Is China a Regional Military Threat?
October 18, 2005
What’s the current strength of China’s military?
Experts say China has been steadily building up its strategic and conventional capabilities and preparing to project its influence into the western Pacific. Fifteen years ago, experts say, China had a “bare-bones” military: basic capabilities, but nothing sophisticated or top-of-the-line. But after seventeen years of double-digit spending increases, China is currently spending two to three times more than the $30 billion per year publicly announced as its defense budget, the Pentagon estimates. All that spending has gone to building a sophisticated modern military: a massive submarine fleet, an air force stocked with Russian fighter jets, and the newest Chinese-developed technology in missile defense, satellite surveillance, radar, and interception—including the ability to fire nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles from submarines anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. China’s military—with some 2.3 million soldiers—can now legitimately challenge that of the United States, experts say. And if the European Union lifts its 17-year-old ban on selling arms to China, as it is considering doing, the Chinese military’s modernization will proceed even more quickly.
What military threats does China face?
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, currently on a trip to China, asked pointedly in a June 4 speech in Singapore, “Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?” Experts have a one-word answer: Taiwan. “More than anything else, China’s acquisitions are directing at fighting a war in the Taiwan Strait,” says Richard Bush III, director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. China considers Taiwan a renegade province that it wants to take back; Taiwan considers itself a separate country and seeks to declare independence from China. The conflict, which has brewed for more than fifty years, could still lead to a war, experts say. In addition, China feels threatened by instability on the Korean peninsula to its east and Islamic militancy in the former Russian republics to its west.
Is China becoming more assertive militarily?
In some ways. In remarks that surprised the world, Chinese Major General Zhu Chenghu said July 14 that China would be prepared to attack the United States with nuclear weapons if U.S. forces intervened in a confrontation with Taiwan. His comments were the most specific warnings by a senior Chinese military official to the United States in over a decade, and garnered international attention. Zhu is a reputed hawk who teaches at China’s National Defense University. His comments, while later disavowed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, were seen by experts as an example of China’s increasingly assertive posture.
What is China’s diplomatic policy?
The country’s first priority is economic development, experts say. It is trying to spread the gains of its “economic miracle”—the economy has grown at about 9 percent per year for the last two decades—to more of its citizens. The domestic goal is social stability above all, experts say. Overseas, experts say Chinese officials know they must project a peaceful image of themselves to the region and the world. “It is a vital ongoing requirement that Chinese diplomacy continues to provide tangible reassurance of Beijing’s peaceable intentions,” Terence O’Brien, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, said in a speech August 3. Xinhua news agency, China’s official news organization, reported that a September Chinese government white paper on defense declared that China does not wish to damage global strategic stability, erode trust among big powers, or undermine the legitimate security interests of other countries.
What are Taiwan’s concerns?
Taiwan’s most pressing security concern, without a doubt, is China, located just 100 miles away across the Taiwan Strait. China has hundreds of ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan, and is targeting much of its militarization campaign specifically at the island, including building amphibious tanks that can be used to storm Taiwan’s shores. Since nationalist president Chen Shui-Bian was elected to his first term in 2000, he has steadily pressed China with his talk of Taiwanese independence. He raised hackles August 3 by supporting the idea of a referendum to ask Taiwanese citizens if the island should declare formal independence from China. China is very hostile to such talk: On August 7, the official China Daily newspaper quoted a Chinese military official saying, “Taiwan choosing independence is tantamount to choosing war.” China’s military buildup has put Taiwan at a strategic disadvantage: Taiwan’s military spending has dropped 25 percent over the last five years, to only 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The United States, which pledged to help Taiwan defend itself in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act and several subsequent communiqués, has been pressuring the island to buy a specially designed $18 billion package of U.S. arms to improve its military capabilities. But Taiwan’s opposition coalition has blocked this sale, leaving Taiwan falling ever-more rapidly behind China in preparedness for a military conflict.
What are Japan’s concerns?
Japan and China compete over a host of issues, from regional security to international trade to access to energy. The two countries have a centuries-old history of conflict, including two Sino-Japanese wars that began in 1894 and 1931, and a bloody Japanese occupation of China during World War II. Recent conflict over natural gas reserves in the East China Sea have led to fears of another confrontation, which China’s military investments have done little to ease. “In general, people are very worried,” says Toshihiro Nakayama, a Japanese foreign policy analyst and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Northeast Policy Studies. “The motive of a Chinese military buildup is not quite clear to us,” he says, adding that China’s focus on offensive military capacity—as opposed to peacekeeping or emergency relief—exacerbates the fears. Japan spends some $44 billion per year on defense, according to the Nikkei Weekly, but Article 9 of its constitution prohibits war or the use of force to settle international disputes. Right-wing hawks in Japan have long agitated to amend the constitution so Japanese forces can go to war; worries over China’s new military role are feeding that debate, experts say. “The anxiety that Japan feels over China becomes a kind of accelerator” for Japan’s own issues, Bush says.
What about Russia?
Russia spends some $65 billion per year on defense, but its cash-strapped army is selling China the advanced hardware—including ballistic weapons and satellite systems—it needs to modernize, Bush says. China is a major market for Russian goods, from weapons to energy. China consumes some 300 million tons of oil per year, second only to the United States, and is aggressively seeking reliable energy sources around the world. Analysts say Russia and China are cooperating on a new security relationship that would protect oil pipelines and gas-shipping routes from rivals and terrorists: this month, China began building a private pipeline from the northeastern Chinese city of Heihe to the town of Baloveshcehnsk in Russia. China and Russia are also moving toward a security arrangement to counter U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) influence in the region. During week-long exercises in August on the Liaodong peninsula in northeast China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) showed that it is ready to maintain security in the region without the United States, experts say.
What about Southeast Asia?
Experts say Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, are currently calculating that the political and economic benefits of closer ties with a strong China outweigh the military risks. Bilateral trade between China and the ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries soared to nearly $60 billion in the first half of 2005, a 25 percent increase over last year, amid increasing cuts in tariffs. The region is now China’s fourth-largest trading partner; China sank some $226 million in foreign direct investment in the region in 2004. Despite the economic windfall, ASEAN countries want the United States to pay more attention to the new security trends in the region, experts say. While these countries are not very vocal about their fears, experts say they are nervously looking over their shoulders at China’s military buildup and wondering where it’s headed.
How should the U.S. handle China’s military rise?
Experts say the Sino-U.S. relationship is critical, and it is important Washington gets it right. Some critics found it shocking that Rumsfeld’s first visit to China comes in his fifth year as defense secretary. Most other high-level officials in the Defense and State Departments have already been to China, experts say, or are actively engaged with managing the complex relationship between the two countries. China and the United States have become interdependent trading partners, although the nearly $200 billion U.S. trade deficit with China has increased tensions and protectionist talk from U.S. lawmakers. In this context, some experts found Rumsfeld’s June comments provocative. “If we treat China as the enemy now, it will become the enemy in the future,” Bush says. Bush says he hopes Rumsfeld’s visit marks the starts of a relationship that can manage the growth of Chinese power into the future.
Weigh in on this issue by emailing CFR.org.
Email
This report argues that the United States must lead with domestic action on climate change and proposes a U.S. negotiating strategy for a global UN climate agreement that includes commitments from all major economies, while also promoting a less formal Partnership for Climate Cooperation that would focus the world's largest emitters on implementing aggressive emissions reductions.
This Task Force report examines changes in Latin America and in U.S. influence there, while taking account of the region's enduring importance to the United States. The Task Force offers an agenda for U.S. policy toward Latin America and identifies four critical areas that should provide the basis of a new U.S. approach.
After two decades of liberalization, many countries around the world are adopting new restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI) that could retard continued progress. The authors make recommendations for correcting this protectionist drift by proposing guidelines for how countries can better regulate FDI yet still reap its economic benefits.
In this Council Special Report, the authors make a strong case that the Bush administration’s policy of diplomatic isolation of Syria is not serving U.S. interests, and offer informed history and thoughtful analysis of the country and its external behavior.
