China's Military-Civilian Complex

China's Military-Civilian Complex

Evan A. Feigenbaum

In high dudgeon, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill this week that would prohibit the export of satellites to China. The action was a quick response to a string of allegations that the Clinton Administration changed its policy on satellite exports to China after the Democratic National Committee received donations from agents of the Chinese military and American businessmen.

Banning all satellite exports may seem like a quick, easy solution, but it doesn't address the real problem: how to encourage trade while protecting national security. In other words, how can we determine whether exported technology will be used for military or peaceful purposes?

In the case of China, all sides in the debate have distorted the role of Chinese weapons makers in acquiring sophisticated technology.

Many technologies that China seeks -- fiberoptics, for instance, or supercomputers -- can be used in weapons, but they also have important commercial applications. This puts the American regulators in the Commerce, State and Defense Departments in charge of such sales in an awkward position. How do they know what the technology will be used for?

Regulators generally try to solve this problem by carefully determining whether the buyer has ties to the military. If the buyer does have such ties, then many regulators assume that the technology must be for use in weapons. If a buyer seems to be from a civilian enterprise, then it is assumed that the technology will be used for commercial purposes.

This strategy is supposedly effective because China has recently put in place new hurdles that separate the research and manufacture of weapons from civilian industry.

But this picture is not completely accurate. When it comes to planning what technologies the Chinese Government should invest in, the military and civilian bureaucracies are almost completely interconnected -- so much so that finding a distinction between the two is practically impossible.

Indeed, China has been so technologically backward for so long -- and its cadre of leading scientists and engineers is so small -- that the Government has routinely mobilized civilian workers for weapons development projects. For decades, university professors, nonmilitary bureaucrats and members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have all played important roles in planning China's weapons program.

But don't jump to the conclusion that every civilian project has a hidden military objective or that China is primarily concerned with making weapons. Of course, China is trying to modernize its arsenal. But arms development is no longer the country's most important goal.

China is now concentrating on improving its industrial base and developing new technologies like biological engineering. Indeed, many of the same people who built nuclear weapons, missiles and military satellites have been the driving force behind this shift. Military planners are deeply involved in setting goals for many civilian industries, like energy plants and automated factories, which have little to do with weapons.

Since 1986, China has pursued what it calls the 863 program, which concentrates Government investment in seven distinct areas, like information technology, which have both civilian and military applications. But only two of those areas, lasers and space technology, are supervised by the Government's weapons development agency. And even in these areas, much of the money is invested in research for civilian technology.

The 863 program is not a state secret, yet many United States policy makers and members of Congress continue to assume that military goals remain paramount in China. They fail to see that just as the technology has many uses, China has many different reasons for seeking foreign technology.

We must come to grips with this reality. The House ban on satellite sales is a hasty and foolish way to begin a review of our policy on high-tech imports. The real goal should be to lighten the unrealistic burden now placed on the American regulators in various departments and agencies. What we need is a more realistic method of assessing technological exports to China -- one that recognizes just how complex and interconnected its high-technology system is.