Good Reading About China-Cdma Mentioned-WSJ>
September 12, 1999
AWSJ: China Report: A Work In Progress:
The PLA
By MATT FORNEY
BEIJING -- Nearly a quarter of a century before there was a People's
Republic of China, there was the People's Liberation Army. Yet amid all
the hoopla surrounding the PRC's 50th anniversary, the PLA passed its
72nd anniversary on Aug. 1 quietly, even dourly.
An editorial in the military-run Liberation Army Daily complained that the
army feels pinched between an increasingly decadent, money-driven
society and the prospect of high-tech wars that China can't win. The
emergence of superstitious cults and me-first consumerism show people
are "more vulgar in communicating with each other," the daily warned,
while increasingly high-tech Western militaries and tensions with Taiwan
pose "a severe test."
It's a test, the article suggested, that the PLA may not be equipped to pass.
But not for lack of effort. The PLA has taken long steps in the past year to
adjust to the economic changes reshaping China and to modernize its
forces. It has divested itself of most of PLA Inc., the business empire it
built over the past 15 years, and has focused its limited resources instead
on building rapid-reaction forces that can project power off China's shores,
notably toward Taiwan.
It has done this without prying more money from the government - defense
spending, estimated at $35 billion, has remained at around 4% of the total
economy for a long time. Instead, the army will specialize. It will shed
another half-million men to around 2.3 million, down from four million a
few years ago, train a non-commissioned-officer corps to keep expertise in
the ranks, and concentrate scarce resources on building or buying the kind
of smart bombs and satellite-guided missiles that CNN has shown the U.S.
and its allies using to devastate bunkers in Kosovo and, before that, Iraq.
But to succeed, the army needs another decade or so of peace to develop
its new strategies. Until recently, few generals doubted that East Asia's two
decades without a cross-border war would continue. Kosovo changed
that. There's a growing consensus among the brass that war is more likely,
and it blames the U.S.
Kosovo forced the generals to reconsider U.S. intentions. To them, the
Kosovo conflict was radically different than, say, the Gulf War in 1991.
The Gulf War enjoyed the sanction of the United Nations, Western armies
targeted a country that had obviously invaded another sovereign state, and
the valuable oil under the sand afforded plenty of motive.
Kosovo shares none of those characteristics. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization acted without U.N. approval, troops from Belgrade crossed
no national borders, and the PLA doesn't accept that human rights
violations threatened Western interests. So its military analysts began
looking for other reasons. And while they were thinking, U.S. warplanes
bombed China's embassy in Belgrade on May 7 - by accident, says the
U.S., though Beijing hasn't accepted its explanations.
The bombing added credence to those who already viewed Washington
with suspicion. Shortly after the bombing, Bonnie Glaser, a consultant to
the U.S. Department of Defense, toured Beijing to meet PLA officers.
"They said this wouldn't have happened in the Cold War, when the Soviet
Union targeted the U.S." she recalls. "We have become careless and
unpredictable, they said, and they can't look at our behavior and see where
we will intervene next."
That unpredictability irks the PLA, especially regarding North Korea. If
Washington had evidence of a nuclear weapons factory there, would it
bomb it unilaterally? The PLA used to think no, but now it isn't so sure,
Ms. Glaser says.
While it's unclear if the conclusions the PLA seems to have drawn about
U.S. intentions in Kosovo represent a consensus or only brought
temporary prominence to hard-liners, the actions of "U.S.-led NATO
forces" in Kosovo has certainly forced a rethinking of U.S. motives in
general. The conclusion seems to be that Washington aims to use NATO
to dominate Europe, and its defense treaty with Japan to dominate Asia.
Here is a sampling from the latest issue of China Military Science,
published quarterly by the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, one of
the PLA's most important think tanks. Unlike some of the more shrill
comments aimed at the U.S. from the Foreign Ministry, which might have
been intended to show ordinary Chinese that the government can stand up
to Washington, these have a military readership in mind.
- Peng Guangqian, a senior colonel, argues that by controlling NATO and
Japan, the U.S. could rule the world: The central U.S. goal "is to create in
the 21st Century a Roman-style imperial system under U.S. domination,
slowing the emergence of a multipolar world, extending unipolar
domination and actually making itself into the latest global emperor in
human history."
- Gan Lu (probably a pseudonym) writes that the U.S. used the Kosovo
war to dominate the European arms market, drive Russia from the Balkans
and damage its economy: The war enabled "continued expansion of U.S.
consumer and agriculture products into Russia's market, limiting Russia's
exports to only natural resources sent to the U.S. and the West. The
Kosovo War not only shrinks Russia's sphere of influence, it could even
drive it from the region."
- Yao Youzhi, a major general, writes that China should re-evaluate
whether the world's current state of international peace will end quickly:
U.S. "interferencism" gives Washington any excuse it needs to "strike when
it wants to strike, interfering in other country's internal affairs and even
using military force."
Such vitriol concerns some analysts, who fear the military increasingly
meddles in political affairs. That marks a change from the past decade or
so, when the PLA increasingly removed itself from foreign affairs, allowing
civilian leaders to run the country and tasking them with keeping the military
out of any wars it can't win - which means pretty much any war outside
China's borders. Today, the military enjoys more clout.
In the old days, Mao Tse-tung had literally written the book on military
strategy, and enjoyed unquestioned authority over the army. His successor,
Deng Xiaoping, distinguished himself as an army commander and later ran
military affairs in Southwest China, and maintained broad contacts in the
ranks. President Jiang Zemin, however, came to power in 1989 with no
military background or contacts. For him, support from the generals comes
with a price. He must compromise with the brass in ways his predecessors
didn't.
On the morning of May 8, for instance, after the Belgrade Embassy
bombing, Mr. Jiang chaired a meeting of the politburo's all-powerful
Standing Committee to decide what to do. But it had no decision to make.
"The military had already decreed the bombing intentional, and the
Standing Committee adopted that line," says a Western diplomat who
followed the issue. Once that decision was made, the government felt it had
to allow tens of thousands of people to demonstrate outside the U.S.
Embassy and consulates, which led to near riots in which a mob burned the
home of the U.S. Consul General in remote Chengdu. As the military
increasingly fears U.S. intentions, it could similarly interfere in decisions
ordinarily made by China's civilian leaders.
Taiwan especially nettles it. In July, President Lee Teng-hui suddenly
scrapped Taiwan's "one China" policy, the semantic formula that has kept
the peace between the two rivals for a half century. It was an obvious
effort to increase Taiwan's autonomy if not move it toward independence,
something the PLA has vowed repeatedly to use force to prevent. Beijing
still considers Taiwan a renegade province - which is just how Belgrade
considered Kosovo.
"The bombing of Kosovo really made the PLA concerned the U.S. might
do the same thing in the Taiwan Strait," says Yan Xuetong, a researcher at
the China Institute for Contemporary International Affairs, referring to the
body of water separating Taiwan from the mainland. He notes that the U.S.
is considering including Taiwan in a planned missile-defense system called
Theater Missile Defense, and if it does, "that means they're preparing for
war."
So is China, in the long term. Its M-9 and DF-21 missiles can come within
a hundred meters of targets in Taiwan, says Andrew Yang, secretary
general of the Council of Advanced Policy Studies in Taipei, and he
expects Beijing to deploy highly accurate cruise missiles by 2005. "These
concern me the most," he says. "There's no real defense against the M-9
right now."
Launching missiles, however, is far different from launching an invasion, and
China clearly lacks the ability to mount an amphibious assault against
Taiwan. Its navy can't sail enough men across the water, and its air force
can't dominate the skies. Even the M-9s that worry Mr. Yang haven't been
integrated into an effective battlefield command-and-control system. They
can hit Taiwan, but they can't be linked to a system that detects incoming
missiles, coordinates with fighter jets or integrates with missile batteries
elsewhere.
Here's how poorly integrated China's systems are: When batteries in Fujian
province began firing M-9s toward Taiwan in 1996 to influence
presidential elections there, the U.S. sent two aircraft carrier battle groups
to the region to underscore Washington's commitment to protect Taiwan.
According to retired Rear Adm. Eric McVadon, Beijing's military leaders
didn't know the groups were there until they heard it from U.S. sources,
and they were never able to gauge exactly where the ships were, or when.
Beijing knows that improving its forces requires more than radar. It will
take a different type of soldier, and it's trying to rebuild its forces
accordingly. In addition to cutting total numbers of people in uniform, it has
reduced the period of enlistment from up to four years to two. Then, it will
try to improve training, and move the smartest soldiers into more technical
jobs.
That requires a complete overhaul of training programs, which has already
begun. For instance, it recently created the PLA Sciences and Engineering
University, which trains in information warfare, by merging several other
institutes. The goal is to "educate a smaller number of people to take on
more responsibility," says an Asian military attache in Beijing.
Key to the restructuring is the creation of noncommissioned officers - those
between corporal and top sergeant who entered the military as grunts but
take on more responsibility, usually because of a technical skill and without
becoming high-level officers. In the past, soldiers who wanted to remain in
the army stayed foot soldiers, or else became fully commissioned officers.
It's a bigger change than it sounds. "If the only guy who can use advanced
equipment is an officer, what if he's taken out on the battlefield?" asks the
attache. By creating a corps of higher-trained soldiers and
noncommissioned officers, "they're meeting the pre-conditions for modern
warfare," he says.
The PLA has also tried to eliminate distractions to fighting wars; namely,
the temptations of business. In July last year, President Jiang suddenly
ordered the army to divest itself of tens of thousands of businesses, many
of which were using their military status to defy laws. Transport companies
run by the air force, for instance, were thought to run smuggling rings.
In most cases, the military has in fact divested by transferring assets to a
government ministry, which then finds state enterprises to take them over.
It's unclear how much the military is paid for its companies. On the whole,
though, the military seems to get the short end. Many had expected a
budget surplus this year to offset lost income from olive-drab enterprises.
That didn't happen - the budget increased 12.7%, about the same as the
year before.
The PLA has, however, managed to retain the lucrative industry it
considers most important - telecommunications. A joint venture involving a
PLA company, China Electronics Systems Engineering Corp., had won the
right to provide a type of mobile phone standard called CDMA to four
cities. A few months ago, the government announced that the right had
been revoked; another company would offer the service. Then in July, the
government reversed itself, China's cabinet announced that Cesec will
retain the right to offer the service.
Yet the vast majority of military firms were backward factories near
military bases that provided jobs to the families of officers who were too
poorly paid to live on military salaries. Local governments reluctantly
subsidized these money-losing concerns. But now that those factories are
no longer military, there's less reason to subsidize them, and many are
going bankrupt, to the consternation of PLA brass.
---
Mr. Forney is a reporter in The Asian Wall Street Journal's Beijing bureau.
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