China’s PLA Reportedly Preparing for Big R&D Push as Beijing Hikes Defense Budget
© AP Photo / Kin Cheung
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After spending several years rapidly expanding its forces with more modern weaponry, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is reportedly preparing to spend more money on research and development (R&D), according to experts. Over the weekend, the Chinese legislature announced the biggest proposed defense budget hike in four years.
In his remarks at the start of the National People’s Congress (NPC) on Sunday, outgoing Chinese Premier Li Keqiang urged a “whole nation strategy” for taking the lead over the United States in basic scientific research as well as advanced technologies, including those needed for advanced intelligence and space flight. He also urged the NPC to “consolidate and enhance integration of national strategies and strategic capabilities and step up capacity-building in science, technology and industries related to national defense.”
“The new system for mobilizing resources nationwide should be improved,” Li said. “We should better leverage the role of the government in pooling resources to make key technological breakthroughs, and enterprises should be the principal actors in innovation.”
Tan Kefei, who led the PLA and armed police delegation at the NPC, similarly said on Monday that the PLA needs “to accelerate the creation of a modern logistics support system … “It’s also necessary to further expand the military reforms [of the past decades] to improve military oversight and continue to modernize.”
The PLA has undergone a rapid modernization campaign for the last decade, ushering in new fighter jets, armored vehicles, firearms, and warships in a dizzying expansion of its capabilities. The efforts have brought the PLA up to what the Pentagon now considers a “near-peer” capability, prompting fears in Washington and helping to justify a strategic shift toward “great power competition” with China as well as Russia, which performed its own army restructuring.
The NPC’s budget proposal includes a 7.2% increase in defense - the country’s largest since 2019 - with an increased focus on funding research into new technologies.
The R&D focus is itself nothing new, as China has long looked to build a strong technological base as a key tool for bringing the country into the 21st century. Chinese President Xi Jinping has set a series of incremental goals for turning China into a “moderately prosperous society” by 2020 and a “fully developed nation” and “a global leader in terms of comprehensive national power and international influence” by 2049. Last month, he urged a massive new funding focus on technology education at earlier ages and for research funding to ensure China has a technologically literate population on which to base such a massive “sci-tech revolution.”
The composition of the Communist Party of China’s new Central Committee voted in at the 20th Party Congress last year reflected that focus, with 40% of its members having tech expertise.
While that effort includes military technology, it also includes those technologies with a variety of civilian and military applications, such as advanced computer chips. Late last year, Shenzhen-based tech giant Huawei had filed for a patent on EUV lithography, the technology used to make the ultra-advanced microchips that China had been blocked from getting from Taiwan and the Netherlands just months earlier - evidence that Beijing’s concerns about self-sufficiency in the face of increased Western hostility go back many years.
Other experts told Chinese media on Monday that the PLA was drawing important lessons from watching Russia’s year-long operation in Ukraine, where they have seen similar doctrines with similar weapons systems play out on both sides. In particular, PLA strategists are thinking about “urban operations” such as they might encounter in Taiwan, according to one expert.
Indeed, the NPC has made clear it expects to accelerate the process of reunification with Taiwan, a Chinese island governed by a republican rump state that survived the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Beijing sees Taiwan as a Chinese province in rebellion and regards US support for the Taipei government, even though informal, as meddling in internal Chinese affairs.
A panel discussion on the sidelines of the NPC with Chinese defense officials called attention to the developments.
PLA Lt. Gen. Ma Yiming, a deputy to the NPC who served as deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department at the PLA’s Central Military Commission (CMC) from 2017 to 2020, said that China should “speedily improve its strategic capability” to realize national reunification and “strengthen research on specific issues such as urban operations and [logistic] support.”
Zhang Youxia, who is the CMC’s present vice-chairman, also said that “we should promote innovative combat tactics for information warfare, ensuring our armed forces can keep making progress in military modernization.”
