Well, you have to ask yourself: who would write such a thing? Leftists who admired Mao don't like armies, they prefer to focus on more life affirming features of Red China, like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Right wingers always preferred Russian bugaboos (and, let's face it: even though Russia is a wreck, it's still more dangerous than China). Nobody, and I mean nobody who studies them today wants to piss off the modern Chinoises; write something vaguely critical of China or Chinese communism, and your access gets cut off. There's a book by Xiaobing Li -I haven't read it, but it appears to have this defect. This is, of course, unconscionable, considering how important the Chinese army is, and its peculiar role in China. From a history nerd perspective, the recent Soviet, Indian and Vietnamese wars with China were pretty interesting, in that they were more normal and natural wars than most of the ones you see these days. Pretty much a complete disaster for the Chinese on all three counts; their army was a fairly bad one. I suspect they had delusions of grandeur left over from the Korean war, forgetting they only did well with a Korean army and Soviet air superiority; and we still beat 'em.

It's also pretty nuts how close the Sovs came to nuking china in the early 60s.
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/

Anyway, I get most of my info about such things from FAS and Jane's Fighting Systems.

Thanks I'll see if I can get that book
Anyone else?

Patrick