This is China! BLOG

Inexorable China: Re-making the Military

A British friend Andy and I were on the second leg of a four-day bicycle ride around Lake Tai (Taihu, in Chinese), three hours west of Shanghai. A couple hours northwest of the resort area of Huzhou, at the southern bend of the lake, we came across a small armada of Chinese amphibious craft parked along the shore. A gaggle of onlookers from the nearby village had come to watch the display of armament and the soldiers who lolled on and around the craft, awaiting orders. The bemused villagers sat alongside the low wall of the maintenance road that fronted the lake, chattering amongst themselves excitedly and pointing at the proud display of Chinese military might.

Andy and I decided to try our luck as tourists just out in spandex for a spin around the lake and by happenstance coming upon military field maneovers. We stopped, and for a full three minutes became more of an attraction for the locals than the firepower at the shore. Actually, the equipment didn’t look all that sophisticated; great duck boats really, the sort that American cities like Boston take tourists around to see the sights. Still, a weathered-looking soldier, short, wearing an over-sized uniform, burbled something at us and waved us away. The villagers chortled at the sight. “Think he’s asking us to take a photo? Andy asked” “No,” I answered, “I think this is a secret,” I said, and pointed my chin at the gaping villagers. “Let’s get out of here before they get annoying.” I saluted the soldier, waved at the villagers – who exploded in peels of laughter – and pulled away from the exercise as quickly as my legs would carry me.

China has been increasing its military expenditures on average fifteen percent per year the past 15 years, according to the Financial Times. Now, military expenditure amounts to 1.4% of GDP; still low compared to America’s 3.7% of GDP. China’s increase in its military spending seems to belie its claim to a “Gentle Rise,” as the Central Government calls its accelerated economic development. And yet, as the Economist Magazine points out, much of the expenditure is on modernizing its armed forces. It’s army is 2 million men and women strong – the largest in the world – just recently equipped with uniforms and helmets that actually fit, instead of the famously oversized uniforms of the past finished off with a pair of sneakers or hard-top dress shoes. Many of its aircraft are older Soviet fighters, and its Navy is weighed down by obsolete aircraft carriers from Russia and Australia.

Though American Hawks would prefer to believe that China is bent on world domination, an insider’s view of China sees a country with its hands full modernizing its economy, quelling the local protests against indiscrimate applications of eminent domain, providing a sense of economic opportunity to all its citizens, and reigning in the current Taiwanese government’s penchant for declaring itself a free and independent nation.

The military preoccupations of the Chinese government have not changed much in several thousand years. It is still intent on ensuring its claims on Taiwan, as well as islands in the East China Sea, and with maintaining the integrity of its borders with Vietnam, Russia and India. Even with North Korea, which – though an ideological friend fifty years ago – has become a liability in the North Asia neighborhood because of its assumed role as rogue state.

Further abroad, though, China is stretching beyond history. China has geopolitical interests in oil, the opiate of all industrialized societies today. From the Seychelles to the Malacca’s Straights, from Iran to Kazahkstan, China is either sourcing oil or transporting oil. In other words, though China perhaps does not have imperialistic aspirations, it certainly believes it has strategic interests it must protect to keep its modernizing society on course and its regime in power. China’s Navy, then, is increasing its strength and its sophistication in a way that hasn’t been seen in its history in 500 years, when a fleet of Chinese vessels sailed from the east coast of China to Indonesia on to Africa and back again. The United States, in particular, remembers the reason the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor was because of a blockade of Japanese oil through the Malacca’s Straight, one of the busiest passes in the world.

China’s military modernization of course will stimulate its close neighbors – especially Japan – to escalate build-up of their own arsenals. Taiwan, too, will likely be set to buy even more armaments from the United States in an effort to show the Mainland that though Taiwan may lose autonomy, it will give the Central Committee a bloody nose and not much on the island left to govern.

But then again, half of Taiwan resides in China as it is.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China

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2. Inexorable China: Land Grabs
3. Inexorable China: Increasing Water Demands
4. Inexorable China: Increased Infrastructure Availability
5. Inexorable China: Go West for Cheap Sneakers
6. Inexorable China: China at Your Services