Posted on: Sunday, February 6, 2005
THE RISING EAST
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By Richard Halloran
China is modernizing its military forces faster than anyone expected, escalating the potential danger to the island of Taiwan, to American forces and bases in Asia, and to the overall balance of power in the region.
"China adheres to the military strategy of active defense and works to speed up the revolution of military affairs (RMA) with Chinese characteristics," says the white paper Beijing issued in December. It points to "leapfrog development" in high-tech weapons for its missile units, navy, and air force.
Where many American and Asian analysts said before that China would be able to mount a credible threat between 2010 and 2015, now they are saying it will come earlier, perhaps by 2006 and certainly by 2012.
China seems driven by perceptions that Taiwan, over which Beijing claims sovereignty, is drifting toward formal independence, that the United States is becoming a greater menace as it realigns and strengthens its forces in Asia, and that, more distantly, Japan has begun to assert itself militarily.
Behind this military progress has been the rapid growth of the Chinese economy that pays for the military power. China's defense budget is estimated to have ballooned to $80 billion, the world's third largest after the United States and Russia, and almost double that of Japan, which has Asia's second largest defense budget.
Associated Press library photo • July 31, 2003 To buy even more, the Chinese have been urging the European Union to lift the arms embargo imposed after the uprising in Beijing's Tienanmen Square in 1989 in which unknown hundreds of advocates of democracy were killed by Chinese soldiers. The United States and Taiwan adamantly oppose easing the restriction. The Chinese, ironically, have learned much from the U.S. armed forces, having intensely studied the lessons learned in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, U.S. deployments to the Balkans in the late 1990s, and most recently by the swift destruction of Saddam Hussein's forces in Iraq.
Even so, American military officers contend that the United States has sufficient combat power, notably at sea, in the sky, and with nuclear weapons, to defeat China if hostilities should break out. Said one, however, "it sure complicates our planning."
This assessment of Chinese military power was drawn from the Chinese white paper, a recent defense report published in Taiwan, a Pentagon report to Congress, and conversations with American and Asian analysts with access to intelligence reports.
The vanguard of China's military advance has been hardware. Military education and training have been improved as have logistics. But integrating the forces to invade Taiwan or to challenge the United States has lagged.
China's missile force, called the Second Artillery, had been deploying 50 to 75 short-range missiles a year; that has increased to more than 100 and in 2006 Second Artillery will have 800 aimed at Taiwan. Accuracy has been doubled so that most missiles would hit within 60 to 90 feet of their targets.
Moreover, the missiles have been made mobile to make them less of a target. In a training drill, a brigade moved 360 miles and was ready to fire in two days.
Land-based and air-launched cruise missiles, which are flying torpedoes with stubby wings and advanced navigational devices, have been added to the Chinese inventory to add to their ability to stand off and fire at targets on Taiwan or at U.S. warships at sea.
In the Chinese navy, long the stepchild of the People's Liberation Army, submarines are leading the way. In the event of hostilities, they would be tasked with gaining control of the Taiwan Strait between the island and the mainland, and fending off the U.S. Navy.
China has bought eight Kilo diesel-electric submarines from Russia and is planning to buy four more. Beijing is also building its own Song class of diesel-electric boats. Although they lack the range of nuclear-powered submarines, they are quieter and more effective close to shore. For long-range operations, China is building several nuclear-powered attack submarines.
China, which has become the world's third largest shipbuilder, has produced about 100 amphibious ships, and four tank landing ships are under construction. That appears to have obliterated a U.S. Navy joke that, because the Chinese lacked amphibious ships, the only way they could invade Taiwan was by swimming.
Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia.
The Chinese, who had insisted on self-sufficiency, have bought weapons and technology from abroad, notably from Russia. China could afford those purchases because Beijing's foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest, rose to $610 billion by the end of 2004, more than 10 times their holdings of $53 billion 10 years ago.
Visitors observe a Chinese-made missile from the 1950s on display at Beijing's military museum. China is acquiring short-range missiles at a much faster rate than U.S. officials previously thought and is aiming the weapons at Taiwan — and possibly at U.S. targets, in case the Bush administration decides to intervene on the island's behalf, according to a recent Pentagon report.
