The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

power and guns and to “mechanized warfare” with
the employment of tanks, battleships, and airplanes),
and determined that China must take measures to
catch up with this RMA in the information age. 222
The other catalyst for change was the Taiwan Strait
crisis of 1995-96, during which the United States made
a strong show of force in the Western Pacific, perhaps
the largest since World War II. Chinese leaders suddenly
found themselves confronting the Taiwan independence
movement (prior to that time, the Taiwan
issue was mostly an unfinished war between the CCP
and KMT and Taiwan independence was not in question),
but its ability to deter Taiwan’s push for independence
and likely U.S. military intervention abhorrently
inadequate. To protect its claimed core interests,
China must upgrade its military power immediately.
Finally, the U.S.-China power transition also surfaced
in time to remind the Chinese leaders that they
needed a strong military to support and protect China’s
rise to power. Although Chinese leaders spoke
out loud their proposition for China’s peaceful rise,
they had every reason to observe the old saying that,
if you want peace, prepare for war.
These challenging situations required China’s
policy adjustment. Back in the early days of China’s
economic reform, Deng Xiaoping put China’s military
modernization on the back burner. He was on record
as instructing China’s military leaders that military
modernization had to wait until China quadrupled
the size of its economy, hopefully by the end of the
20th century. 223 However, the new circumstances dictated
that China set its military modernization in motion
ahead of schedule. “To build a prosperous nation
with a strong military” (富国强军) was China’s answer
to the challenges. 224
190