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Authors: Geoff A. Dyer
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officers why it was in the national interest first to develop the civilian economy and then to modernize the military,” notes Ezra Vogel, author of an authoritative biography on the Chinese leader. “Deng was probably the only leader of his time with the authority, determination and political skill to keep these officers from launching serious protests against this policy.”
But over time, patience wore thin, and the military has started toreceive the sorts of resources that it had long been clamoring for. After Deng was forced to call up units of the PLA from outside of Beijing to fire on the Tiananmen protesters in 1989, spending on the military started to increase, including salaries and housing. If Tiananmen was a key turning point, another was the first Gulf War, in 1990–91. The campaign to push Iraq from Kuwait had a profound psychological impact among the Chinese leadership. Watching the images of destruction on their televisions, Chinese military officials were acutely aware of both their own limitations and the vast technological superiority of the U.S.
At the start of the naval buildup, Taiwan was the primary focus. China wanted to have sufficient forces to take control of the island if it ever tried to declare independence formally, and to prevent any other power from intervening in a conflict if it did break out. In the early days of the People’s Republic, almost all the viable ships were given to the northern and eastern fleets, which operate near Taiwan, while the southern fleet was considered a poor cousin. Taiwan remains a priority, but over time, the scope of China’s naval ambitions has expanded. One of the reasons the opening of the new naval base on Hainan Island was so significant was that it demonstrated the new priorities of China’s naval push, the ability to project power not just east, toward Taiwan, but also down into the South China Sea and beyond.
“Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?” The questions were raised by Donald Rumsfeld in 2005, when the then defense secretary was visiting Singapore for a conference. Iraq was still engulfed with violence at that time, and his comments seemed another exercise in neocon scaremongering. But nearly a decade later, the questions have not gone away. The uncomfortable truth is that China’s military investments are focused largely on the United States’ presence in the region. There should be little surprise that an aspiring great power would choose to invest more in its military as its interests and power expands. Yet China is not investing in the sort of navy that could be used for policing the world’s sea-lanes for pirates and terrorists. Instead, its principal target is the U.S. Navy. According to Dennis Blair, the retired admiral who was head of the U.S. intelligence services early in the Obama administration:“Ninety percent of their time is spent on thinking about new and interesting ways to sink our ships and shoot down our planes.”
American strategists sometimes talk abouta Chinese “anti-navy”—a series of weapons, some based on land, some at sea, which are specifically designed to keep an opposing navy as far away as possible from the mainland. China has a large and growing fleet of submarines, including nuclear-powered vessels and a group of Russia-supplied diesel submarines which are quiet and hard to detect. It is developing two different versions of stealth fighter jets (including the airplane that was tested the day Robert Gates was in Beijing), as well as its own unmanned drones that can deploy missiles. The navy is developing a new type of destroyer battleship which will have some of the missile defense capabilities of American Aegis ships.
Pride of place in the anti-navy, however, goes to the Second Artillery Force, which operates most of the more than one thousand missiles that
But over time, patience wore thin, and the military has started toreceive the sorts of resources that it had long been clamoring for. After Deng was forced to call up units of the PLA from outside of Beijing to fire on the Tiananmen protesters in 1989, spending on the military started to increase, including salaries and housing. If Tiananmen was a key turning point, another was the first Gulf War, in 1990–91. The campaign to push Iraq from Kuwait had a profound psychological impact among the Chinese leadership. Watching the images of destruction on their televisions, Chinese military officials were acutely aware of both their own limitations and the vast technological superiority of the U.S.
At the start of the naval buildup, Taiwan was the primary focus. China wanted to have sufficient forces to take control of the island if it ever tried to declare independence formally, and to prevent any other power from intervening in a conflict if it did break out. In the early days of the People’s Republic, almost all the viable ships were given to the northern and eastern fleets, which operate near Taiwan, while the southern fleet was considered a poor cousin. Taiwan remains a priority, but over time, the scope of China’s naval ambitions has expanded. One of the reasons the opening of the new naval base on Hainan Island was so significant was that it demonstrated the new priorities of China’s naval push, the ability to project power not just east, toward Taiwan, but also down into the South China Sea and beyond.
“Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?” The questions were raised by Donald Rumsfeld in 2005, when the then defense secretary was visiting Singapore for a conference. Iraq was still engulfed with violence at that time, and his comments seemed another exercise in neocon scaremongering. But nearly a decade later, the questions have not gone away. The uncomfortable truth is that China’s military investments are focused largely on the United States’ presence in the region. There should be little surprise that an aspiring great power would choose to invest more in its military as its interests and power expands. Yet China is not investing in the sort of navy that could be used for policing the world’s sea-lanes for pirates and terrorists. Instead, its principal target is the U.S. Navy. According to Dennis Blair, the retired admiral who was head of the U.S. intelligence services early in the Obama administration:“Ninety percent of their time is spent on thinking about new and interesting ways to sink our ships and shoot down our planes.”
American strategists sometimes talk abouta Chinese “anti-navy”—a series of weapons, some based on land, some at sea, which are specifically designed to keep an opposing navy as far away as possible from the mainland. China has a large and growing fleet of submarines, including nuclear-powered vessels and a group of Russia-supplied diesel submarines which are quiet and hard to detect. It is developing two different versions of stealth fighter jets (including the airplane that was tested the day Robert Gates was in Beijing), as well as its own unmanned drones that can deploy missiles. The navy is developing a new type of destroyer battleship which will have some of the missile defense capabilities of American Aegis ships.
Pride of place in the anti-navy, however, goes to the Second Artillery Force, which operates most of the more than one thousand missiles that
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