How China is replacing America as Asia's military titan (2)

David Lague and Benjamin Kang Lim

Welcome to the second and concluding part of the joint article wnd, and this fact is the subject of a joint article by David Lague and Benjamin Kang Lim, titled: “How China is replacing America as Asia's military titan.”

Propaganda aside, Xi is proving far more assertive than his most recent predecessors in employing China’s new military power. In 2013, China began dredging and island-building in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, an area in which Beijing has competing territorial claims with the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brunei.

Xi personally directed these moves, according to a July 2017 commentary in Study Times, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party’s Central Party School. “It is the equivalent of building a Great Wall at sea,” the commentary said.

Extensive fortification of these outposts, including missile batteries, means that China has virtually annexed a vast swath of this ocean. Ahead of his May 30 appointment to head the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip Davidson told a Congressional committee that China was now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios “short of war.”

Xi is also stepping up military pressure on Taiwan, Japan and India. Alongside a massive arsenal of missiles capable of striking Taiwan, Chinese naval and air forces conduct increasingly complex exercises that regularly encircle the self-governing island.

The military hierarchy Xi inherited had become a law unto itself under Hu, according to Li Nan, a scholar of the Chinese military at the National University of Singapore. “It was out of control, in a sense,” said Li. “Now the power is centralized in the hands of Xi Jinping.”

This nondescript record appears to have worked in his favor. During his period as China’s paramount leader, President Jiang Zemin handpicked Xi for senior office because the younger man was perceived to lack ambition, according to sources with close ties to the Chinese leadership. Xi was also thought to be a pliable candidate because he lacked a power base, one source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

From the beginning, Xi’s corruption purge and promotion of loyal officers made it clear he had big plans for the PLA. Then, in mid-2015, he cut 300,000 mostly noncombat and administrative personnel before launching a sweeping overhaul of the military structure.

He broke up the four sprawling, Maoist-era “general departments” of the PLA that had become powerful, highly autonomous and deeply corrupt, said Li from the National University of Singapore. Xi replaced them with 15 new agencies that report directly to the Central Military Commission he chairs.

He also scrapped the seven geographically based military regions and replaced them with five joint-service theater commands. These new regional commands, comparable to those that govern the US armed forces, are responsible for military operations and have a strong focus on combining air, land, naval and other capabilities of the Chinese armed forces to suit modern warfare.

Xi also promoted favored commanders, many of them officers he knew in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, where he served the bulk of his early career as an official, according to Chinese and Western observers of the PLA. Others hail from his home province of Shaanxi or are fellow princelings.

At the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, Xi further tightened his grip over the top military leadership, paring the Central Military Commission from 11 members to seven and stacking it with loyalists. Xi knew most of them from Shaanxi and Fujian.

As he burnishes his military credentials, Xi draws on his early service in uniform. In speeches to military audiences, he describes himself as a soldier-turned-official, according to reports in the state-controlled media. In distinctive PLA camouflage fatigues, cap and combat boots, he has overseen some of the biggest military parades since the 1949 communist victory. In the most recent of these displays, Xi has taken the salute from the troops without sharing the podium with the usual line-up of fellow party leaders and elders.

In a massive naval exercise in April last year, Xi boarded the guided-missile destroyer Changsha to review the Chinese fleet of 48 warships in the South China Sea. State-run television showed the navy commander, Vice Adm. Shen Jinlong, and navy political commissar, Vice Adm. Qin Shengxiang, standing to attention as they reported to Xi and saluted. Xi then gave the order for the exercise to proceed.

Both navy chiefs are Xi proteges. Shen has been rapidly promoted under Xi, leapfrogging other, more senior officers, according to Chinese and Western analysts. Qin had worked closely with the Chinese leader in a top post in the Central Military Commission before his promotion in 2017 to his navy role, China’s official military media reported.

Xi was also in fatigues again in July 2017 at a massive military parade to mark the 90th anniversary of the PLA at the Zhurihe training ground in Inner Mongolia. He took the salute from the parade commander, Gen. Han Weiguo, an officer who served in Fujian while Xi was a party and government official in the province. Han has enjoyed a meteoric rise under Xi, being promoted to command China’s ground forces shortly after this parade.

 “Xi Jinping is obsessed with military parades,” said Willy Lam Wo-lap, a veteran observer of personnel movements in China’s military and political elites and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “He loves these demonstrations of raw power.”

As part of Xi’s martial image-building, the party’s propaganda machine portrays him as the leader responsible for a decisive pivot in China’s recovery from foreign conquest and colonial domination that began with the First Opium War in the mid-19th Century.

Music

In the opening scenes of the “Strong Military” documentary, Xi is shown boarding the guided-missile destroyer Haikou at Shekou port on Dec. 8, 2012, and sailing into the South China Sea for the first time since becoming party and military chief that year. As Xi looks to the horizon through binoculars, the narrator says: “As the warship pierces the waves, Xi Jinping peers toward a vision obscured in the mist of history when, 170 years ago, Western powers came from the sea to open the door to China, beginning a bitter nightmare for ancient China.”

The nightmare ends, according to the documentary, with the communist victory under Mao and the periods of growing economic and military power under former leaders Deng, Jiang and Hu. With Xi in charge, the series shows, a heavily armed China is poised to recover its former glory.

Propaganda aside, Xi is proving far more assertive than his most recent predecessors in employing China’s new military power. In 2013, China began dredging and island-building in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, an area in which Beijing has competing territorial claims with the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brunei.

Xi personally directed these moves, according to a July 2017 commentary in Study Times, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party’s Central Party School. “It is the equivalent of building a Great Wall at sea,” the commentary said.

Extensive fortification of these outposts, including missile batteries, means that China has virtually annexed a vast swath of this ocean. Ahead of his May 30 appointment to head the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip Davidson told a Congressional committee that China was now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios “short of war.”

Xi is also stepping up military pressure on Taiwan, Japan and India. Alongside a massive arsenal of missiles capable of striking Taiwan, Chinese naval and air forces conduct increasingly complex exercises that regularly encircle the self-governing island.

These exercises are designed to intimidate Taiwan and wear down its forces that must respond to these drills, according to some Taiwanese defense analysts. “They are obviously applying a lot of coercive power over Taiwan,” said Yang, the former Taiwan defense minister. Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province and is determined to bring it under mainland control.

In response to questions from Reuters, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it would continue to maintain surveillance and deploy aircraft and warships to “ensure the safety of our nation’s air and sea territory.”

Chinese naval and air forces are also increasing the tempo of deployments, exercises and patrols through the Japanese island chain. Japan’s annual military White Paper last year said China’s “unilateral escalation” of activities around Japan was arousing strong security concerns. Japanese interceptors scrambled 638 times in the past year against Chinese aircraft, the government reported this month, up almost 30 percent from the year before.

“China has expanded and intensified military activities not only in the East China Sea, but also in the Pacific Ocean and the seas around Japan,” the Japanese Defense Ministry said in response to questions from Reuters. “These activities appear aimed at improving operational capability and bolstering China’s presence.”

Despite these assertive moves, there are still questions from inside the PLA about the capacity of Chinese forces to compete with the United States and other advanced military powers. In numerous published commentaries, Chinese officers and strategists point to the PLA’s lack of experience in conflict, technological shortcomings and failure to introduce effective command and control.

Xi’s power grab and bold agenda also carry great risk for him personally, the party and China. There has been widespread speculation in China that the corruption crackdown in the military and a parallel purge of party and government officials is at least in part Xi’s response to a vicious, behind-the-scenes power struggle.

Rare evidence of this surfaced at a key gathering of top officials. On the sidelines of the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, Liu Shiyu, then China’s chief stock market regulator, accused a group of senior officials deposed in the purge of plotting a coup, including the disgraced former military chief Guo Boxiong. Earlier, the official military newspaper hinted at similar accusations, without citing evidence. Guo, who was imprisoned on corruption charges, could not be reached for comment. The Chinese government has not commented further on this allegation.

In bringing down so many powerful military and party leaders and their factions, Xi has made many dangerous enemies, say people with ties to the leadership. And steep increases in military spending will become more difficult to sustain if the growth of the debt-burdened Chinese economy continues to slow.

Still, Xi shows no sign of toning down his drive to galvanize the Chinese military. On Oct. 25, he toured the Southern Theater Command in the city of Guangzhou, the headquarters responsible for the contested South China Sea. State television showed Xi in fatigues and combat boots, striding through the command post with senior brass. Xi, state media reported, told officers to concentrate on “preparing for war and combat.”