Whatever China’s concerns and intentions, its capacity to act upon them in ways inimical to U.S. The PRC’s armed forces are not very good, and not getting better very fast. An enormous gap separates China’s military capabilities from its aspirations. That said, our main focus in this article is less on the PRC’s intentions, always subject to change in any event, than on its military capabilities. Moreover, China is plagued by enormous socioeconomic problems, whose solution requires maintaining good relations with the world’s major economic powers-and with the United States in particular. In addition, Beijing has recently taken a number of steps to cooperate with the United States on security matters: signing the Chemical Weapons Convention and nuclear test ban treaty, terminating its assistance to nuclear facilities in Pakistan, pledging to cut off ballistic missile transfers to Pakistan as well as nuclear and anti-ship cruise missile trade with Iran, and quietly restraining the North Koreans. interests are in fact not global or ideological but territorial in nature, and confined primarily to the islands and waterways to China’s south and southeast. Most of the Chinese aims that run counter to U.S.
More generally, Beijing appears poised to translate its growing economic power into greater military strength and geopolitical weight, as indeed a Chinese defense white paper acknowledged last year.ĭespite all of the above, we believe that the recent clamor over China’s strategic ambitions is greatly overblown. The PRC continues to criticize harshly America’s global alliance system and its assertive foreign policy. interests or, for that matter, with those of nearby countries. Chinese ambitions toward the Spratly Islands do not converge with U.S. The ongoing dispute over Taiwan, for example, is ripe for troublesome misperception. The PRC, then, has demonstrated a number of intentions and aims that warrant close American attention.
And now these questions have been given a new urgency by the espionage allegations contained in the Cox report. More recently, the PRC has undertaken a steady build-up of short-range missiles opposite Taiwan-hardly, it seems, a benign development, particularly when considered alongside President Jiang Zemin’s presumed goal of reuniting Taiwan with the Chinese mainland during his tenure in office. It also reinforced military facilities on the Spratly Islands, which China claims although they are hundreds of miles from its shores. In 1995, and then again in 1996, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) splashed missiles off the Taiwanese coast. How good is China’s military, and how much should the United States care? There are ample grounds for addressing these questions.
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