China's show of strength ups military ante
By Willy Lam
Large-scale air and naval maneuvers off China's southeast coast last week demonstrated the post-17th Party Congress leadership's determination to project hard power in view of tension in the Taiwan Strait. The week-long war games, which coincided with Beijing's sudden cancellation of the USS Kitty Hawk battle group's Hong Kong port call, are also meant to convey Beijing's displeasure with Washington's recent decision to sell weapons to
Taiwan and to honor the Dalai Lama.
Moreover, this show of force reflects the commitment of President Hu Jintao, who was re-elected chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) at the congress, to speed up the modernization of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) already formidable arsenal.
The military drills, which started on November 19, covered a wide swath of the Pacific, including sensitive terrain east of Taiwan and north of the Philippine archipelago. While official PLA media have been reticent about the exercises, Hong Kong papers and military-related websites in China noted that their purpose was to simulate a "pincer attack" on Taiwan as well as a naval blockade.
Elite battalions from PLA Air Force units under the Guangzhou and the Nanjing Military Regions, as well as the East and South China Sea Fleets, were involved. They deployed hardware including Russian-made Kilo-class submarines, Sovremmy-class destroyers and indigenously developed Flying Leopard jet-fighters. Among new weapons tested at the maneuvers were 022 stealth missiles and Russian-made SS-N-27 "Club" anti-ship cruise missiles.
Several hundred commercial flights along China's southeast coast - the majority of which originated from airports in Shanghai and Guangzhou - were postponed during the exercises. It was not until last Saturday that the East China Civil Aviation Bureau lifted the highly disruptive aviation control (People's Daily, November 26). Li Jingao, an official of the CAAC East China Air Traffic Management Bureau, claimed: "The delay resulted from a backlog caused by the control in previous days." Military analysts noted that PLA authorities did not want the Kitty Hawk battle group - whose 8,000-odd sailors had earlier planned to spend Thanksgiving in Hong Kong - to be in the vicinity.
This is despite the fact that during his visit to Beijing earlier this month, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his hosts made new pledges to boost confidence-building measures, including establishing a military-to-military hotline. On a deeper level, the Kitty Hawk incident reflected Beijing's anger at Washington's plan to sell Taiwan a $940 million upgrade to its Patriot II anti-missile shield. Beijing apparently also wanted to protest President George W Bush's presence at a congressional ceremony last month honoring the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibet's pro-independence movement and deemed a "separatist" by Beijing.
There are also indications that this stupendous muscle-flexing was targeting more than the usual suspects; for examples Taiwan and the United States. Parts of the exercises took place close to the disputed Paracel Islands, including the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa archipelagos in the South China Sea, a few islets whose sovereignty is claimed by Vietnam. Last Friday, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry pointed out that the war games were a "violation of Vietnam's sovereignty".
Le Dung, the Vietnamese ministry's spokesman, said, "It is not in line with the common perception of senior leaders of the two countries as well as the spirit of the recent meeting between the two prime ministers on the sidelines of the 13th ASEAN Summit in Singapore."
A Beijing source close to the Taiwan policy establishment said the Central Military Commission and the Communist Party's Leading Group on Taiwan Affairs - which is also headed by Hu - were worried about possible "tricks" by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the pro-independence ruling party in Taiwan, in the run-up to the presidential elections scheduled for next March.
The source said that Beijing was most worried that the Taiwan military might engineer a "military crisis" with the PLA, which would then serve as a pretext for the DPP administration to postpone the elections or even to impose martial law. Last Sunday, Taiwanese President and DPP chairman Chen Shui-bian indicated that proclaiming martial law was an option if the opposition Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist Party) continues to side-step electoral procedures for the upcoming Legislative Yuan elections.
While Chen later withdrew his threat, Beijing remained concerned that the DPP leadership might again resort to wild cards given the fact that the KMT presidential candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has consistently outpolled the DPP's Frank Hsieh in island-wide surveys.
The Chinese civilian leadership has largely assumed a low profile on the Taiwan issue. In his address to the 17th Congress, President Hu even dangled the possibility of a "peace accord" with Taiwan. Yet the post-17th Congress leadership has been at the same time hedging its soft bet on the KMT by making thorough preparations for what Hu called "military struggles" against pro-independence elements on the island. As outgoing Defense Minister General Cao Gangchuan put it earlier this month: "Should Chen Shui-bian be bold enough to concoct major events [in the direction] of independence, we shall take drastic measures to uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity at any cost."
The two most powerful bodies in the polity - the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) and the CMC - are filled with cadres and generals with long-standing expertise on Taiwan. Three PSC members have served as either governor or party secretary of Fujian, the "frontline province" opposite Taiwan. They are Chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Jia Qinglin, Secretary of the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection He Guoqiang, and fifth-generation rising star Xi Jinping, the front-ranked secretary of the Central Committee Secretariat.
The CMC is replete with Taiwan Strait specialists. This include Defense Minister designate General Liang Guanglie, a veteran commander of war games off the Taiwan coast; the newly promoted Chief of General Staff, General Chen Bingde, a former commander of the Nanjing Military Region; Air Force Commander General Xu Qiliang, who was once based in Fujian; and Naval Commander Admiral Wu Shengli, a former vice-chief of the East Sea Fleet. Since becoming CMC chief in late 2004, Hu has promoted a large number of alumni of the Nanjing Military Region, which has "jurisdiction" over the strait.
On a larger scale, last week's provocative exercises tally with the overall pattern of power projection that began early this year with the destruction of an old weather satellite by state-of-the-art PLA missiles. The feat, which apparently signaled Beijing's readiness to join the militarization of space, was followed by the country's successful effort late last month to put a Chinese-made satellite into the moon's orbit.
Moreover, the PLA has for the past year deviated from its past practice of keeping newly developed weapons under wraps. Semi-official military websites regularly run stories and pictures that showcase the prototypes or just-completed versions of soon-to-be-deployed hardware ranging from the Jin-class submarine - which is capable of carrying nuclear-tipped cruise missiles - to the nation's first aircraft carrier.
Apart from telling Taiwan independence forces - and their sympathizers in the United States and Japan - that Beijing has the wherewithal to maintain national unity, Beijing is flexing its military muscle in a fashion befitting an emerging quasi-superpower. Referring to the 17th Congress, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences strategist Hong Yuan pointed out that "the [defense] concerns of the new leadership and the force projection of China's military have gone way beyond the Taiwan Strait".
Hong sees the coming five years as "a period of rapid development in areas ranging from the PLA's establishment, institutions and hardware to the extent and means of force projection".
Moreover, the display of the country's new-found achievements in weaponry and aeronautics serves to strengthen internal cohesiveness, a long-standing Communist Party goal. As Premier Wen Jiabao put it on Monday while displaying China's first close-up satellite pictures of the moon: the feat is a "major manifestation of the increase in our comprehensive national strength and the ceaseless enhancement of our innovative ability". Wen added, "[The project] will have a tremendous significance toward boosting the cohesiveness of the people."
Chinks in the Chinese armor, however, have become apparent in the course of Beijing's bold display of military prowess. The latest war games have demonstrated poor coordination among the Communist Party, government and military departments. For example, it was not until November 21 that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered its snub to the Kitty Hawk (suggesting the delay may be the result of policy discrepancy); however, the ministry reversed itself a day later by saying that the Chinese had now granted permission to the port call for "humanitarian reasons".
This was in apparent reference to the hundreds of the crew's family members who had flown into Hong Kong in anticipation of Thanksgiving festivities. The battle group, however, was well on its way back to its Japan home base, and there was no question of it turning back to Hong Kong.
The Kitty Hawk affair has cast a pall over seemingly positive developments in US-Chinese military relations. Most notably, there is the issue of military transparency, which was raised by Secretary Gates during his visit to China. The military drills were not reported by any official Chinese media. There are also indications that the PLA did not alert relevant Chinese government departments, let alone countries in the Asia-Pacific region, of the maneuvers.
These developments may also cast a shadow over the Chinese navy's first-ever port call in Japan this week. The Shenzhen missile destroyer will be in Japan for four days in what the two countries hope will be a symbolic confirmation of the thaw in bilateral ties.
The increasing assertiveness of Hu and his generals, however, could potentially stoke the "China threat" theory in Japan, the United States, and Southeast Asian countries that still have territorial disputes with China.
Willy Wo-Lap Lam is a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He has worked in senior editorial positions in international media including Asiaweek news magazine, South China Morning Post and the Asia-Pacific Headquarters of CNN.
http://atimes01.atimes.com/atimes/China/IL01Ad02.html
Monday, Dec. 03, 2007
China's Kitty Hawk Problem
By Simon Elegant
One of the most striking aspects of China's emergence as a world power has been the sophistication with which the nation's complex and evolving new role on the global stage has been managed. A country that once was known for stonefaced spokesmen spouting slogans has displayed a remarkable finesse in forging new relationships and revivifying old ones. In the last five years, for example, President Hu Jintao has led a concerted effort to spread China's so-called "soft power" in Asia, Africa and South America. There have also been sharp reversals of what previously seemed intractable positions on key regional issues such as reining in North Korea's nuclear program, where many observers credit pressure from China on their North Korean allies as being critical to the effort's progress. Long-strained relations with Japan have also improved markedly; over the weekend, the two counties held their highest-level summit in Beijing since diplomatic ties were restored in 1972.
Yet despite all its newfound diplomatic adroitness, on a few sensitive issues the Beijing government seems to revert instinctively to its Maoist-era default mode. Last week China gave the world a series of demonstrations of that, in relation to two especially sensitive issues, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama.
The problem first emerged when news broke of China's refusal to allow the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier to make a long-planned port visit to Hong Kong for the American Thanksgiving holiday. The abrupt decision produced plenty of heart-wrenching news photos of tearful U.S. Navy family members who had flown into Hong Kong to meet their loved ones. Apparently in reaction to the negative coverage, the Foreign Ministry then announced it had changed its mind for "humanitarian reasons" and would allow the carrier to visit after all, though by this time the ship was already well on its way to its home base in Japan. Similar confusion seemed to be in evidence a few days later when, during a visit to the White House, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reportedly told President Bush the episode was due to a "misunderstanding." But the next day, ministry spokesman in Beijing Liu Jianchao, told reporters that reports Yang had used the word "misunderstanding" didn't "conform with the facts."
Some 50 U.S. navy vessels pass through Hong Kong in a normal year and the only time entry has been refused before was during crises such as the bombing by American planes of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the mid-air collision of a Chinese fighter and a U.S. surveillance plane in 2001. So in diplomatic terms, the Kitty Hawk refusal was a pretty sharp rebuke. It was also a much more calculated move than it at first appeared: The Pentagon revealed in the days after the incident that two other ships and a U.S. Air Force plane had earlier been denied stopovers in Hong Kong. Comments by Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu made it clear that there was a linkage between the refusals and the Washington visit earlier in November by the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, as well as to the recently announced sale of a batch of sophisticated arms to Taiwan.
Beijing may have thought it was making a clear diplomatic demarche. But the flip-flopping over the Kitty Hawk made China seem both vindictive and indecisive. It led a lot of observers to wonder what would happen if there was a real crisis in the Taiwan Strait, where there is always the potential for a disastrous "misunderstanding." It also highlighted a lack of communication within the Chinese government that makes the possibility of a military confrontation in the Strait even more worrying.
One problem, says Huang Jing, a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institute in Washington D.C., is that China's Foreign Ministry has relatively little power and largely acts as a messenger to convey policies crafted at higher levels, such as the military. "Everyone seems to think that Yang Jiechi is China's Condi Rice," says Huang, "but he's actually quite low on the totem pole compared with a senior general, to whom he would have to bow and be deferential." Of course, many bureaucracies suffer from communications problems, blurred lines of authority and plain old dumb decisions. But because of its burgeoning importance in helping to manage world affairs, China now has a responsibility to set its house in order. With 900 missiles aimed at Taiwan on China's coast and U.S. carrier battle groups sailing through the Taiwan Strait, there's ample opportunity for miscalculation. And if shooting started because some general didn't want to pander to a lowly member of the striped-pants set, that wouldn't just be dumb. It would be a disaster.
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1690086,00.html
