China's defence industry offers lessons to India

In a closed-door discussion here on Thursday, a leading authority on China’s military modernisation explained how that country’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA, the term embraces navy and air force, too) has transformed into a top-rung, largely indigenously equipped force in barely a decade, even as India’s military languishes as the world’s biggest importer of defence equipment.

Tai Ming Cheung, who spoke to the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis, is a professor working with the US Pentagon’s Minerva Project, in which academics like him pore over Beijing’s Chinese-language releases to track military and technological developments within the PLA.

Tai noted both China and India were “catch-up countries”, attempting a technological leapfrog by taking just decades to reach a technology level that Western countries had taken more than a century to achieve.

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