Intelligence Dissemination Management - Net Assessment - Chinese Contemporary

Chinese Contemporary

There is intense secrecy about Chinese national security matters, but comparisons with other nations' processes of strategic assessment can increase our understanding of how China may assess its future security environment. By viewing China in comparative perspective, it may be possible to understand better how China deals with its assessment problems.

"Comparing the Soviet structure with Chinese materials in the 1990s, it is apparent from the way in which Soviet strategic assessment was performed in the 1930s that a number of similarities, at least in institutional roles and the vocabulary of Marxism-Leninism, can also be seen in contemporary China. The leader of the Communist Party publicly presented a global strategic assessment to periodic Communist Party Congresses. The authors of the military portions of the assessment came from two institutions that have counterparts in Beijing today and were prominent in Moscow in the 1930s: the General Staff Academy and the National War "College.

Another similarity was that the Communist Party leader chaired a defense council or main military committee and in these capacities attended peacetime military exercises and was involved deciding the details of military strategy, weapons acquisition, and war planning.

In the US, there are independent or ideologically associated "think tanks", and there are government contract research organizations both not-for-profit and for-profit. In China, the primary difference between these Chinese institutes and American research institutes is their "ownership." Research institutes are "owned" by the major institutional players in the national security decision making process in China. Members of these institutes often decline to discuss in any detail the exact nature of their internal reports. They are not puppets, however, and many research institutions are important in their own right for the creative ideas they produce. Their leaders carry great prestige and have high rank in the Communist Party.