Summary
This book portrays how China’s state transformation is taking place or moving without much notice through trial and error, which seems awfully cautious, balanced and systematic. Specially, it addresses the discourse of State transformation in China, contextualizing its progress and timely transformation in the military, civil-military, political and socio-economic terms. Scholars have tried to examine this discourse time and again. But again they have neglected to do that through “institutional” parameters. That means; literature is still lacking in identifying the changes in China’s systemic regime politics, particularly in military, civil-military ties, and economic terms at one place. Not many in India have tried to judge or identify China’s progress through its systemic transformation in institutional terms. Therefore, this study claims to be the opening of its kind from this region.
The bearings of this study are universal. It further intends to narrate how China’s systemic internal changes would manifest its external bearings and contribute to the discourse of the “rise of China”. China’s domestic conditions, it needs to be noted emphatically, contribute greatly to its external posture. This book has tried to highlight some of the emerging issues manifested in China’s overall State transformation. It has addressed the underlying factors of this change through military modernization, Party-military dynamics, regime politics, the regime’s process of taking decisions, and the complexity of the Chinese economic growth. How China is keeping a balance on many problematic fronts to pace its progress in a complex domestic order is in itself an interesting topic for study.
This year-long project in IDSA started as an attempt to examine the domestic order of China’s transitional politics. Separately, each chapter of this book has tried to offer a pragmatist assessment and granular insight into the particular issues they address in Chinese politics of State transformation, and identify numerous specific evolving dynamics worthy of policy relevance. The book seeks to argue about the emerging character of the regime and the nation-building approach through military and socio-economic means without upsetting China’s social stability. It is by no means an ultimate examination of all the transitional processes or discourses China is going through. But the analyses presented in this book reflect upon three broad, related themes in contemporary Chinese politics: political transition, nation building through military transformation and evolution of China as a State.