Evan S. Medeiros

Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition, and today's security environment demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats. This analysis of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on a range of historical examples from World War I through Somalia in the early 1990s to inform escalation-related decisionmaking.

This report analyzes the individual strengths and weaknesses of China's defense industrial complex. It examines four specific defense-industrial sectors - missiles, aircraft, shipbuilding, and information technology. It argues that China's defense industry is gradually emerging from two and a half decades of neglect, inefficiency and corruption. As part of a larger RAND Project AIR FORCE study on Chinese military modernization, this document analyzes the individual strengths and weaknesses of four specific defense-industrial sectors - missile, aircraft, shipbuilding, and information technology - to explain variations in performance among those sectors, with a focus on differences in institutional arrangements, incentives, and exposure to market forces, and to evaluate the prospects for China's defense industry and its ability to contribute to military modernization.

This book projects future growth in Chinese defense expenditures, evaluates the current and likely future capabilities of China's defense industries, and compares likely future defense expenditure levels with recent expenditures by the United States and the U.S. Air Force.

China is now a global actor of significant and growing importance. It is involved in regions and on issues that were once only peripheral to its interests, and it is effectively using tools previously unavailable. China's international behavior is clearly altering the dynamics of the current international system, but it is not transforming its structure. China's global activism is continually changing and has so many dimensions that it immediately raises questions about China's current and future intentions. This study provides a conceptual and empirical framework to assess these important trends. It examines how China views its security environment, how it defines its international objectives, how it is pursuing them, and the consequences for U.S. economic and security interests. For more than 60 years, decisionmakers in the public and private sectors have turned to the RAND Corporation for objective analysis and effective solutions that address the challenges facing the nation and the world.

China's importance in the Asia-Pacific has been on the rise, raising concerns about competition the United States. The authors examined the reactions of six U.S. allies and partners to China's rise. All six see China as an economic opportunity. They want it to be engaged productively in regional affairs, but without becoming dominant. They want the United States to remain deeply engaged in the region.

Reluctant Restraint examines one of the most important changes in Chinese foreign policy since the country opened to the world: China's gradual move to support the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, missiles, and their related goods and technologies. Once a critic of the global nonproliferation regime, China is now a supporter of it, although with some reservations. Medeiros analyzes how and why Chinese nonproliferation policies have evolved so substantially since the early 1980s. He argues that U.S. diplomacy has played a significant and enduring role in shaping China's gradual recognition of the dangers of proliferation, and in its subsequent altered behavior.

This book examines the structure and operation of the Chinese government's controls on exports of items that could be used in the production of weapons of mass destruction.

The product of a conference jointly sponsored by the RAND Corporation and Centre Asie Ifri, this volume presents transatlantic views of Chinese foreign policy and national security goals. It offers a common path for engaging China as a rising power. The product of a conference jointly sponsored by the RAND Corporation and Centre Asie Ifri, this volume represents a transatlantic view of Chinese national strategy and capabilities and offers a common path for engaging rising Chinese power. Its aim is to examine the issues through a U.S.-French prism and to facilitate analysis of how to develop U.S.-European cooperation on China policy.

Global arms proliferation continues to be a key concern for the United States, particularly the export role of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Although China experienced a significant decline in its arms exports in the 1990s (down from the boom times of the 1980s), the PRC provides a significant array of lethal weapons and sensitive defense technologies to states around the world. These exports provide an invaluable means by which to assess the progress and performance of China's military-industrial complex. Moreover, these products may present the very systems and technological know-how that the United States and allied forces will encounter in a future conflict.