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A Player, but No Superpower
Why China's military is a threat to its neighbors, but shouldn't concern the United States on its home turf.
BY ANDREW S. ERICKSON, ADAM P. LIFF
On
March 5, at the opening of the National People's Congress, Beijing announced its official 2013 defense budget: roughly $114.3 billion, a 10.7 percent increase over the
previous year and, in nominal terms, nearly four times the official budget a
decade ago. This level of spending is enough to
make China a force in
its neighborhood, but not one to engage in combat
overseas.
Beijing
has long faced a much more
problematic geostrategic position than Washington has. The United States
borders two friendly neighbors and is buffered by massive oceans to its
east and west. It enjoys abundant natural resources and the most allies
in the world. China, by contrast, borders 14
countries (including four states with nuclear weapons) and has ongoing
disputes
with all its maritime neighbors, including its powerful rival, Japan.
Since the early
1990s, China has been surprisingly forthright about the
reasons it is strengthening its military: to catch up with other powers, to construct a more
capable and modern military force in order to assert its outstanding
territorial and maritime claims, and to secure its development on its own terms. It also wants to acquire prestige as a full-fledged "military great power" -- a status
its leaders appear
to increasingly see as necessary to enhance China's international standing. Despite technological inferiority through
most of the last two decades, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) utilized its geographical proximity to
potential hot spots in what it calls the "Near Seas" (the Yellow,
East China, and South China seas) to develop deterrents based on asymmetric technologies aimed at exploiting
the vulnerabilities in potential adversaries' expensive military technologies. China's
ballistic and cruise missiles, for
example, are cheaper to produce, deploy, and use to attack
enemy surface ships than the defensive systems necessary to protect would-be
targets. In short, China is increasing the potential cost for the United States
to intervene in the Near Seas.
Beijing
is still spending well
within its means. Its defense budget is
the
world's second-largest, but so is its economy. China's
military-spending growth is roughly consistent with its rising GDP
and is actually outpaced
by Beijing's rapid increase in state financial expenditures. China is no
Soviet Union, whose military spending ultimately stunted its economy, reaching unsustainable levels -- far higher proportionally than that of China today, even when
compared with high-end estimates of Beijing's actual spending.
China's
official defense budget
still doesn't capture all defense-related spending, but no country's
does. U.S. spending on nuclear weapons, as well as the hundreds of
billions of dollars in supplemental appropriations
that George W. Bush's administration used to fund operations in Iraq,
doesn't appear in
the official Pentagon budget. U.S. defense-related spending appears
clearly
in other official documents, but the same is true for at least one major
item China excludes from its
defense budget: spending on its paramilitary force, the People's Armed
Police,
which is published in annual
statistical yearbooks -- albeit without significant details -- under "Public
Security." Although China's
official budget figure remains far less transparent
than Pentagon spending, it appears
increasingly accurate. The U.S. Defense Department estimates that China's "total military-related spending" in
relation to Beijing's official defense-budget figure
has fallen from approximately 325 to 400 percent of official figures for 2002, to 143 to 214 percent
for 2008, to 113 to 170 percent
for 2011 -- a significant trend in Chinese budget
transparency.
Meanwhile,
the United States is convulsed by
debate over whether it can afford to maintain current defense-spending
levels. In China, however, rapid economic and tax-revenue growth has provided a rising budgetary tide,
allowing Chinese leaders the luxury of avoiding many tough decisions about
spending priorities. And there's no end in sight: The U.S.
National Intelligence Council predicts that China's GDP will surpass
that of the United States in purchasing-power-parity terms in 2022, and near
2030 at market exchange rates, suggesting that high defense spending may be sustainable for a long time.
Even with this
surging investment, there are several major obstacles to China's developing
military capabilities potent far beyond the Near Seas. Inefficiencies still weaken the
PLA, which has an estimated
2.285 million active-duty personnel, and dilute the impact of spending increases.
Some commentaries in
influential Chinese military journals have charged that the
PLA's procurement strategy increasingly focuses on mimicking overseas
developments in arms and equipment technology, even though more basic strategic
goals, like Beijing's island and maritime claims in the Near Seas, remain
unresolved. The PLA lacks robust
internal mechanisms for analyzing or evaluating its equipment procurement needs, and a growing percentage of the
defense budget appears to be earmarked toward prestige-driven, highly publicized,
and extremely expensive programs that don't yield top-end military capabilities.
China's aircraft "starter
carrier," for example, is not only extremely vulnerable to missiles and
submarines, but is also years away from reaching the capabilities that the United
States possesses today. And the reconnaissance options that China's manned
space program offers could be provided more cheaply via unmanned satellites.
Corruption remains
a serious problem in the military. "No country can defeat China," PLA
Gen. Liu Yuan said in meeting with
roughly 600 officers in December 2011. "Only our own corruption can destroy us
and cause our armed forces to be defeated without fighting." In February, Xi Jinping, China's soon-to-be president, launched a campaign to impose stricter discipline and oversight in the military.
Yet
it will take more than limiting military banquets
to "four dishes and a soup," a policy Xi has called for, to solve the PLA's
problems and enable it to become one of the world's most sophisticated
militaries. China scholar Minxin Pei has warned
that by
pursuing gradualist, incomplete reforms, Beijing risks a "trapped
transition" instead
of transformation into a full-fledged market economy. Signs of an
analogous trap are also apparent in the military, as it strives to
transition from a domestic, Near
Seas-focused, personnel-intensive
force to one characterized by a broader geographical mandate, advanced
technology, and innovation. A
slowdown in enhancement of
military capabilities
looms: The PLA's rapid
progress in recent years means that fewer easy
improvements and fixes remain.
But the closer the
PLA gets to possessing cutting-edge capabilities in defense technology,
the more
difficult it becomes to advance
further -- much of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked.
Well-educated and technologically capable personnel cost significantly
more to
attract, train, and retain than China's erstwhile massive peasant land
army, particularly when
private-sector alternatives provide significantly greater compensation.
Other personnel expenses -- including health care and retirement costs
-- which constitute major challenges to
the U.S. military budget, may hit China
even more rapidly given its less-favorable demographics.
Despite its
progress in modernizing and some remarkable new hardware, the PLA's war-fighting
capabilities still significantly trail those of the U.S. military. They may get
trapped there, even though a growing number of influential actors have called for China to expand its
military horizons. The likelihood that the PLA will get trapped in its region
-- with respect to high-end war-fighting capabilities -- will increase if Beijing's
growing military power and assertiveness lead its neighbors to further
accelerate their own counterbalancing. China's geographical, economic, and (in some cases)
technological advantages do not
transfer to capabilities that would allow it to
engage in high-intensity combat beyond the country's immediate periphery. In other
words, China can stir up the Near Seas, but can't make tsunamis beyond that.
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