China's Military Faces the Future

Open Access

Abstract

This collection of high-quality essays by some of the leading experts on the Chinese military is the product of the 1997 Seventh Annual Conference on the People's Liber- ation Army (PLA), sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The au- thors, although inspired by different secu- rity and threat perceptions, present sober, straightforward, and reasonable assess- ments of PLA efforts to modernise itself in the 1990s and of its prospects for the im- mediate future. Evidence drawn from the essays shows that the PLA is increasingly modern, confident, and assertive but that it has not yet developed sophisticated the- ories and technologies comparable to those of the United States or relevant to fighting an American-style, high-tech lim- ited war, or any war beyond its borders.