The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

ties; 145 R&D, production, and design for space systems
remains dominated by defense industry. 146 Moreover,
the large upfront cost of developing and producing a
space system often constitutes an extremely high entry
barrier for government agencies (much less nonstate
enterprises) Despite participation of the civilian
sector and the stock market to raise capital, the price
tag for putting hundreds of more satellites in orbit—to
achieve a space capability comparable to the United
States—will require far more than is currently being
invested and may be prohibitively high.
IT Industry.
The benefits to the military through its strategic relationship
with China’s robust civilian, and nonstate
IT sectors that have evolved since the late 1990s has
been described in detail. 147 It has been characterized
as intimate, expansive, and centrally supported resulting
in substantial progress. This chapter will neither
challenge nor repeat those findings. However, with
the vast demands to increase virtually every aspect
of information technology to push forward China’s
defense modernization plans, a “paradigm shift” in
civil-military cooperation appears far from complete.
While there are many examples of successes in electronics,
telecommunications, and computer technologies,
there are also failures. One telling example is the
limited success of China’s indigenous semi-conductor
and integrated circuit industries, after almost a decade
of intensive effort to translate its initial chip manufacturing
success into a seamless upstream/downstream
industrial scale production. 148 Early in this decade,
China first attempted to adopt the Integrated Device
Manufacturer (IDC) industrial model similar to the
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