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November 21, 2005

The Christian Science Monitor's China coverage is generally ahead of the curve, and a recent two-part series in the newspaper on China's military mobilization only confirms their position. The Chinese military has gotten far more capable in the past ten or fifteen years; it is now plausible for PLA officers to talk about China having a regional military strategy, even if it cannot yet implement it. Nevertheless, alarmism over China's potency is premature.

To take just one example of the differences in United States and Chinese power-projection capability even within Asia, within two weeks after last December's Asian tsunami, the Chinese military bragged that it had airlifted 500 tons of humanitarian relief to disaster-hit areas. The United States's airlift capability--during wartime--to the afflicted region exceeded that by several orders of magnitude, and this does not include the contributions made by the U.S. Navy.

Of course, as China's power grows, so will the temptation to use that power to assert Beijing's influence around the region--and not only in such traditional areas of concern as the Korean peninsula and Taiwan. The quasi-military disputes between Tokyo and Beijing over disputed offshore natural gas fields are one indication. Within the next decade or two, Chinese ships may make ceremonial patrols of the Straits of Malacca. And such temptations will not end there.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at November 21, 2005 08:47 AM

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