A Gooie, Chewie Chinese Post: Whither China?

There are a plethora of Chinese posts and articles out there that ought to be pointed out for some of my readers. There's a bunch that is just plain fascinating and disturbing at the same time. I don't have time right now to think this through and let things gel, but the info can be used to paint an odd picture for China's future.

First up from the BBC and it's article titled "Perils of a new Pacific arms race":

This year China is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Peoples' Liberation Army.

But its traditional strategic thinking is undergoing a huge shift, prompting fears in the United States that China might pose a threat to American diplomatic and military power with a naval arms race in the Pacific.

The capitulation of Sadam Hussein's army in the face of a hi-tech American onslaught in Desert Storm, with land, air and sea forces enabling a rapid US advance across large areas of land, gave a fresh impetus to military modernisation, according to Christian Lemiere, China expert at Jane's Country Risk.

"China had always relied upon the idea that if attacked it had large areas of land. It could fall back with these areas but if one power is able to take that and very quickly, it rapidly negates any advantage.

China has been looking to match US military technology and launched an anti-satellite missile as part of this process.

Joseph Lin, a military affairs analyst with the Jamestown Foundation in Washington said this development has unnerved the Pentagon.

"The United States is heavily dependent upon satellites for all matters of communications, especially the military, which would be crippled and completely ineffectual without any sort of satellite coverage either for imaging, navigation or for communications."

At the same time, China's naval build-up has alerted American military officials to the previously unthinkable possibility that they might face competition in the Pacific Ocean, where the US has enjoyed naval dominance since the World War Two.

The article goes on to discuss how, basically, the Chinese Military is being crafted to try to negate the American Military. In some ways it sounds like the way that the Soviets were working to counter the US military. In other ways though, it definitely does not. Keep in mind, the Chinese have stated that they were aiming for the 2050s as the time to do the big time build up anything other than the economy aspect. Has that changed? Or are they still just biding their time?

Next up is Asia Times Online's "Eurasian bloc seeks world without West":

What is the significance of "Peace Mission 2007" - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) exercise now under way at the Chebarkulsk training ground in Chelyabinsk, Russia - and the summit that will follow in Bishkek?

Is the SCO, which consists of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, on the verge of being transformed into a new Warsaw Pact, a Eurasian counterbalance to the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? Simon Tidsall of The Guardian newspaper quoted Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian defense analyst, who observed: "As Moscow's relations with the West deteriorate, the Kremlin is doing its best to seek allies and is building up the SCO to counterbalance NATO. In propaganda terms, Peace Mission 2007 will be used to the full."

Meanwhile, the Russian newspaper Kommersant, in an article tellingly titled "Maneuvers to go around the United States", sees the exercises and the summit that will follow in Bishkek as part of a renewed Russian effort to push back against the US "on all fronts", from opposing plans to deploy missile-defense components in central-eastern Europe to "expelling" the US from Central Asia altogether. Kommersant also highlights the role played by former defense minister and current Deputy Prime Minister (and presidential contender) Sergei Ivanov in acting as the godfather of this mission, beginning with his visit to Beijing last year.

Statements coming from China, however, support the thesis advanced by political scientists Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner and Steven Weber that emerging powers are seeking neither to integrate with nor balance against the US, but to create an alternative international order that "routes around" Washington. Chen Hu, executive chief editor of China's state-owned World Military Affairs magazine, made a point of stressing that "Peace Mission 2007 targets no country, nor does it mean a military alliance", and argued that the Shanghai grouping is not trying to create a counterbalancing bloc against Washington. He described it as a "new type" of regional security organization that has made obsolete the "traditional security outlook" of seeking a balance of power.

Yes, Chen had a not-so-subtle dig at Washington - noting that countries felt the need to work more closely together in the Shanghai framework since "different countries have different anti-terror combat criteria and a few of them push forward hegemony under the cloak of war on terror". But as Tidsall commented, "No one in the SCO, least of all China with next year's Beijing Olympics and its trade and development goals potentially in the firing line, seriously wanted confrontation with the West."

One of the theses of Weber, Ratner and Barma is that countries in the "World without the West" remain in play, and India's reaction to the exercises is a case in point. The Hindu newspaper reported: "While favoring cooperation with the SCO on trade and economic issues, official sources told The Hindu that India would like to steer clear of aligning with this six-nation grouping in military, strategic and political terms."

A World with the West sounds an awful lot like the old Second World bit from the Cold War. Is it that the Americans are the Cold Warriors or, perhaps, the Russians are far more so than the Americans. or perhaps...the media keeps interpreting something new through old eyes.

Shifting into China's internal issues, Demography Matters has a fascinating, and a bit scary about "Asian Economies on a Demographic Cliff?":

The International Labour Organisation has a new report out today, entitled "Visions for Asia’s Decent Work Decade: Sustainable Growth and Jobs to 2015". You can download the report in pdf here).

The report uses comparatively strong langauge, warning that - due to comparatively rapid `population ageing - the “demographic dividend” process is likely be limited in many parts of Asia, with the proportion of children aged 0 to 15 and youth aged 15 to 24 set to decline rapidly across the whole of the region. In fact they point out that the more developed parts of Asia - such as Singapore, South Korea and parts of China - are likely to hit the “demographic cliff” much earlier than the rest.

As they point out, more than a quarter of the population in several of the more “developed economies” are expected to be older than 65 by 2015, and in China, largely as a result of short sighted family planning policies, there has beem an “accelerated" demographic transition process. As a result, China is “ageing faster than any other nation in history”.

The idea is that the Chinese - and other Asian nations - are going to hit a demographic wall and possibly have their economies choke as the workers dry up. That might play havoc with the 2050 time frame that the Chinese were thinking of throwing themselves around. If they are still planning for that time frame.

Next up is the NY Times' Orwellian "China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People":

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

hrm. Frightening, yes, but is it a sign of things coming unglued a bit? The more you clamp down and all that jazz?

Then there's the debtable LA Times' "China's new revolutionaries: U.S. consumers":

Who would have thought that tainted pet food and toys would threaten to unravel the authoritarian export model of Chinese growth that the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 was partly meant to secure? China's then "paramount leader" Deng Xiaoping, who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, could well imagine how political upheaval would derail China's stable path to prosperity. But it surely never entered his mind, nor that of his descendant comrades, that the fickle American consumer would one day become, as the students in the square wanted to be, the agent of revolutionary change in China.

In the name of sovereignty, China's leaders for a long time have gotten away with suppressing their own citizens while ignoring the get-gloriously-rich-quick corruption that has thrived in the absence of the rule of law. But, thanks to globalization, China's export reliance on the U.S. market has imported the political demands of the U.S. consumer into the equation. Americans won't hesitate to cut the import lifeline and shift away from Chinese products that might poison their children or kill their pets.

Unlike organized labor or human rights groups, consumers don't have to mobilize to effect change; they only have to stop spending. And their bargaining agents -- Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R Us -- have immensely more clout than the AFL-CIO and Amnesty International in fostering change in China.

Ironically, the United States' "most favored nation" trade treatment for China (and its later entry into the World Trade Organization), which labor and human rights groups so virulently opposed in the past, has become a Trojan horse. China's future is now so linked to the American consumer that Beijing will be forced to curb corruption and strengthen regulation through the rule of law or face the certain doom of its export-led growth.

I'm unsure if I buy the idea, but I've not had time to assimilate the whole thing.

Finally, the Danger Room - Wired's militaria blog - makes the comment that maybe China (!!) might be joining the fray for the north pole resources even as the University of Chicago's Law School Blog questions the legality of claims up there under international law.

May you live in interesting times, the Alien Marshmellow cursed me with[1]: I just wish I had time to think through what was going on around me for what it means.


1. Allen, if I see you any time within the next 50 years in person, you're getting a nice big kick in the fundament for that curse!