“The navy of any great power… has the dream to have one or more aircraft carriers,” he said.
Like many of the party leaders of his generation, Deng was himself a veteran of the Communist Party’s war against the Nationalists and the Long March. Not only did he have strong personal relationships with the military top brass when he assumed power, but they also had a sense of shared sacrifice in defense of the party. Over the last couple of decades, however, the party and the military have taken different paths. The party has become dominated by trained bureaucrats who have worked their way up the system, spending decades in provincial jobs learning the ropes. The new military leaders are also cut from a different cloth. Rather than party ideologues well schooled in the texts of Marxism-Leninism, they are now professional soldiers who are focused on honing their new skills. The PLA has less influence over domestic politics than it used to enjoy but, at the same time, the party is much less directly involved in the PLA than it once was. The PLA political commissars, who once enforced political orthodoxy among the rank and file, are now much more focused on boosting morale—one Chinese observer likens them to the equivalent of chaplains in a Western army. As Marxism has withered as a guiding force, the military has also developed a stronger sense of its role as a defender of the national interest. China now has a professional officer class with a slightly Prussian air, which is proud of the new capabilities at its disposal and was reared on a worldview that sees China as a powerful and strong nation.
The most dangerous situation would be if a few “rogue generals” started to freelance, using the perceived weakness of civilian leaders to push their own agenda outside of the formal policy process. That would be a large red-flag warning about looming future instability in China’s relations with the rest of the world. Most informed observers of China’s military believe that this is far from the case, and that the Communist Party leadership still remains firmly in control of the military. But every now and then, there are tantalizing glimpses of a restless military that is occasionally willing to push the boundaries. The test flight of the J-20 on the day Robert Gates was in town was one such case. Another incident happened in 2007, when China used a land-based missile to blow a weather satellite out of space. The test was a wake-up call for foreign militaries, a warning shot about China’s cyberwar capabilities. Just as illuminating was the way the test was discovered. With no word coming from the Chinese government, the story first appeared in a U.S. magazine, which was probably tipped off by U.S. or other Western intelligence agencies. And even when the news did break, the Foreign Ministry gave the impression that it had been left completely in the dark by the military.
These little glimpses of the interactions between the PLA and the party suggest an occasionally confrontational streak, but they do not indicate a stark split. The real influence that the PLA is starting to have is more subtle, the result not of open lobbying but from the drip-feed effect of a military worldview that is both intensely proud of China and deeply skeptical about the U.S. military. It is this tide of hawkish views that is helping to gradually chip away at Deng’s call for self-restraint. By exposing big shifts in relative power that have taken place between the U.S. and China, the financial crisis encouraged some in China to believe that the time was theirs. Hu Jintao had few connections with the military before he became president in 2002, and Chinese academics and officials who attend regular foreign-policy gatherings with military officials would describe the openness with which Hu was criticized—something that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. One leading academic told me of a discussion with some of his military counterparts in which Hu had been attacked by name for being soft on Japan. “Arrogant people with a lot of ego,” the academic described them.
I got the full force of this worldview when I went to visit Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu. I wanted to meet Liu because a few months earlier he had caused something of a sensation when he published his first book, China Dream, a nationalist tract that called for the country to build a military force to rival and compete with the U.S. In his book he argued that the U.S. and China were embarking on a “marathon contest” for global leadership. Having spared no efforts to contain the rise of the Soviet Union and Japan, Liu argued that the U.S. would “fight a third battle to retain its title” against China. His book became a best seller both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. One large Chinese newspaper ran serializations of China Dream for a whole month. Yanghe, a company which makes one of the country’s best-known brands of liquor, ordered ten thousand copies to give to its clients. “The chairman described it as a textbook for patriotism,” Liu told me, not a little immodestly.
Liu lives in a complex of residential buildings reserved for military personnel, just along the road from the Defense Ministry’s huge building in central Beijing. Foreigners are not supposed to enter the compound, he said on the phone, so I should wear a woolly hat and keep my head down when passing through the gate. In the end, the car drove in without any problems at all, the guard airily waving us through. Inside the compound, there were few signs of insecurity, but plenty of esprit de corps. There was a well-tended running track, and a theater that put on shows of revolutionary songs at the weekends. It was midmorning, and the exercise area was full of pensioners doing stretches on a series of yellow machines. A lithe fifty-year-old with dyed black hair and the rank of a senior colonel, Liu now teaches at the National Defense University, where he gives lectures on Marxist theory and U.S.-China relations. Liu said that on the very day he launched his book, in 2010, Barack Obama gave a speech saying that the U.S. would never be number two in the world. “It was such a coincidence. As an ordinary military man, I argue loudly that China should try to be the number one, should race to be the champion country,” Liu said.
A few months before we talked, a Chinese admiral called Yuan Youfei had caused a good deal of consternation at a high-profile U.S.-China summit when he launched into a long diatribe attacking the “hegemonic” U.S. According to American officials present, Yuan accused Washington of plotting to encircle China and treating Beijing as an enemy. Liu Mingfu said he agreed entirely with Yuan’s analysis. For Liu, the Chinese leadership faces a stark choice: either China develops the military capacity to challenge the U.S., or it will be forever bullied by its larger rival. “For China, a runner-up who does not want to be a champion is not a good runner-up,” he told me. “But the U.S. wants a mini-NATO to contain China.” As we talked in his flat, his wife sat next to him, eating sunflower seeds from a plastic bag and nodding vigorously every time he made a forceful point. A few weeks before, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had visited Beijing to encourage Chinese entrepreneurs to do more for charity. “Chinese people enjoyed seeing the civilization of Gates and Buffett. America should send more cultural and peaceful ambassadors like that,” Liu told me. “But, instead, the American aircraft carriers make 1.3 billion Chinese people see America’s hegemony and barbarism.” As I was leaving, he gripped my hand firmly. “You British are reasonable people; Germans are very reasonable,” he said. “But the Americans?”
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 s
ome 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.
The Contest of the Century Page 5
