If you're looking to understand better why Chinese spies have been so eagerly vacuuming the U.S. for military secrets during the past three decades, you could do worse than start in China with the People's Liberation Army. China's military today is so outdated that much of its equipment might well have seen action in the Korean War, and many of its troops are semiliterate. The country's strategic nuclear arsenal is 300 times as small as that of the U.S. The entire arsenal packs about as much explosive power as what the U.S. stuffs into one Trident submarine. China's ballistic-missile sub (singular, not plural) hasn't been to sea for a year and would be sunk in minutes in a battle with a U.S. attack sub. The People's Republic has no aircraft carriers (the U.S. maintains 11 carrier battle groups), no long-range strategic bombers (the U.S. has 174) and funds this stumbling juggernaut with a budget of 14 cents for every dollar the U.S. spends on defense. The P.L.A., says the Pentagon, is "still decades away from possessing a comprehensive capability to engage and defeat a modern adversary beyond China's boundaries."
Beijing desperately wants to change that perception, not because China's leaders have an enemy in their sights but because they seek the kind of credibility that a truly modern military brings. Capitol Hill rhetoric aside, China doesn't covet nuclear missiles so it can lob them at Los Angeles. It wants them so that it can be a legitimate player on the international stage, a nation fully in control of its own military destiny. So, as its entrepreneurs have embraced StarTacs and Yahoo!, Beijing's generals now want to trade their antique weaponry and cold war tactics for the PlayStation power they see in NATO's arsenal.
For the first time since the People's Revolution succeeded 50 years ago, Beijing is finally struggling to recast its military priorities. The process began in the early 1990s, at the very top of the armed forces, when politicians pushed the military to streamline its command-and-control structure. The old model for communications, logistics and war fighting was an astonishingly inefficient hybrid that mixed the ideological militarism of the Long March with old-style Soviet doctrines about how to fight on land. Instead the Chinese are toying with a far more flexible-force structure, one that would rely more on highly mobile, highly modernized soldiers. Overall goal: a military that could fight "a limited war under high-tech conditions"--read Desert Storm in Asia. Out would be the old-style model of "military regions" and "group armies" that were designed to support massive human waves in punishing ground attacks. In would be a joint-forces model copied, in many respects, from what currently sits in that five-sided building on the Potomac. Insiders in Beijing say top Chinese brass tried to sell the idea to President Jiang Zemin last year, but he vetoed the plan as too radical--especially on top of all the other changes he had instituted in the P.L.A.