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Concern over the national security implications of transnational industrial integration is growing in the United States. Direct and indirect Sino-American integration in high-technology industrial sectors is regarded as a threat to American industrial security in terms of the National Technology and Industrial Base and technological primacy. The American government has launched a number of national and international initiatives to strengthen the resilience of American defence supply chains and limit China's capacity to derive defence-industrial benefits from industrial ties. The emerging industrial security framework supports the functional requirements of American defence firms, but threatens American arms programmes through its potential impact on the affordability of arms, the flexibility of arms production arrangements, the scale and time frame of arms production, and the development of arms over the long-term, as restrictions on offshore collaboration threaten industrial processes that are central to high-technology production and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite China's rise on the world stage and rapid improvements in the quality and quantity of its arms production, little is truly known about Chinese defence groups' performance. The existing literature suffers from a significant gap: there has been no measure of how much the Chinese defence industry is worth financially, in comparison to other leading defence firms. There is also a dearth in detailed assessments of China's defence-industrial and defence-innovation capacities. Therefore, this article seeks to provide reliable estimates of Chinese defence enterprises' revenue derived from their military-related activities. In discussing our results, we also show that the current Chinese leadership's defence-industry reforms specifically target self-identified shortcomings and in doing so, strives to bring Chinese defence companies to the top of the world's defence-technological innovation standards. This will contribute to the debate on China's defence-innovation capabilities and on the Chinese defence industry's remaining weaknesses in that regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay assesses various dimensions of China's defence industrial enterprises. It argues that the defence industrial system should be divided into two tiers: tier one, composed of weapons and equipment producers for the military, and tier two, composed of “civilian” industrial enterprises that provided critical inputs for tier one enterprises, and which in national emergencies could be mobilized to produce weapons themselves. In 1985, there were 1,158 tier one defence enterprises and 827 tier two enterprises among China's 8,285 large- and medium-scale enterprises. Additional information is provided on defence enterprise shares of the economy at the provincial and the national levels, on enterprise distribution by industrial sector, and on when enterprises were built. The article attempts to estimate the total number of workers, output value and fixed assets of the defence industrial sector, and their weight in the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]