China: The Emerging Rival

Khaleej Times Online

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao urged greater development of China’s military Saturday, saying modernizaton of the army was of strategic importance to safeguard the eventual reunification of Taiwan. “Strengthening national defense and developing the army constitute a task of strategic importance to our modernization drive and an important guarantee for safeguarding national security and reunification,” Wen said at the opening session of the annual National People’s Congress (NPC). Wen said it was an “historical objective” to ensure that the army “is capable of winning any war it fights,” but also underscored the importance of the military being run “strictly in accordance with the law.”

Clearly, the west must keep its eye on China. It is posturing to ensure the eventual annexation of Taiwan. The real question will be what will the Taiwanese and US do when push comes to shove. The US has held a "one China" policy since the Nixon Administration. Bush has shown all the signs that the Administration's position has shifting:

Statements by senior Bush Administration officials are instructive in framing how the White House views Taiwan's security. Even before the election, the Republican Party platform, which was ratified by the GOP in Philadelphia in August 2000, stated. "Our policy is based on the principle that there must be no use of force by China against Taiwan. We deny the right of Beijing to impose its rule on the free Taiwanese people. All issues regarding Taiwan's future must be resolved peacefully and must be agreeable to the people of Taiwan. If China violates these principles and attacks Taiwan, then the United States will respond appropriately in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act. America will help Taiwan defend itself.

China has responded by bellicose statements about its intentions to acquire Taiwan at all costs. Soon after publicly planning to make it illegal for Taiwan to declare independence, China announced its intention to increase its military expenditure. While it would appear that the amount its spending is less than half the size of Japan's budget, some western experts say China is deliberately hiding its real expenditure, said to be third worldwide behind the US and Russia.
Traditionally, China has been loath to involve itself beyond its own region. But clearly that tradition has changed. China is seeking new markets everyday for its products and its thirst for oil has made it aggressive in the South China Sea and forced it to reach well beyond its own region.
The biggest concern of all is China's improving missile capability. Already, its nuclear tipped missiles threaten all of Asia Pacific, but by 2015 its missiles will be capable of reaching all of North America.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration can only view the world in terms of Cold War perspectives of conflict and containment. The world has changed. Soon the US will no longer dominate and two new super powers will present themselves, China and India. Trade drives global politics. Economies have become so dependent on each other, the era of periodic world wide conflicts may be ending, not because we aren't willing to fight, but its no longer in our best interests.
The number one problem in this new world is a limited energy supply. For that reason alone, our number one priority needs to be a renewable energy supply. Without that solution, there will be another World War and its hard to imagine it not including use of nuclear warheads.
The number two problem for the US is that our economy is running on borrowed money. Since we can no longer expect to dominate the world, our debt can not be sustained. We need to rebuild our deteriorating infrastructure. We are no longer competitive with our past strength, industrial output. Now we are struggling to stay competitive in information technology and showing all signs of falling behind. Even if that is not true, our next generation of workers will not be as skilled in math and science. Our future work force is likely to be better match for heavy industry. Without rebuilding infrastructure or recreating an interest in math and science in our children, we will build ourselves a permanent underclass of poor and homeless people who eventually will be large enough to threaten civil order.


China Announces Increase in Military Spending | America sees China as next big threat | China's military budget to grow 12.6% this year
Military modernisation of strategic importance, China says
(AFP) 5 March 2005
BEIJING - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao urged greater development of China’s military Saturday, saying modernizaton of the army was of strategic importance to safeguard the eventual reunification of Taiwan.
“Strengthening national defense and developing the army constitute a task of strategic importance to our modernization drive and an important guarantee for safeguarding national security and reunification,” Wen said at the opening session of the annual National People’s Congress (NPC).
Wen said it was an “historical objective” to ensure that the army “is capable of winning any war it fights,” but also underscored the importance of the military being run “strictly in accordance with the law.”
The NPC is due to pass an “anti-secession law” on Taiwan, a move seen as defining the legal terms in which China can use military force to reunify the island territory, which it considers a part of its territorial integrity.
The draft law has yet to be made public.
“Taking the military strategy for the new period as our overall guide, we will actively promote the revolution in military affairs with Chinese characteristics and enhance the army’s ability to use information technology in fighting integrated warfare,” Wen said.
“We will greatly strengthen defense-related science and technology industries.”
China will boost its publicly-stated military spending by 12.6 percent this year to 247.7 billion yuan (29.9 billion dollars) following a nearly 15-year trend in double-digit growth in defense spending.
China’s actual annual military expenditures are believed to be between two and three times more than the publicly stated budget, which does not include arms procurement and military-related research and development, analysts said.
Mar. 5, 2005. 01:00 AM
America sees China as next big threat
`It's an open secret in Washington'
STEPHEN HANDELMAN
NEW YORK—If you ask a U.S. White House official or any of Washington's senior intelligence analysts what they consider to be the greatest long-term threat to U.S. stability, the answer might surprise anyone expecting to hear the by now traditional apocalyptic warnings about global terrorism.
The real danger, they would say, is China.
"It's an open secret in Washington," says Kishore Mahbubani, who was Singapore's veteran ambassador to the United Nations until last year. "The emergence of China as a potential rival is considered the next big threat to the U.S. — and China knows this, too."
China's had "superpower-in-waiting" status — partly as a function of the sheer size of its geographical reach, population (1.2 billion and growing) and the dramatic transformation of its economy — since the Cold War ended. But the slow, steady expansion of its military force has tipped the balance for anxious Washington geo-strategists.
It explains the bitter quarrel surfacing this month between the U.S. and Europe over whether to lift a ban on sales of military technology to China imposed more than 15 years ago, in response to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. The U.S. wants arms sanctions to remain; the Europeans want sales to resume.
The quarrel is more serious than the transatlantic fireworks over Iraq. The Americans say the Chinese military build-up is already the most extensive in the world. They single out plans to build 23 amphibious assault ships, 13 attack submarines, and other upgrades in the navy and air force.
The Europeans agree that Chinese military expansion is worrisome; but they point out that blocking foreign technology sales will have only a marginal impact. Besides, they argue, keeping the Tiananmen-era ban in place because of a perceived new threat diminishes the credibility of sanctions.
Targeted countries will believe that nothing they do will ever get them off the hook, so why bother to pay attention? (Saddam Hussein's lackeys used to argue the same thing.)
But the U.S. has a point. China's military transformation, combined with its increasingly aggressive trade policies, is creating a new power dynamic in a region already anxious about rising Chinese influence from Japan to Taiwan.
And unchecked, China is likely to travel further toward projecting its military and economic power in the 21st century. U.S. Vice-Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, in testimony before the U.S. Senate, predicted Chinese nuclear-tipped missiles will soon be "capable of targeting U.S. and allied military installations" in the region — and, by 2015, on the North American continent.
Skeptics argue that the Chinese "threat" is a fantasy. China historically has been loath to extend its influence beyond its region. The irony, however, is that as Beijing grows increasingly suspicious of Western intentions, it may back into a role as a rival, or hostile, superpower.
"Anywhere you go in China, officials believe 100 per cent that the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans war was deliberate," reports Mahbubani, who identifies the perception gap in his just-published book, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World.
As the title suggests, Mahbubani believes the U.S. needs to mollify fears about its own intentions — particularly in the emerging giants of China and India. The potential for dangerously crossed signals, he warned in New York recently, is far greater than the rivalry between Islam and the West.
"The U.S. needs to do much more to change its image overseas," says Mahbubani. That's good advice. Both the Chinese military expansion and the heated-up quarrel between Europe and Washington (Congress threatened this week to restrict technology sales to Europe) offer a way to put Ottawa's missile defence decision last week in context.
The critics who successfully lobbied for opting out of North American missile defence are congratulating themselves for keeping Canada out of a U.S. "space weapons" program and thereby avoid endorsement of Washington's terrorism-fixated foreign policy.
In fact, they may have knocked Canada out of the policy-making loop regarding Washington's deepest concern — of which the missiles represent just one strategic element: the struggle to cope with growing Chinese military and economic competition in the Western Hemisphere.
After the missile decision, Canada's ability to influence Washington over continental security issues, and by extension allow its voice to be heard on the Great China Question, may now have decreased.
That should bother anyone fearful for Canadian sovereignty.
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The International Herald Tribune
China's military budget to grow 12.6% this year
By Chris Buckley International Herald Tribune
Saturday, March 5, 2005
BEIJING In an announcement intended to coincide with the opening of its annual parliamentary session this weekend, a spokesman for the Chinese Parliament said Friday that China intended to increase officially declared spending on its military by 12.6 percent this year, to $29.9 billion.
This latest official increase, combined with the Chinese Parliament's plans to enshrine in law China's threats against Taiwan's moves toward full independence, may intensify disquiet in the Bush administration and among China's neighbors about the speed and goals of China's military modernization.
The increase will be used to raise income and benefits for military personnel, pay for personnel reductions, underwrite a reorganization of the military, and pay for new weapons, said the spokesman, Jiang Enzhu. It is part of the annual budget that China's government will report to the Parliament, called the National People's Congress, Jiang said at a news conference at the opening of the session on Saturday.
This latest rise comes after increases of 11.6 percent in 2004, 9.6 percent in 2003, 17.6 percent in 2002 and regular double-digit increases in the decade before that. But Jiang said that, for its size, China remains a meager military spender. "Compared with other great powers, China's military spending is fairly low," he said.
Indeed, China's official military budget is dwarfed by the United States' military budget of $400 billion for 2005, and it is less than half the size of Japan's military budget.
But some Western experts estimate that the real size of China's military spending is several times the official number, placing it third behind the United States and Russia, and there is no doubt China has embarked on an ambitious effort to develop or buy advanced aircraft, naval vessels and missiles.
In recent months, senior officials in the Bush administration have said that China's growing military reach is a potential challenge to the United States' dominance in Asia. The new director of the CIA, Porter Goss, said that China's military modernization threatened to overturn the military balance between China and Taiwan.
"Beijing's military modernization and military buildup is tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait," he told a Senate committee on Feb. 17.
Taiwan's government recently announced pared-down plans for a special budget allocation of $15.4 billion to buy antisubmarine aircraft and missiles from the United States. The original allocation also included plans to buy submarines, but the program was stalled amid political opposition and charges of overspending. The Bush administration has criticized Taiwan for reducing military spending and has also tried to stop Europe from overturning a ban on sales of military technology to China.
While this latest increase is unlikely to draw direct criticism from the majority of Chinese citizens, it comes amid growing calls from society and members of Parliament for the government to spend more on schools, aid for the poor and rural development. The parliamentary session will continue until March 14.
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