Sino-U.S. Military Relationship In The 1980s

Following a moderate pace of the normalization of Sino-U.S. diplomatic relations, thehistory of the 1980s has witnessed a dramatic breakthrough in the military tiesbetween these two once-hostile countries. Generally it is accepted by both sides thatthe exchange of high-level visits, functional communication and technology transfer& sales of defensive weapons were the three main components architecting themilitary cooperation, which has served as a notable platform to reinforce thedevelopment of Sino-U.S. relationship. Yet in 1989 the U.S. government criticizedChinese leaders for their inappropriate solutions to domestic political crisis and calleda halt to further cooperation, thus terminated this fairly rare“honey moon phase”inthe history of Sino-U.S. military relations.The“Peace Pearl”Project, which used to play as a milestone in the path of PLAAF’shistory, was once China’s biggest military program in cooperation with foreigncounties since the founding of PRC until the 1990s. It came into existence under aharsh situation of severe threats from the USSR and the inability to resist it byPLAAF then. Programmed to upgrade the Chinese J-8Ⅱfighter, the“Peace Pearl”Project achieved certain results by joint efforts of military and technical personnelfrom U.S. and China. Unfortunately, the disaster of Sino-U.S. military relations in1989 inevitably exerted a negative influence to the project and finally dragged it downto an hopeless dead end. Though failed, the“Peace Pearl”Project deserves noignorance nor underestimation in PLA’s history for its significance in themodernization of PLAAF.Initiated by their respective strategic intents, China and U.S. behaved in differentpatterns in the military relations of 1980s: for China, the PLA adhered tightly to theprinciple of“supportive technology import with limited purchase”, aiming to absorband digest U.S. advanced military technology for domestic production; for America, itwas more than evident that the U.S. Army maintained a sense of superiority andconfidence in their contact with China, yet certain technical restrictions were madeunder an overall instruction of“constraining PLA’s strategic attack capacity”.The military relations between China and U.S. in the 1980s was shaped by severalfactors, among which we can find some key elements attributed to both domestic andinternational environments. The positive factors, summarized by the author, aremutual agreement on counterbalancing the USSR, PLA’s needs for modernization and U.S. Army’s requirements of increasing the transparency of PLA; the negative factors,also compounded by multiple causes, are U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, China’s armstrade with third world countries and the continuous worry of U.S. government aboutits Asian Allies’uneasy reaction to the flourish of Sino-U.S. military relations in the1980s.