difference between COSTIND and the preceding National Defense Science and Technology Commission (NDSTC) is that the latter was a political body for compromise and coordination of competition, whereas COSTIND represented an effort at integration.

The formation of COSTIND reflected the success of the strategic weapons elite over their conventional weapons rivals.

Why was this seen as a victory? Is the budget competition between elite scientists to be interpreted as hostility and struggle?

Regardless, the defense budget was still reduced. Deng Xiaoping therefore found a new role for these defense technology elites: to help build the nation.

Around 1981, the burgeoning “China in the Year 2000” series of projects reinforced the concept of “scientific decision-making.” This had two main effects: it shifted leadership attention to a series of non-military technologies and projects, and it strengthened relationships with foreign experts who could assist China’s efforts to navigate its transition.

Part 4

Some of China’s strategic weapons experts realized after the establishment of COSTIND that they could never return to the past when they held immense power. Meanwhile, civilian technology elites were seeking greater control.

When the focus shifted to conventional weapons, the emphasis on technology gave way to an emphasis on equipment. Consequently, the importance of technical experts was supplanted by civilian personnel in military uniforms stationed at headquarters. The latter group became the biggest beneficiaries.

Although the strategic weapons experts won a victory within COSTIND, they simultaneously lost their broader power base. COSTIND became one of the four general headquarters of the PLA.

Deng Xiaoping pushed for the establishment of the State Science and Technology Commission (SSTC) with two main objectives:

1. To explain the dimensions of scientific and technological choices to the leadership.
2. To elevate China’s level of science and technology.

The SSTC thus replaced COSTIND as the most important advisory body in the field of science and technology.

Unlike COSTIND, the SSTC had very close ties to factories and the industrial sector, which was the very basis of its creation. It had the character of a government agency, which diluted the Party-military background of the former NDSTC.

One way the SSTC consolidated its power was by asserting the role of science and technology in economic planning, a domain long monopolized by the State Planning Commission (SPC). However, the SSTC lacked a formal role in production and had few economic resources to allocate. It therefore remained primarily in the realm of knowledge rather than material resources. Even so, its role became increasingly important throughout the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping.

For the first time, the leadership group began to judge a technological achievement based on its degree of commercialization and industrialization. This led to an evaluation of the traditional military R&D system as a “failure” because it could not promote national economic development nor facilitate the commercialization and industrialization of high technology.

The second and third generations of strategic weapons elites sought to emphasize the importance of their legacy for the future by publishing a series of heroic histories. However, it was precisely this content that led the political leadership to believe that their projects were irrelevant to China’s future.

A crisis of confidence emerged as Chinese scientists felt that the national research system was failing to keep pace with technological change. A consensus gradually formed that the real problem was not the defense technology system, but the national research system as a whole. The strategic weapons experts wanted to modernize national defense, but with ever-tightening budgets, this was difficult to achieve. Therefore, only by advancing the entire national research system could defense modernization be realized.

Following technological exchanges with the United States and Europe, Chinese technical experts began to reassess China’s technological capabilities. After communicating with the Perry delegation, China’s strategic weapons elites re-examined the process of defense technology upgrades. Initially, China had hoped to obtain comprehensive, in-depth defense technology transfers and was willing to open many of its secret facilities for American inspection. However, the U.S. still refused, ultimately shifting to partial technology transfers. Through this process, the Chinese side learned that most technological upgrades in the contemporary world were incremental, with component and software upgrades being the main components. In the United States, these upgrades relied heavily on innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which had substantial civilian markets in addition to military contracts.

Even though many Chinese engineers were aware of the huge influence of the electronics industry in the U.S. and its vital role in national defense, the leaders of the strategic weapons R&D program, considering China’s scarce resources, deliberately chose a state-led and coordinated development process. This was partly because some of them also saw the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) and viewed it as a model of state-led S&T development.

Although Chinese politicians realized that the most important military R&D issue of the 1980s was defense transformation, the renowned strategic weapons experts focused on something more fundamental: technology and organizational culture.

The real problem was this: if the dual-use nature of technology would not easily change, then the best way to bridge the gap between civilian and military organizational cultures was to create an institution that facilitates technology diffusion. For many, the way to achieve this was through the diversification of the strategic weapons elite themselves. To some extent, this advocacy for diversification was also a political consideration; after all, the elites were simply trying to cope with the trend of civilianization and the shift in military procurement preferences. Of course, this also reflected their response to the Deng-era strategy of prioritizing the state over the Party-military. Since they had built a framework that spanned systems and organizations in the Mao era, they could now penetrate the world of civilian technology. They wanted to establish, in the Deng era, a cross-organizational coordination mechanism that spanned both military and civilian domains.

Therefore, some weapons experts had to leave the military R&D system. This realization was a difficult process for individuals like General Zhang Aiping to accept. They had to abandon their demands for increased military spending and instead turn to transforming their own roles.

In a 1989 speech, Qian Xuesen called for a renewed emphasis on cutting-edge technology. But in the contemporary context, what constituted “cutting-edge technology” was to be determined by the state.

Market failures in technology investment exist even in highly developed capitalist countries, especially for long-cycle basic research, which still requires substantial state investment.

Part 5

From the perspective of the state or the highest decision-makers, the brief interruption in R&D (strategic weapons) investment between 1977 and 1983 was not a sign of strategic confusion, but a reallocation of resource priorities during a national strategic shift. When the national strategy turned to economic construction, capital accumulation and investment were directed toward the most critical areas of people’s livelihood. Once the economy improved, resources would be fully allocated back to S&T R&D. Therefore, from the perspective of the technology elites, this was a process of self-effort and self-redemption during a period of falling out of favor and then being restored to grace. However, was the investment in technology an inevitability? Judging from the 1978 National Science Conference, the will to invest in R&D seems to have been consistent; it was merely constrained by resource allocation problems. The book does not seem to analyze this brief interruption from the perspective of the top decision-makers, failing to clarify whether it represented two shifts in understanding or simply a reluctant allocation of scarce resources.

Although there is no direct evidence of opposition to the 863 Program in the Politburo, different voices did exist during the discussions. Opponents argued that centralized R&D had led to China’s backwardness in commercial technology. Therefore, Deng’s attitude at this time was crucial. Multiple sources claim that Deng considered the 863 Program his personal preference. At this stage, Deng Xiaoping further advanced the role of S&T in economic construction, viewing it as the “primary productive force.”

In Deng’s eyes, Nie’s technology elites became even more important:

1. The technology elites could still produce high-level scientific and technological achievements even in a backward environment.
2. These technological achievements had a significant impact on China’s position in the world, including its influence on other superpowers.
3. They proved that when demand-pull and discovery-push mechanisms worked well, China could generate indigenous technological breakthroughs.

On many occasions and in many speeches, Deng drew analogies between the current S&T R&D and the strategic weapons development of the 1960s. He repeatedly emphasized the impact of strategic weapons on China’s status.

For China’s political leaders, the success of strategic weapons symbolized courage, power, prestige, and national will.

Just as China in the 1960s, in a hostile environment and with a seemingly insurmountable gap with the U.S. and the Soviet Union, could successfully develop strategic weapons, so too could contemporary China, in a similar situation, achieve technological breakthroughs for the 21st century. As Mao said, “we will be bullied if we don’t have the atomic bomb.” Deng now said, “we cannot afford the cost of not being engaged.” Such rhetoric perhaps served to provide a political rationale for the high cost of technology spending.

China had never used conventional weapons to measure return on investment. Similarly, in the 1980s, mastering broadband communication technology and artificial intelligence robotics would be seen as a special honor in the eyes of Chinese leaders, on par with the prestige brought by strategic weapons. Deng consistently criticized the imbalances of the Mao era, but he never completely negated the imbalances of state investment during that period. On the contrary, Deng inherited and continued the techno-nationalism of the Mao era, only with the goal no longer being better weapons.

Although Deng did not believe in Nie Rongzhen’s “trickle-down” model of military-to-civilian conversion, he fully believed in Nie’s broader view of how technology shapes China’s position in the global order.

The designers of the 863 Program had several goals:

1. China should strive to close the gap with the world’s leaders in several specific fields.
2. Invest in long-term, industrially competitive research and military strengthening.
3. Favor fields with a symbiotic relationship between basic and applied research.
4. Favor projects with a symbiotic relationship between science, technology, and industrialization.

The greatest value of the 863 Program was that it broke the ministerial-managed R&D system of the 1950s. Although the strategic weapons program could draw resources from the national system, most technology systems were closed, limited, and self-sufficient. The 863 Program, for the first time in China, reduced the fragmentation of R&D. It extended the institutions and practices once confined to the strategic weapons sector to the entire state-led civilian R&D system. This was mainly reflected in the decentralization of budgetary decision-making power.

For the first time, Chinese technical experts wielded such influence, and it was not limited to the circle of strategic weapons experts. This was manifested in decision-making processes, modes of cooperation, and organizational design.

The history of strategic weapons R&D also seems to validate a particular view of Chinese politics: that of hyper-bureaucratization, meaning that inter-organizational competition does not lead to innovation and decisive resource allocation, but merely produces incrementalism.

Initially, the 863 Program relied more on informal relationships to establish vertical management connections. But by the 1990s, it attempted to imitate the horizontal information service centers of Marshal Nie’s era in the 1960s to promote the flow of information and communication. Specialized national research centers were established in different fields to achieve this goal.

The author repeatedly suggests that the 863 Program, in some form (management, educating Deng), realized the original vision of Marshal Nie Rongzhen. But does this mean that the 863 Program was simply an upgrade of Marshal Nie’s strategic weapons research?

The 863 Program granted enormous power to the research elites in various fields, including not only personnel appointments but also the allocation of huge R&D funds. How, then, could fairness and credibility be guaranteed in this process?

The book emphasizes the informal relationships among scientists but does not conduct an in-depth study of this aspect. This is the source of another question. Why did a national strategic technology initiative, launched and led by strategic weapons experts, include five civilian technology areas, among them a large amount of research in genetics and medicine? Why were the strategic weapons elites willing to share these resources with other fields? What role did informal relationships play in this?

If these fields were not decided by the strategic weapons technology elites, then our understanding of their active role in historical development, perhaps their historical agency, needs to be further diminished.

Part 6

Five years after the implementation of the 863 Program, China began to see its problems.

The state-led path of S&T R&D continued to expand in the 1990s and brought limited but impressive progress in some areas, but it never brought the sustained, widespread innovation that the leaders had hoped for.

A conflict existed between China’s insistence on indigenous technological innovation and its increasing reliance on foreign technology transfer. A similar conflict existed between the 50-year-old socialist system and the continuous integration into the global economic market.

Although planners attempted to create a competitive high-tech market by attacking old monopolists and encouraging new competitors, administrative orders often proved to be the decisive factor in determining the winners.

1992 was a key year for China’s S&T system. Various factors were reshaping the state’s role in policy. The government issued a series of plans to guide S&T, hoping to provide market-based incentives for various actors while stimulating technology diffusion and transfer through targeted state subsidies. These plans differed from the 863 Program; a large amount of funding was invested in non-mechanized sectors or in commercialization. This led to the formation of the Torch Program.

Song Jian, in 1991, described the different divisions of labor among the various plans, which were divided into three tiers. The first tier consisted of locally-led development projects to create a foundation. The second was state-supported research projects like 863 and Torch. The third was basic scientific research. (This was perhaps because the 863 Program had long emphasized applied science). However, differences still existed between the 863 and Torch programs, reflecting the special role of strategic technology projects and the growing divergence between the state’s strategic goals and the role of other technologies.

First Tier: Indirectly Funded Experiments

Starting from the mid-1980s, various programs were launched to improve agricultural technology and local small-scale industrial enterprises. By 1992, 85% of townships had received some level of investment, equipment, and training related to the Spark Program. This represented the central government’s attempt to shift from a centralized, state-led system of funding technology to a market-based mechanism.

Second Tier: Localization and Commercialization Experiments

Programs in this tier, including Torch and 863, required higher levels of government investment and input. The Torch Program, however, was centered around several hubs to try to meet a mix of planning objectives, including:

• State-supported commercialization, industrialization, and technology transfer, thus involving less techno-nationalism. The Torch Program was initially designed to establish non-governmental commercialization mechanisms (though the outcome seems to have been different) to enhance commercial viability and enterprise profits. Its main purpose was to attract foreign technology and investment to the local level, hoping to achieve high-tech development rather than just the production of high-tech products.
• The Torch Program sought to upgrade infrastructure at the local level, rather than prioritizing national laboratories and enterprises.
• The Torch Program attempted to keep non-standard companies away from state financial allocations.

Third Tier: Basic Research

In the 1990s, the government continued to support some basic research. In the Eighth Five-Year Plan, 20,000 research projects were directly supported. Funds were channeled through the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to projects that had undergone expanded peer review.

The above seems to indicate that the central government was trying to create more market-oriented investment methods to promote faster S&T progress across society. The 863 Program, besides being concentrated in only seven fields, also emphasized applied science and that research should serve applied technology. Therefore, multiple programs were launched at the societal level to achieve these goals, including the Torch Program, rural development programs, and direct state investment in basic research projects. The monopoly of the 863 Program was weakened; it was no longer the only, nor the most important, program. Even its R&D model was no longer favored by the central government (which preferred market-oriented approaches).

Hybrid Institutions

Many universities established affiliated enterprises for the purpose of commercialization, that is, they were created when a technology reached a mature stage and needed to face the market. This was different from involving enterprises in the R&D process from the very beginning.

In 1996, a decade after the launch of the 863 Program, a “Super 863 Program” was proposed. However, China still showed a preference for large-scale, planned, mobilizational infrastructure projects, including the “Three Golden Projects.” This gave affiliated spin-off companies the opportunity to directly undertake government projects, including the state-led “Information Superhighway” plan. Unsurprisingly, the expert groups from the 863 Program became deeply involved in the Three Golden Projects.

This process was full of contradictions. It continuously introduced elements of planning and followed a planned path, yet the biggest challenge for China was actually to break away from such a path and adopt a market-oriented one.

China still persists with top-down, planned innovation in various forms. If this in itself has inherent limitations, then so does the almost conditioned reflex of adherence to nationalism in technology policy.

The first point of contradiction: China’s indigenous innovation and manufacturing capabilities, to some extent, relied more on non-governmental and market-based mechanisms, such as the Torch Program. But China remained completely dependent on foreign technology transfer in many areas, including arms procurement from Russia and its long-standing complaints about U.S. export controls.

The second point of contradiction: Although technology was being continuously imported and transferred, old ways of thinking and behaving persisted. The pursuit of “indigenization” (本土化) has always been the highest goal of the Beijing leadership. Senior politicians have always viewed technology transfer and commercial cooperation from an instrumentalist perspective. Just as in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union provided technical assistance to gain China’s support within the socialist camp, today, this trade is conducted in a market context. Yet, China’s technology transfer policy always demands the lowest price and does not guarantee long-term cooperation.

The third self-limiting aspect reflected in China’s approach to strategic and planned scientific development is the continued politicization of enterprises.

There is a huge difference between the R&D cooperation model formed during the strategic weapons development of the Mao era (which emphasized technology and de-politicization) and the organizational separation management that China carried out in the telecommunications sector in the 1990s. The telecommunications sector became highly politicized.

The military-industrial elite played a key role in the rise of new communication technologies.

The strategic mode of technological development has a huge legacy (influence) in China.

Evidently, high politicization became a major flaw in the 863 R&D model. In 1989, the Ministry of Electronics Industry and some defense agencies believed that their fiber optic technology could play a special role in promoting China’s information transformation. However, political and bureaucratic maneuvering ultimately prevented the best from being the final winner.

Experts from the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications also undertook 863 Program projects, and these experts established significant barriers to prevent other competitors from joining. Qian Zongjue became the most important figure controlling the discourse in this field.

Part 7

The final part comments on how China should embrace globalization after joining the WTO, taking on the tone of a historical conclusion. It turns out that the globalization of goods does not lead to a globalization of consciousness. Globalization itself is not merely a linear progression forward.

The author believes that the 863 Program also revealed that China’s technology planners now understand that defense needs must also be met through commercial development.

At least for the Americans, the prominent presence of defense objectives, even in ostensibly “commercial” projects like the 863 Program, remains a major obstacle to technology trade. However, this is perhaps inevitable: it is completely unrealistic to expect a country like China—with its vast territory, long history, strong national pride, and enormous economic potential—to renounce a thorough technological overhaul of its military, which in some areas still relies on old equipment from the 1970s (or even the 1960s). Analysts should have no illusions about the motivations driving the 863 Program and other projects. The mere fact of being “weak” is enough to make China’s planners uneasy. As its technological base in most areas still lags 10 to 20 years behind international standards, China’s strategists must guard against an uncertain future, as the international political landscape in Asia could change fundamentally in as little as three to ten years. Consequently, the pressure exerted by strategists on industrial planners to meet the technological requirements for this precautionary hedging has intensified, thereby shaping the unambiguously dual-use nature of projects like the 863 Program. It is clear that the United States and Japan are being used as explicit benchmarks. However, given that export controls have become so problematic, a more desirable response might be to invest heavily in America’s own capabilities rather than trying to undermine China’s progress—except in areas that have only a singular military significance. This may be the best strategy for maintaining America’s advantage. Therefore, China’s various defense objectives must be understood in the context of the massive changes that have occurred in China’s conception of what a technological base is and how to maintain it.

In the past 20 years, China has learned that managing innovation from the top down is an extremely difficult task. In several areas where innovation has proven very effective, such as Silicon Valley and other regions, private property rights and government deregulation still seem insufficient. But in the realms of entrepreneurship and university-led basic research, breakthroughs are on the horizon.

If a commercial project shows military potential, its commercialization process will be undermined once it enters the military system.

Although foreign technology and ideas have had a significant influence on China’s transformation, the determination of China’s leaders to change the country’s state of poverty and weakness is unalterable. This means that as long as the strategic weapons experts exert themselves, this desire for wealth and power will make the 863 Program effective again.

The entrepreneurial spirit that grows from a small scale is the ultimate determinant of whether China can become a leading technological power in the future. This requires China to make a complete break with its past connections to strategic technology, indigenization, and technology transfer.

The strategic weapons program, like Li Hongzhang’s Jiangnan Arsenal and Chiang Kai-shek’s National Defense Economic Plan, were all processes of promoting modernization through the military. However, the strategic weapons experts played a more important economic and social role than their two predecessors.

They were not only inventors of weapons but also inventors of institutions and management.