The Contest of the Century (7 page)

Since the first Gulf War, in the early nineties, America has developed a battalion of “TV generals,” retired members of the military who provide expert commentary on military operations and, every now and
then, slip in a hawkish criticism of the commander-in-chief. In the last few years, something similar has started to happen in China. A small group of media-friendly members of the armed forces have begun to talk openly about their views on military matters, including their mistrust of and distaste for the U.S. military and its policies in Asia. Dai Xu, a colonel in the air force, writes regular articles and appears on television to criticize U.S. efforts to contain China.
“If the U.S. can light a fire in China’s backyard, we can also light a fire in their backyard,” he wrote in 2010. In some ways, Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu is the latest addition to their numbers. The question that remained unanswered during our conversation was whether Liu’s brand of saber rattling was a minority position, or if he was reflecting broader views about the U.S. among the armed services that are starting to influence the politicians. Liu is not in active service and is not involved in developing Chinese military strategy. The sort of crude and hard-line views that he puts forward are, therefore, by no means official policy, although
China Dream
did have a foreword written by Lieutenant General Liu Yazhou, the son-in-law of a former Chinese president and a close adviser of Xi Jinping, China’s new president.

Many experts on China’s military warn against seeing the PLA as a unified bastion of anti-Americanism. They say that the PLA, like so many institutions in China these days, is full of people who have substantial direct experience of the U.S. Indeed, the children of a few senior military figures are believed to have attended university in the U.S. They also have huge admiration for the operational skills and technology of the U.S. military. Others are less sanguine. A few days after I met Liu, I asked Chu Shulong what to make of Liu Mingfu and the other hawkish, military pundits. Chu spent eight years in the PLA before becoming an academic at Peking University, and so speaks from some experience. “These scholars at military institutions have little contact with the real military leaders. They are giving their personal opinions, but they in no way represent the Central Military Commission [the body that runs the armed forces],” he told me. “The real military are much more hard-line than these scholars. They are even more hostile and suspicious of the U.S.”

Every now and again, that resentment toward the U.S. leaks out
into the open. In 2010, recently retired admiral Hu Yanlin, who had been the navy’s chief political commissar and a close adviser to the top commander Wu Shengli, described the U.S. as
“the fundamental anti-Chinese force.” Talking about the South China Sea, he added that the U.S. “may seek to precipitate a crisis, hoping the internal difficulties would facilitate foreign aggression or that foreign aggression could cause internal anxiety.”

The PLA does not dictate policy to its civilian masters, but it does help shape the atmosphere in which policy is made. The nationalist rhetoric and skepticism of the U.S. that are central to the PLA’s worldview are slowly leaking into the policy process. Over the last decade, a weaker civilian leadership has found it harder to push back against hawkish voices in the military. All of which makes the personality and background of China’s new president so interesting and important. Unlike his predecessor, Xi Jinping is steeped in Chinese military tradition. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a central figure in the Communist Party war with the Nationalists in the 1930s, organizing a guerrilla base in Yan’an, in northeast central China, that later provided refuge for Mao Zedong. When the younger Xi left university in the late 1970s, his first job was as
mishu
, a sort of personal assistant, to Defense Minister Geng Biao, who was a friend of his father’s. Xi proudly wore a military uniform to the office every day. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is a popular folksinger who is attached to the army’s song-and-dance troupe. She holds the rank of major general, and until her husband became a senior leader, she was a regular in the huge television spectacle that airs every year on the eve of the New Year holiday. More recently, a photo has reappeared showing her singing to soldiers in Tiananmen Square in the days following the bloody suppression of the 1989 democracy protests.

In some ways, the military is part of his political support base. In two decades as a provincial official, Xi was known as a “military hugger” for his efforts to help the troops stationed in his area, giving them privileged access to amusement parks and festivals, and appearing regularly at military parades. Such a background could give Xi more credibility to stand up to some of the more restive generals. He will have a personal authority in their company that Hu Jintao always lacked. But it could also make him more sympathetic to their nationalist worldview.
In the years during which he was preparing to take the top job, his most famous comments were a rant he gave at a 2009 dinner of Chinese expatriates in Mexico City, in which he warned, “There are a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country.” One of the central questions in China over the next decade will be whether Xi’s core instinct is to control the military, or to channel its views. A more natural leader than his predecessor, Xi could be less intimidated by hawkish voices. Yet his early statements have been full of nationalist echoes, and some analysts believe he is relying on the military to consolidate its position. In a speech he gave aboard the destroyer
Haikou
, which patrols the South China Sea, shortly after assuming power, he expanded on his new slogan about promoting a “Chinese dream.” “The dream can be said to be the dream of a strong nation and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military,” he said. “We must achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation and we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and a strong military.”

ASSASSIN
’
S MACE

Long before
Diamonds Are Forever
started playing on my China Southern flight back to Beijing, it had been hard to shake the slightly James Bond feel about Yalong Bay. If you stand on the beach at the Sanya Sheraton and look out to sea, and if the light is not too hazy, you can just about make out a headland to the southeast of the bay. What the eye cannot detect is the large underground submarine base that lies on the other side of the headland. First revealed in satellite photos published in 2008 by U.S. scientists, the images showed the cavelike holes which are the entrances for the submarines. The tunnels give way to a large harbor carved deep into the rock to protect the subs from bombing raids. The underwater base has the Chinese navy’s only demagnetizing facility, which makes it much harder for the submarines to be detected. The disclosures about the Sanya submarine base form part of a relentless trend over the last decade, during which observers have been continuously surprised by the technical sophistication of China’s military modernization. China has managed to catch a lot of people by surprise.

After touring the U.S. in 1890, Oscar Wilde had one of his characters react with surprise at being told that the U.S. had no ruins or curiosities. “No ruins, no curiosities!” the Canterville Ghost replied. “You have your navy and your manners.” For sophisticated subjects of the British Empire, the American navy was an obvious punch line at that time. Yet, by the end of the decade, one in which the U.S. invested heavily in its navy under the influence of Teddy Roosevelt and Captain Mahan, the U.S. had roundly defeated Spain in battles in 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 in
the 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 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 to
receive 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.”