China’s Techno-WarriorsIn the spring of 1987, the father of Chinas strategic missile program, Qian Xuesen, told colleagues that China must steel itself for a century of sustained intellectual warfare. His use of a military metaphor was not a linguistic quirk, but reflected the central role of the military in Chinas emergence as a modern state, especially in the period since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Over the course of the Communist era, a