NOT CHINA'S MODEL, FRANCE'S:

One thing China can't offer Africa (Bright B Simons, Evans Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe , 2/01/07, Asia Times)

China's model is much too dependent on the extravagant profusion of resources and too unproductive to be of much use. The African connection in this context is discussed in detail in the second half of this article.

In the past decade, China has moved mountains to effect radical, wholesale changes to the way its defense industries are organized and their output calibrated to the global projection needs of its evolving geopolitical strategy. The impression has been given that reforms will be bold and sweeping and will manifest in a clear break from the traditional approach of melding technical progress to political priorities in China.

But clearly, from the results, it does not seem as if Chinese leaders had been prepared to move sufficiently away from their comfort zone, because they have only imported the most bureaucratic, centralist, crony-based aspects of military-industrial complexes in operation elsewhere, so that the long-lamented issue of the coupling of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) bureaucratic inefficiency to a resource-intensive approach to military innovation has now been compounded with and magnified by the admission of private sector's "rent seekers" (corrupt influences) into the fold.

It makes one wonder whether China has been taking lessons from fabulously Dirigiste France. The French military-industrial complex, which has spawned white elephants such as the fancy-ballroom aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is a perfect study of how anti-competitive, over-subsidized, crony-dependent, pork-barreled institutional frameworks can handicap even the finest engineering and managerial talent.

The extent to which France's Grande Ecole and Ecole Polytechnique old boys' networks have become stumbling blocks in the reform of that country's stagnating defense industry cannot be summarized here; that the country's defense industry was nearly bankrupted in the mid-1990s ought to suffice as a hint.

Two hundred and twenty years after the Revolution they haven't figured out that the French model doesn't work?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2007 8:57 AM