The importance of party-military relations in the People's Republic of China was succinctly stated by Mao in his dictum that "political power comes from the gun" and "the Party should command the gun." Party-military relations in the PRC have never fully conformed to Mao's warning. This study seeks to analyze the nature and types of party-military relations in the PRC during the post-Mao period and the factors affecting change in these relations.

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This thesis has explored two basic themes in post-Cold War international relations. The first is the transformation of the global and regional security environments leading to a projected decline in the importance of traditional realist-style security problems. The second is the supposed shift in state behavior with conflictual strategies giving way to accommodation. These presumed trends are explored in the context of Southeast Asia and, more specifically, China's security strategies and relations in the region. This study argues that conventional security problems have declined in Southeast Asia in the short term but still remain prominent. In terms of policies, while China's goals remained partly revisionist with regard to territorial issues and status/power relationships, its approaches became more accommodative in coping with disputed issues in the region. This was manifested above all in its gradual acceptance of a multilateral framework for dialogue on regional security issues and in its willingness to undertake some confidence building measures in the military area. This shift can be explained partly in terms of China's external political concerns at both the global and regional levels. The more fundamental explanation, however, lies in China's drive for economic modernization with an accommodative regional strategy intended to ensure the flow of external resources required for this purpose.

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The official reaction of the Russian Federation and of the People's Republic of China to the announcement made by the United States in December 2001 to abrogate the almost thirty years old Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty has been remarkably weak, given their sustained and coordinated opposition to the deployment of strategic defences against ballistic missiles (BMD). Because the existing literature, particularly balance of power theory, under-explored this puzzle and fails to provide a satisfactory explanation to it, a neoclassical realist model building on structural and unit-level variables is proposed to supplement this caveat. It is argued that Russia, as a stagnant great power experiencing trouble at the domestic level, bandwagons with the United States because it discounts the medium- and long-term threat posed by BMD. China, a rising developmental state, is soft balancing because it resents the project and the threat it poses to its security. It has not hard balanced so far because there is an acknowledgement that this could jeopardize its power base, as the telling example of the USSR collapse illustrated.

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