Description

In the international relations literature, national security is often equated with threats to national territory and the effective exercise of state control within national boundaries. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, additional insights can be gained by disaggregating the elements of China’s national security situation. Over the early years of the PRC we can argue that China faced at least four different kinds of security threats (and possibly more). The four were: the threat of a revolutionary socialist state in a capitalist world economy; the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons; the threat to legitimacy posed by the existence of an alternative regime resident on Taiwan; and the more traditional border defense notion of security. No one uniform grand strategy or security policy could fully addressed all of them. The various kinds of threats could be met by different strategies, but over time, the strategies themselves became increasingly incompatible with each other.

Mao, as the final arbiter of Chinese national security policy, prioritized different security challenges and responses at different times, but most of the time he pursed strategies focusing on (in Waltz’s terms) internal balancing rather than external balancing, with high commitment to defense industrialization. Even during the heyday of the Sino-Soviet alliance, internal balancing was a, and probably, the crucial basis of Chinese grand strategies. Indeed, for most of Mao’s rule, defense industrialization was the focal point of grand strategy, China’s political economy, and many aspects of higher educational policy. It is hard to understate how central defense industrialization was to the Maoist period.

David Bachman is the Associate Director of the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. His areas of interest are government and politics of contemporary China; US-China relations and Chinese foreign relations. He is also the author of Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward (Cambridge University Press, 1991).