China Rebuilds Its Military Muscle

Communist China is reshaping its armed forces in an effort to build up its strength and make it the dominant power in Asia and beyond.

Following the blueprint laid out in a so-called White Paper just two years ago, Oct. 17, 2000 as reported by NewsMax.com, China has taken steps to reduce its bloated armed forces by slashing 1.3 million Red Army soldiers and concentrating on modernizing and improving its military with technology.

China’s top military brass is focusing on reshaping the nation’s oversized and outdated armed forces and transforming them into a modern, integrated fighting force, the New York Times reported this week, two years late.

In the Times' story "China Reshaping Military to Toughen Its Muscle in the Region," reporter Craig S. Smith writes that the rebuilding of China’s military is based on allowing the regime to assert its power regionally. This slant contradicts the thrust of the White Paper, which revealed the nation’s much more grandiose military ambitions, stretching as far as Australia's front doorstep.

"For now," the Times says, "the generals' efforts are focused almost exclusively on assembling a credible threat to Taiwan, over which Beijing is determined to regain sovereignty. In the longer term, the goal is to create a force able to project the country's power well beyond its shores."

"They're not trying to get to Hawaii, but over time to establish a 200- to 300-mile projection capability, which is known as `area and sea denial,'" David Shambaugh, the author of the soon-to-be published "Modernizing China's Military," told the Times.

Shambaugh said the goal of China's generals was to turn the People's Liberation Army into a mobile and technologically competent force able to fight "limited wars under high-technology conditions."

To reach that goal, the Times says, China has been reducing the size of its military, cutting the Red Army by 1.33 million soldiers over the last 15 years. Moreover, the army is shifting its 40,000- to 70,000-man armies into more mobile 15,000-man brigades and spending more time and money into training those soldiers, "spending more time than ever on costly live-fire exercises and emphasizing coordination between its infantry and naval and air forces."

This is the strategy spelled out in the 2000 White Paper, which the Washington Post at the time reported provided more "detail than China has ever allowed about the structure of the 2.5 million-member People's Liberation Army, as well as a blueprint of government efforts to turn it into a leaner, more versatile fighting force by demobilizing troops, stepping up training, improving command and control, selling 6,000 military-owned commercial enterprises and establishing a military judicial system."

The White Paper claimed that China was "endeavoring to transform its armed forces from a numerically superior to a qualitatively superior type, and from a manpower-intensive to a technology-intensive type." It added that the army had been downsized by a half-million over the last three years.

"This is a phenomenal document. It goes far further than anything they've ever done before," Shambaugh told the Washington Post in October 2000. Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University, was meeting with Chinese military officials in the eastern city of Suzhou at the time.

"With a couple of exceptions, mainly their refusal to provide information about weapons and deployment of forces, this is exactly the kind of thing we've been calling for, and it puts China on par with Japan, Taiwan and South Korea as far as transparency of its military."

- China lacks aircraft carriers necessary to project its power very far, analysts say. The army, however is learning how to conduct in-flight refueling of its fighter jets, critical to extending its reach beyond the country's shores.

- China is building a new generation of submarines, some of which are nuclear powered and capable of launching nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. Most are simply intended to make America think twice about intervening in the region.

- China is also close to deploying its own cruise missiles. Together with the new submarines, the missiles "will really change China's offensive posture," Shambaugh told the Times.

The Times writes that prior to 9/11, Washington viewed China as the most dangerous potential military opponent on the horizon, noting that while the terrorist threat has distracted America's attention, China's drive to achieve regional power status continues unabated. Shambaugh and many other Western analysts are cited as saying that at its current pace, China will achieve air and naval superiority in the Taiwan Strait by the end of the decade.

Still, China is a long way from posing a threat to the United States, military analysts told the Times. Despite the fact that it still has the largest standing army in the world, it has not yet begun the sort of buildup necessary to turn itself into a superpower, or even to challenge Washington's military presence in the region anytime soon, the Times said.

"I don't see these capabilities as the leading edge of a more comprehensive, long-term plan either to supplant U.S. military power in the Western Pacific or to challenge U.S. power on a global basis," said Jonathan Pollack, director of the strategic research department at the United States Naval War College.

That is not to say that the country will not become a sizable presence in Asia demanding American attention. "The Chinese don't require equivalence with U.S. forces to make our future decisions about war and peace in the Pacific much more consequential," Pollack said.

Though no one is suggesting that China wants to extend its territory, it is seen as desiring greater influence over East and Southeast Asia. The country is increasingly dependent on imported oil, for example, and it wants to be able to defend strategically important sea lanes, which the United States could now easily cut.

For all its recent steps, however, China has a long way to go to become a first-tier military power.

China, the Times insists, remains interested in establishing sovereignty over territory it believes is rightly its own. After conquering Taiwan, "China could turn its attention to the oil-rich South China Sea, where it has territorial disputes with several countries."

"Once the Taiwan front is closed, we may turn to the South China Sea," said Shen Dingli, an expert on the Chinese military at Fudan University in Shanghai. Beyond the South China Sea, "we have a third issue to resolve," namely to take the Diaoyutai Islands from Japan.

China clearly wants to be a global power, and its military modernization effort fits into that general framework. But realization of that ambition is far in the future, Western military analysts told the Times.

"China," Pollack said, "is beginning to emerge as a more potent power, and the U.S. and China need to come to a strategic understanding, because there will be many places where our interests and capabilities could bump into each other. But let's not make them out to be 10 feet tall."

But in the October 2000 White Paper, communist China revealed plans to build a "blue-water navy" capable of putting its armed forces as far away as what its military calls "first island-chain" by 2010 and to the "second island-chain" by 2040.

In Chinese military planning, the first and second island chains describe the sphere of influence that China expects to achieve in the Pacific Ocean. The first chain of islands includes Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines and Brunei. The second chain extends to Australia’s doorstep.

But at the time Taiwanese military officials warned that these island chains are only preliminary targets.

"China's intensive military buildup in recent years is certainly not targeted only at Taiwan. China's real target is the U.S.," said Taiwanese National Defense University lecturer Col. Jen Yi-ming.

Some Western observers saw Beijing’s release of the White Paper purporting to lay bare the state of China’s military machine and its operations as a sign that China, one of the most secretive military powers in the world, was trying to ease international concerns about its military ambitions.

Beijing’s large-scale maneuvers in northern China in the fall of 2000, however, were intended to remind the world, especially Washington and Taipei, of China's growing military strength, a top Taiwanese military official warned.

"The Chinese exercise carries the message to the U.S., Japan and Taiwan that China has the capability to keep Taiwan under its influence through military means," said Col. Tan Hsi-chun, a lecturer at Taiwan’s National Defense University.

"The thinking behind the move is that the Chinese military leadership is worried that people in Taiwan are becoming less scared of China because Taiwan's military has been able to acquire and absorb quite a number of advanced weapons from abroad in recent years," Tan said.

"Chinese military leaders certainly do not want to see this sentiment grow stronger in Taiwan," Tan explained. "They want to demonstrate through the recent large-scale military exercise that they are quite capable of overpowering Taiwan militarily."

The biggest problem China faces is that they need a very big army for domestic head-bashing, and a very modern army for power projection.

The can choose one or the other. Choose the former, and they'll never get Taiwan. Choose the latter, and they risk domestic insurrection while they're grabbing Taiwan. Choose a middle ground, and they can get caught out with not enough force to grab Taiwan, and not enough force to survive the domestic backlash.

Too bad the majority of "Conservative Republicans" in both houses of Congress want to give ChiComs the noose with which they want to hang us. They are in the wallets of corrupt, disloyal businesses who stand to profit from trade with the enemy. As it doeth prosper, none dare call PMNTR with Red China treason.

Rebuilds Military?

hmmmm....dont they have to build one first in order to rebuild it? Anything they do to their military is just an improvement, not a rebuilding. Maybe they are just recruiting more men for the billion man swim to overtake Taiwan because their so called "Navy" sure as hell couldnt do it.

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