The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) Academy of Military Sciences (AMS) and National Defense University (NDU) both publish a series of authoritative textbooks that the PLA uses to train its cadets. Among those, AMS published two editions of the Lectures on the Science of Space Operations (空间作战学教程) for postgraduate training, the last of which was published in 2013. China’s bureaucracy across the party, government, and military maintains a regular planning schedule of either five-, ten-, or fifteen-year plans, and they typically update textbooks and guiding materials in those windows as well. At approximately the ten-year anniversary of the last edition, in 2024, China published an updated version of Lectures on the Science of Space Operations, now titled: Introduction to Space Operations (太空作战概论). ,
Jiang Lianju (姜连举), formerly of the AMS, wrote both the old and updated versions of the textbook. No longer written like a professor’s lecture aid, with questions the professor should use to prompt the students, the Introduction to Space Operations now has a more standardized structure that could be used more widely in China as an authoritative document. It maintains many of the same sections and foundational content as the previous version, but with some significant updates. In some cases, the updates are expansions to expound on the preestablished guidance, and in other cases, the changes are shifts with small adjustments or deletions to redirect previous priorities. Indeed, the China of 2013 is not the China of 2024.
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