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FORTIFYING CHINA: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy. By Tai Ming Cheung. Ithaca (NY) and London: Cornell University Press, 2009. xvi, 279pp. (Tables.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8014-4692-4.
Tai Ming Cheung has long been recognized as a uniquely informed student of technological developments affecting Chinese military modernization. In this book, he combines his accumulated insights, innovative new research and a well-developed comparative framework for assessing technological innovation in defense industries to produce an authoritative and timely study of China's twenty-first century defense economy.
Two central themes inform the discussion. The first is the evolution of relations between the defense economy and the civilian economy after the strict separation of the two during the Maoist years up to the early efforts at integration under the defense conversion policies of Deng Xiaoping. The latter produced a mixed record, at best, but by focusing attention on the relationships between the civilian and defense economies, they set the stage for the significant changes which characterize the more successful current efforts at civilian-military integration centred on the development of dual use technologies.
Key to understanding these efforts is the changing relationships between the defense industry and China's national innovation system (NIS) , Cheung's...