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A sultry July in Beijing, the capital of China, did not slow down the summer programs at Tsinghua University (Qinghua University, China’s MIT). The one-week symposium on arms control packed the facility with students, faculty members, and military experts.1 Sun Lizhou, a graduate student from the College of International Relations, Peking University (Beijing University, China’s Harvard), was one of the participants.2 Sun was in his mid-twenties, tall, skinny, and wearing eyeglasses. His broad knowledge and sharp opinion impressed on me a sense that, upon graduation, he would make a fine social scientist. I was surprised to learn through other students that he later voluntarily joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), China’s armed forces, which include the army, navy, air force, and strategic missile force. I found it difficult to imagine Sun in uniform, carrying a gun. I have come to realize, however, that he is part of a new pattern. The men and women in the PLA today differ from those who served in the Chinese Communist military of the past. Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, the armed forces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consisted of rural conscripts and volunteers who generally had attained little education. Two of my uncles, for example, left their village and joined the PLA in the late 1940s. They were praised as “little intellectuals” (xiao zhishi fenzi) in their companies because they had finished their six-year elementary education. Their fellow soldiers perceived a certain literary flair emanating from them. One of the uncles taught the other men how to read and write while stationed in Tibet during the Sino-Indian War of 1962. When I served in the armed forces for three years in the early 1970s, the completion of middle school (nine years) landed me a position in the Engineering Company of the Eleventh Regiment. With this above-average education, I became a machine operator at the Chinese-Russian border during the Sino-Soviet conflicts. By 1983, when I left for graduate study in America, only 4 percent of the 224 top Chinese generals had some college credit hours.3 The PLA was a peasant army utterly lacking in education. Then, in the 1990s, tremendous changes began to take place in the Chinese military.