13-04-2012, 04:36 PM
CHINA’S STRATEGIC CHALLENGE
China\'s Military Modernization.pdf (Size: 1.73 MB / Downloads: 354)
Rapidly Advancing Military Technology and Global Ambitions
For example, on January 11, 2007, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
destroyed a Chinese weather satellite with a direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT)
missile. While China’s two previous attempts to destroy the satellite in July
2005 and February 2006 were known to a small number of intelligence and
military personnel in the United States and perhaps a few other countries,2 the
successful test was a shock to the world when revealed about six days later. It
took the Chinese government twelve days even to acknowledge what the world
had already long known. This event illustrates several aspects of China’s
accelerating military challenge:
Internal Weakness
An additional concern is that what China may or may not do with its accelerating
military and political power will be determined by the very few Chinese
who lead the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 2007 all 1.3 billion citizens of
the PRC were beholden to only 73.36 million CCP members.4 The CCP, in turn,
is ultimately controlled by about 300 people selected from its ranks: the 300 or
so members of the Central Committee, who produce a twenty- to twenty-fivemember
Politburo, which is dominated by its eight- or so-member Standing
Committee, which is in turn usually dominated by its single Chairman. The CCP
tolerates no political competition and ruthlessly employs internal police and
security services in cooperation with organs of the CCP to search out, co-opt, or
destroy political opposition.
Threatening Foreign Policy Choices
The aforementioned circumstances also mean that China’s military and foreign
policies will proceed without the potentially moderating influences of countervailing
institutions, such as legislatures or a free press. Indeed, China has a
large press, and there are many government-sponsored and academic institutions,
which have voluminous output on foreign affairs and military subjects, and
individual Chinese do express a wide range of views on their Internet. But there
is little to suggest that there are major identifiable opinion centers that offer fundamentally
different choices to those made by the CCP. China’s penchant for
secrecy and deception stratagems, based on venerated historic treatises of statecraft
such as that of Sun Zi, dating back to the sixth century B.C., further compound
the task of analysis of Chinese actions. Such a lack of honest debate is at
least in part responsible for China’s pursuit of policies or actions that can only
be viewed as counterproductive for most Chinese:
Can We Engage the PLA and Create Confidence?
Since the 1980s successive U.S. administrations have tried to engage China in
hopes of developing a basis for “confidence” that might in the future help prevent
conflict. The PLA and U.S. shows of force surrounding China’s threatening
military exercises near Taiwan in March 1996 and the April 2001 collision