Professor David Bachman (University of Washington)

This seminar is based of Prof. David Bachman’s book project in process on China’s defense industrialization. The book is composed of three major parts. The first is a history of defense industrialization from 1949 to 1989. It argues that China’s defense industrialization during this period was profoundly affected by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union developed a kind of defense industrialization very different than that of other major combatants in the Second World War, and the Chinese would perhaps unreflectively take on the Soviet system whole cloth. Almost every major weapon system China produced during this period was based on a Soviet design.