It's time!Red China - the world's largest autocracy of the old school Collectivist type unleashes a semi state of the military every year and thanks to their new improved home page, the famous annual Chinese 'White Paper' is up for grabs.
While significantly understating real military spending, this latest defense white paper is revealing in its attempts to wink and nod at the rest of the world about the old Red Dragon's "aggressive pace of non-transparent military modernization."
It also strips away a few bits of fashion to reveal China's strategic strengths, priorities - and - insecurities.
China is indespensible in the new millennium's “harmonious world of enduring peace and common prosperity.” Sounds awful sweet and also packs a sting "nor can the world enjoy prosperity and stability without China.”
Whoa!
Complex interdependence and enhanced cooperation make major wars unlikely -- but there are also tendencies toward more intense strategic competition among rising and developed powers, fueled by military modernization, arms races, and the struggle to secure resources.Kinda tense - like sharing a class with a guy friend whose wife, mistress and girlfriend are also in class.
China’s military wants to reassure that she foresees a cooperative internat'l system, but it needs to justify its continuing expansion and growing sophistication with reference to a widening array of threats, many of them courtesy of Great Satan.
Chinese leaders and analysts appreciate the stability of U.S.-China relations since 2001. But the white paper attests that, notwithstanding American critics who charge that Washington has neglected Asia while firefighting in the Middle East, Great Satan has paid careful attention to Asian power dynamics, and has positioned America to continue to lead in the region.
Rather than ignoring Asia, “the U.S. has increased its strategic attention to and input in the Asia-Pacific region, further consolidating its military alliances, adjusting its military deployment and enhancing its military capabilities.”
Indeed, polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that America’s soft power in Asia greatly exceeds that of China. Despite conventional wisdom that China’s rise erodes America’s staying power in the region, both popular polls and worries of China's military suggest that Great Satan has been doing something right in Asia.
One trick noted - the threats to Chinese national security are internal, or arise from external support for internal separatists and dissidents.
The nightmare for Chinese security planners, based on their reading of China’s predation by foreign powers during the age of imperialism, is of external sponsorship of “splittist” or dissident movements that undermine the cohesion of the Chinese state.“Domestic security and international security are interwoven and
interactive,” China “faces strategic maneuvers and containment from the outside while having to face disruption and sabotage by separatist and hostile forces from the inside.”
Thus the need for a fully crunk idealogical praetorian guard that is strong and a technologically sophisticated military force.
China is pursuing “leapfrog development” of advanced capabilities by undertaking military modernization in a high-tech environment.
Beijing foresees comparative advantages stemming from its development of asymmetric capabilities, including in electronic warfare; from preparing to wage modern war in a battlespace where information dominance is a key to victory (China “aims at winning local wars in conditions of informationization”); and from undertaking military modernization with the benefit of new technologies not available to great powers that modernized earlier in history.
China’s copy cat of American rhetoric about force doctrine, the Revolution in Military Affairs, and information warfare is striking and presents one conclusion:
China is the only military in the world sexplicitly prepping, training and equipping to fight Great Satan.
Pic "People's Liberation Marines: Everwatchful for Imperialist Aggression and Chicanery"
Even with the threat of Islamofascism, an eye must be maintained to the East.
ReplyDeleteAnd China would be wise to keep a close eye on the tentacles of Islamofascism, too..."infidels" are not all Occidental...
IN the last week, I've seen or read almost a dozen pieces -- none in the MSM -- talking about China's growing militarization. The first, and most frightening in my book, came from an evangelical minister named Perry Stone, who runs Voice of Evangelism (www.voe.org). If you go to that website and check out the videos for his Manna-Fest program, be sure to watch Programs #431 and 432.
ReplyDeleteIn these videos, he makes the case, based on a cyclical view of history, that America is in danger of attack or invasion by both China and Saudi Arabia, since they hold the lion's share of America's debt. In historic terms, any time a debtor nation owes more to the lending nation than the debtor nation can afford to pay back, the lending nation recoups its debts through invasion, thus claiming the debtor nation's assets and wiping out the debt.
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China is on the rise but has many problems to overcome. Their infrastructure and banking systems are both weak and need modernizing. This will not happen overnight. The costs of bringing China into the modern age--in so many ways--will be expensive and a long haul. There is also the problem of politics. Their communist lite style government doesn’t help push innovation and creativity either.
ReplyDeleteThey are building up their military but they have a long way to go in catching up to the U.S., if they can ever.