Read Online The Contest of the Century by Geoff A. Dyer - Free Book Online Page A

Cuba and the Philippines, sending an unambiguous message to the world about its new maritime power. As recently as a decade ago, China’s navy suffered the same sort of condescension. The 1990 edition of
Jane’s Fighting Ships
, a sort of annual bible of the world’s navies, described the PLAN as “technically backward and operationally immature.” In 1996, three Chinese warships made a goodwill port call in San Diego. American officials who visited the ships noticed that the interior walls were made of plywood, which made them not only flimsy but also a fire risk. The Chinese military was considered so primitive that some American strategists joked that its battle plan for taking control of Taiwan was “a million-man swim.”
    No one in Washington or any other Asian capital is making the same jokes now. If China’s newfound instinct to challenge the U.S. in the Near Seas is rooted in its history, its expanding economic interests, and the restlessness of some of its officer corps, there is also one final and equally important component—it now has the military capabilities to start making a difference. China is starting to push back against the U.S. in part because it can. After two decades of double-digit increases in military spending, China now has the second-largest defense budget in the world, after the U.S. While the U.S. has been fighting a losing battle in Afghanistan for over a decade and pouring more than a trillion dollars into the debacle in Iraq, China has been carefully conducting the biggest military expansion in the world. Of course, China’s budget is still much smaller than that of the U.S., which spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, and which will remain the most sophisticated military power for some time. But China has no intention of challenging the U.S. around the globe over the coming decades. It has no interest in establishing a serious naval presence inthe Caribbean, for instance, or posting soldiers in continental Europe. Instead, it is focused on Asia.
    With these more limited aims, China is catching up quickly with the U.S. By some estimates, China will have a bigger fleet than the U.S. by the end of this decade, and it already has more submarines. Although it is always dangerous to make straight-line predictions based on existing reality, if China continues with its current rate of increase in military spending, it will have a bigger defense budget than the U.S. by 2025, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Yet China does not need to match the U.S. dollar for dollar in order to achieve its goals: it only needs to spend enough to change the strategic balance in the western Pacific. Chinese strategists talk about “asymmetric” warfare, tactics and tools that can allow a weaker and smaller country to inflict huge damage on a bigger rival. China is not preparing for a war with the U.S. Indeed, the goal is to secure Beijing’s political aims without ever firing in anger. Instead, its military buildup is designed to gradually change the calculations of American commanders, to dissuade them from considering military operations anywhere near China’s coast, and to push them slowly farther out into the Pacific.
    “We do not need to be in such a hurry,” Deng Xiaoping told a Central Military Commission meeting in March 1979. Deng was responding to pressure from his military colleagues for a big increase in spending on new weapons. It was a message he found himself repeating for the next decade, at meeting after meeting. China’s economic boom did not immediately lead to a rapid military buildup. Though the PLA wanted to invest, Deng insisted that building up the domestic economy would come first; the military would need to show some patience. During the 1980s, the Chinese government actually decreased the proportion of the budget that was destined for military spending.“Deng had to explain over and over again to disappointed