China and America in the Persian Gulf } 565
The display of US high-tech warfare had a deep and enduring impact on
China’s military modernization effort. The US demonstrations of military
prowess in 1991 and again in 2003, as much as the Taiwan Strait confrontation
of 1996, fueled the long drive for modern military power that would trans-
form China’s capabilities by the 2010s. Shortly after the ceasefire in the Gulf,
the PLA’s three services met to evaluate the implications of the recent conflict.
The consensus was that the decisive factor in the Allied victory was the enor-
mous superiority of their weapons. Within weeks, Beijing announced a nearly
12 percent increase in military spending, in spite of a record budget deficit
that was nearly 70 percent above what had been projected.^16 Not all Chinese
analysts focused on weaponry; some focused on the doctrinal shortcomings
of Iraqi strategy, including especially the failure of Iraq to strike preemptively
at US forces as they assembled in the Gulf region for the assault on Kuwait.^17
PLA analysts carefully studied the 1991 war.
These developments added momentum to a push for military moderniza-
tion that would continue into the second decade of the twenty-first century
and ultimately have a deep impact on China’s foreign relations. Underlying
Beijing’s sweeping response to the 1991 Gulf war were apprehensions that the
United States might be tempted, if China remained weak, to intervene mili-
tarily to support anti-communist forces in Tibet, or Taiwan, or maybe even in
China proper. Or it might intervene in areas along China’s periphery, North
Korea perhaps, to establish a position from which to better pressure and sub-
vert China. The United States was, it seemed to some of China’s leaders, an
aggressive interventionist country that might be tempted to take advantage of
China’s weaknesses, just as it had done with Iraq and Yugoslavia. The United
States had to be deterred from attacking China. These, in any case, were the
arguments now advanced with greater vigor by China’s military leaders and
heeded carefully by CCP leaders.
Many PLA leaders had long been dissatisfied with the relatively paltry mil-
itary budgets of the 1980s. The Gulf War emboldened them to speak out. As
part of the post-6-4 rectification campaign, the PLA’s political control appa-
ratus had insisted on the primacy of political and moral factors in war.^18 PLA
professional officers, on the other hand, stressed the backwardness of PLA
weaponry, strategy, and doctrine, as well as the need to spend more time on
training in these areas rather than on political study. The 1991 Gulf War gave
the PLA professionals both an opportunity to speak out and a powerful case
study substantiating their point of view. Russia quickly emerged as the key
supplier of advanced military equipment and technology for the PLA. The
burgeoning arms trade between China and Russia may, in fact, have been the
most important and substantial dimension of the Russo-Chinese partnership
that emerged in the 1990s.
Relations between the CCP and the PLA had been altered by the events of
- The dependency of the CCP on PLA loyalty was now very clear. Deng