China's Slow Rise Without War

[W.E.B. Du Bois]

(Draft)

Recently the Department of Defense came out with its annual report on the military progress of China's military (PLA) [People's Liberation Army]. Normally, I would link to this, but I read it a week ago so I don't have it in front of me.

It basically says that China has increased its military expenditure and that the balance of power between the Taiwan Strait is still shifting towards China. I think many people will take this out of context. I want to set the record straight on how things are emerging with the world's only superpower and the world's next superpower. I am going to approach this in a very broad way.

90% of China's army is garbage. The Air Force is mostly composed of Vietnam War era Mig-21's. China has attempted for thirty years to build an F-16 class fighter. They are very close to doing this. They have successfully built everything but the engine (which they import from Russia). Once they master the engine, they will shift into mass production of their F-16 class fighter designated J-10B and their copy of the awesome Su-27SM.

Most of the navy is composed of LAUGHABLE ships. I mean laughable. The role of most ships in a modern fleet is two fold: to provide air defense and to hunt submarines. These Chinese ships can do neither. The air defense is so short, that their main weapons have the same performance as our last-ditch weapons on our navy ships. The last-ditch weapon is the one the Navy uses after they have deployed their main weapons to deal with incoming missile threats.

The army is mostly garbage. I think it still quite likely that China's armored forces have not yet caught up to 1991 Iraq. I kid you not. Most of China's tanks are inferior to the T-72's used by Saddam Hussein's Army.

By contrast, the US has the most powerful military in the world by far. We have thousands of F-15, 16 and 18 as well as 11 carrier battle groups. In the next few years we will see all those fighters replaced by the new stealth fighter F-35. No other country has a working stealth fighter (although the Russians and Indians will have one in 5 years).

Having gotten that context out of the way, I would say that very soon China should have a very strong air force composed of those J-10's and J-11's (Su-27SM). Their naval progress will be slower as the ships are just so expensive. China's naval progress has gone faster than her air force progress. The really interesting things is that despite that growth of the Chinese military budget, it still shows it's limits. China has the ability to build guided missile destroyers very similar to our own. However, it was forced to build an inferior model (051C) possibly due to budget constraints.

Indeed China is growing strong, but China is still not at the level of the Cold War rivalry we had with the USSR.

[Kazikli Bey]

Regardless, I don't think that China really is at any stage, nor will be for a long time, to become a militarily aggressive nation anyway. They're missing a few things, namely that they are still an exporter nation, and I mean that in the sense that China is still the world's factory floor. If they were to start a war with America or one of her allies, it will hurt China most in the long run since it will kill their goods export-based economy. I mean, it will still have allies with which it can trade, but most of those countries are still in the developing world, they simply do not have the capital that America has in order to keep the Chinese economy afloat. Also, China also imports a lot of raw materials as well, such as Iron Ore from Australia. Starting a war like that would be stupid. That said, I think that China's strength lies in their economic power, not their military power. And who knows, hopefully by the time that they are militarily powerful, the communist party would have collapsed.

[W.E.B. Du Bois]

When I have spoken with Chinese nationalists about their political beliefs they said something interesting to me once: the Singapore model, which is a democracy in name only. It allows elections, but if you criticize the government you go to jail. They also have a tight grip on who can register as a party. There's a number of sham democracies in the world that have elections but have all kinds of tricks to actually suppress dissent. I'd rank them something like this:

Most Sham - Singapore > Azerbaijan > Russia - Least Sham

Maybe China could move to a Singapore model someday and then maybe even move to a real democracy someday after that. Chinese history is long, so it could happen.

On a strategic level, China is constrained about getting too militant. On a strategic level, China's position is worse than the US no matter how strong she becomes. The US is not surrounded by major powers, China is.

Russia to the north
India to the South
Japan to the east
US to the east
Mid-Sized states all around: Indonesia, Vietnam, Philipines, Malaysia, South Korea

Aggression in any area would lead to a defensive alliance with any combination of those countries with the United States against China. Not an enviable position even if China was as strong as the US. The US will never have that problem due to our being removed from all that in the Western Hemisphere.

China actually doesn't want to go to war with Taiwan. They are employing the Art of War:

"Therefore one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful."

China would rather unite peacefully with Taiwan, and would rather that Taiwan does not declare independence. China basically has such a build up of missiles on the other side of the Taiwan Strait that she's basically saying that she will flatten Taiwan without an invasion if she declares independence. China seeks to alter Taiwan's decision-making calculus on declaring independence.