Look out Alibaba, China’s People’s Liberation Army has set up a procurement website

The website represents another (small) step in a long-running effort by the Chinese leadership to marketize and rationalize (in David Shambaugh’s parlance) its defense procurement to make sure its soldiers get the equipment they need.

China’s defense R&D sector has been fantastically corrupt since the late 1950’s, when Deng Xiaoping asked Marshal Nie Rongzhen—an old buddy from their student days in Paris—whether he wanted to be mayor of Beijing or run the country’s scientific programs. Nie chose the latter, becoming the first head of the China’s Commission of Science Technology, and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND), eventually stacking COSTIND with enough family members and cronies to make Dick Cheney blush.

Well, maybe not Dick Cheney.

The Chinese leadership finally got around to tackling this empire in the 1990s, forcing Nie’s daughter, General Nie Li, and her husband, COSTIND Chairman General Ding Henggao, into retirement in 1994 and 1996.

In 1998, China reorganized COSTIND as a civilian enterprise with administrative and regulatory responsibilities and created the General Armaments Department as a military procurement entity. (Although COSTIND was stacked with military officers, COSTIND’s bureaucratic interests historically have clashed with the wider PLA).

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