Chinese Military Modernization in the 1980s

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Abstract
Since the deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1976 and the ensuing concentration on the Four Modernizations, increased attention has been paid to whether, and to what extent, China will be able, or wish, to bring its military machine and its military strategy more closely in line with that of “advanced” countries. The term usually applied to this question is “military modernization.” Such a term possesses the advantage of pointing to how changes in military investments are related to the Chinese Communist Party's overall programme of general economic recovery after the Cultural Revolution and how military affairs fit into the Party's plans for the next two to three decades. Extending the meaning of the concept and relating it to the general state of China's political economy has the additional benefit of drawing attention away from exclusive emphasis on one component of Chinese military affairs, “people's war,” that overworked and by now sterile term to which both Chinese practitioners and western analysts were slave for the past four decades. “People's war” as a strategy and a useful concept continues, but it is no longer the umbrella term for understanding Chinese military issues. Indeed, it has been modified by the Chinese themselves, under the rubric” people's war under modern conditions.”