Dangerous Frenemies

Chilean miners aren’t the only folks rising to the surface; so are the military animosities of the rising stars (sub-flag rank) of the officer corps of China’s People’s Liberation Army… towards their only perceived enemy force, the United States of America. With a strong economy, the military has money for new technology and super-weapons, and the PLA is huge: “The PLA is the world's largest military force, with approximately 3 million members… and has the world's largest (active) standing army, with approximately 2.25 million members... The PLA comprises five main service branches consisting of the title "People's Liberation Army Ground Force" PLA Ground Force, PLA Navy (PLAN), PLA Air Force (PLAAF), Second Artillery Corps (strategic nuclear or missile force), and the PLA Reserve Force. The People's Armed Police (PAP), a Chinese paramilitary force under the dual leadership of the Central Military Commission and the Ministry of Public Security, is sometimes confused as a branch of the PLA (both the PLA and the PAP are under the lead of Central Military Commission).” Wikipedia.

Gone is the conspiratorial détente between the United States and China to keep Russia in check; the Chinese seem to think they have this one in hand. The Muslim extremists (like the Uyghurs in the West of China) have been solidly repressed, and Chinese money has bought tons of natural resources from countries with extremist/Islamist governments; in China, oil needs trump political considerations. This leaves one foe that young officers are increasingly using to focus their hatred, and hatred (the need for a “straw man” to draw focus) is one of the great training tools in military colleges and training camps. As Australia and China conducted joint military exercises recently, the exclusion of U.S. forces was very intentional. The U.S. is on the outs with the young officers, as the October 12^th Ne w York Times notes “until ‘the United States stops selling the weapons to Taiwan and stopping spying us with the air or the surface.’”

Recent economic hostilities between the U.S. and China – mostly over currency valuation (as China keeps its currency artificially low to allow its cheap exports to continue to flow to the U.S.) and discriminatory restrictions placed on foreign companies and imports – have underscored this see-saw volatile relationship between economically entwined nations vying for world leadership. Simply, we’re falling, and they are rising.

What is most troubling, however, is that the attitudes of rising PLA officers may be permanently jaded with an anti-U.S. bias: “The Pentagon is worried that its increasingly tense relationship with the Chinese military owes itself in part to the rising leaders of [the current] generation, who, much more than the country’s military elders, view the United States as the enemy. Older Chinese officers remember a time, before the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 set relations back, when American and Chinese forces made common cause against the Soviet Union… The younger officers have known only an anti-American ideology, which casts the United States as bent on thwarting China’s rise.” The Times.

China’s missile capacity is growing rapidly, but it is her Navy – that body of military force that can float almost anywhere as ostensible evidence of power – much like the United States and England before that, that is the badge of being a global military superpower. China has grown its battle fleets significantly of late, adding both surface ships laden with hi-tech missiles and torpedoes as well as increasingly stealthy nuclear submarines… a carrier seems to be under construction as well.

The PLA Navy isn’t remotely close to U.S. levels… yet… but it can sail into foreign ports and make a very big point or conduct war games in areas where littoral border disputes, particularly over islands between nations, have simmered for decades. Tensions are escalating to their highest extent, even as U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, recently visited his counterparts in China. “The United States ‘is engaging in an increasingly tight encirclement of China and constantly challenging China’s core interests,’ Rear Adm. Yang Yi, former head of strategic studies at the Chinese Army’s National Defense University, wrote in August in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, the military newspaper. ‘Washington will inevitably pay a costly price for its muddled decision.’… ‘Why do you sell arms to Taiwan? We don’t sell arms to Hawaii,’ said Col. Liu Mingfu, a China National Defense University professor and author of ‘The China Dream,’ a nationalistic call to succeed the United States as the world’s leading power.” The Times.

Will the see-saw tilt back? What about the civilian leadership? “That official military relations are resuming despite the sharp language from Chinese Army officials is most likely a function of international diplomacy. President Hu Jintao is scheduled to visit Washington soon, and American experts had predicted that China would resume military ties as part of an effort to smooth over rough spots before the state visit.” The Times.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as U.S. prestige sinks slowly in the West, I wonder, what is the nature of our future confrontations with this rising Asian superpower?