Chinese Military Strategy Revised: Local and Limited War

Abstract

In 1985, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), as all three armed services are collectively known, was required to redirect its military strategy from a focus on general war with the USSR to the more probable source of military conflict: small-scale and potentially intense wars around China's periphery. New enemies did not emerge; instead, the kinds of conflicts that could arise required a revised defense policy and military strategy. These changes, although important in themselves, left the PLA even more conscious of its technological obsolescence. Developing concepts of military operations in which speed and lethality were to be the principal characteristics of combat, rather than defensive operations based upon attrition warfare and a society mobilized for war, served only to highlight the PLA's technological weaknesses. As in all the years since the beginning of Chinese defense modernization in the late 1970s, these technological weaknesses led the armed forces to demand swifter modernization of their arms and equipment.