Congress. Provincial party officials responsible for MCF were already publicly using the phrase “integrated national strategic systems and capabilities” and avoiding the term MCF in the months leading up to the 20th Party Congress. It is not clear whether Party leadership believes that China has met all the conditions to move beyond MCF. However, an article published in the PLA Daily in December 2022 stated that the process of enhancing integrated national strategic systems and capabilities will “quicken the pace of national defense and armed forces building” and “greatly enhance the strategic confrontation capability of the national system.”
Management and Implementation. The overall management and implementation of the MCF Development Strategy involves the most powerful organs in the party-state: the Politburo, the State Council (notably the National Development and Reform Commission), and the CMC. In addition to signifying its importance, the CCP Central Committee’s elevation of the MCF Development Strategy to a national-level strategy also was intended to overcome obstacles to implementation across the party-state.
This elevation led to the establishment of the Central Commission for Military Civilian Fusion Development (中央军民融合发展委员会) (CCMCFD) in 2017, chaired by General Secretary Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang, several other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, two State Councilors, both CMC Vice Chairmen, 12 Ministry-level leaders, and others. The stated objective of the CCMCFD is to build the PRC’s “national strategic system and capabilities.” This commission works to improve the “top-level design” of MCF and overcome impediments to implementation. The elevation of the MCF Development Strategy and the creation of the CCMCFD signals the importance that Party leaders place on MCF and the scope and scale of the strategy’s ambitions.
The PRC pursues MCF through six interrelated efforts. Each effort overlaps with the others and has both domestic and international components. The Party seeks to implement the MCF Development Strategy across every level of the PRC from the highest national-level organs down to provinces and townships and creates top-down financing and regulatory mechanisms that incentivize civilian and military stakeholders—such as local governments, academia, research institutions, private investors, and military organizations—to combine efforts on dual-use technologies. The PRC refers to these six aspects as “systems,” which may also be understood as mutually supporting lines of effort or components. The six systems in the MCF Development Strategy are as follows:
The Advanced Defense Science, Technology, and Industrial System. This system focuses on fusing the PRC’s defense industrial base and its civilian technology and industrial base. This includes expanding the private sector’s participation in the PRC’s defense industrial base and supply chains as well as improving the efficiency, capacity, and flexibility of defense and civilian industrial and manufacturing processes. This broader participation seeks to transfer mature technologies both ways across military and civilian sectors, with the goal to produce outsized benefits for both. This also aims to increase the competitiveness within the PRC’s defense industrial base in which one or two defense SOEs dominate an entire sector. This MCF system
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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
