China's Emergence as a Superpower (till 2014)

[Dayuhan]

More on the pessimistic side... much discussion of economic implications, less on potential security/stability issues:

http://www.ibtimes.com/chinas-econom...owdown-1361579

[Firn]

It is a good catch which addresses some of current issues and the recent reactions on the state level.

I tend to believe that the stimulus was a too big and not aimed all too well but if you think back in 2008 the world seemed to come to an end and time was dear. This plus corruption, a partly cheating hand of the state and the implications of a increasingly mature economy were headwinds against a highly efficient allocation of that captial.

We should see in a couple of years roughly how big the multiplier of all that public spending was and how wisely the private sectors invested. In the end for all that talk about an Asian or Chinese way economics are everywhere the same, even if we still have a hard time to figure some of those laws out.

[davidbfpo]

Patrick Porter, an Australian academic strategist, writes an occasional blog column and his latest examines:

...a clash over the Taiwan Strait... in the end predicting the outcome of a China-Taiwan clash would not be about the absolutes of military victory narrowly conceived, but about the issue of cost tolerance and the fear of a Pyrrhic result.

Relations between Taiwan and Beijing have eased in the latest ‘detente.’ But some worry that their mutual aims regarding Taiwan’s ultimate sovereignty are still irreconcilable and that they could still deteriorate. One thing driving this anxiety is the shifting military balance between the two, moving in China’s favour. But assessments of the clash are still predominantly quantitative. The debate should focus primarily not just on China’s superior mass and technology, but on whether it would be willing to absorb the costs of an invasion compared to the Taiwanese’ willingness to tough it out.

Link:http://offshorebalancer.wordpress.co...iwans-defence/

[Dayuhan]

Is an actual invasion really a likely scenario? I always figured that if it came to shooting the Chinese would try to force Taiwan into submission with missile barrages. An invasion would be... complicated. It would be an invasion on the scale of the Normandy landings, in the age of satellite surveillance and guided missiles (the Taiwanese produce their own). There would be no element of surprise. Many Chinese coastal ports are well within the range of Taiwanese missiles. It's potentially a very costly affair.

[carl]

Patrick Porter, an Australian academic strategist, writes an occasional blog column and his latest examines:

Incorporated in Mr. Porter's calculations is the possibility that the Reds might have to deal with a post invasion Taiwanese insurgency and that might be a dissuasive factor. I don't think so. The Red Chinese have enough men to garrison Taiwan extremely heavily. Taiwan is an island and would be easy to cut off from outside supply, no guns for the guerrillas. And no sanctuary but the deep blue sea either. Finally, there are only about 23 million Taiwanese and with a birth rate per woman of .9 there aren't very many young men to do the insurging. The Reds could literally almost put 1 soldier for each Taiwanese male between 15 and 29 on the island to control it. And none of this is to mention the CCP proclivity for extreme brutality. If the island were ever taken, I think the chances of any kind of insurgency are zero.

[Ray]

China’s Deceptively Weak (and Dangerous) Military

In April 2003, the Chinese Navy decided to put a large group of its best submarine talent on the same boat as part of an experiment to synergize its naval elite. The result? Within hours of leaving port, the Type 035 Ming III class submarine sank with all hands lost. Never having fully recovered from this maritime disaster, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council never to have conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine.

China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built and operated an aircraft carrier. While it launched a refurbished Ukrainian built carrier amidst much fanfare in September 2012 – then-President Hu Jintao and all the top brass showed up – soon afterward the big ship had to return to the docks for extensive overhauls because of suspected engine failure; not the most auspicious of starts for China’s fledgling “blue water” navy, and not the least example of a modernizing military that has yet to master last century’s technology.

Indeed, today the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still conducts long-distance maneuver training at speeds measured by how fast the next available cargo train can transport its tanks and guns forward. And if mobilizing and moving armies around on railway tracks sounds a bit antiquated in an era of global airlift, it should – that was how it was done in the First World War.

In many ways, the PLA is weaker than it looks – and more dangerous.Yet while there is ample and growing evidence to suggest China could, through malice or mistake, start a devastating war in the Pacific, it is highly improbable that the PLA’s strategy could actually win a war. Take a Taiwan invasion scenario, which is the PLA’s top operational planning priority. While much hand-wringing has been done in recent years about the shifting military balance in the Taiwan Strait, so far no one has been able to explain how any invading PLA force would be able to cross over 100 nautical miles of exceedingly rough water and successfully land on the world’s most inhospitable beaches, let alone capture the capital and pacify the rest of the rugged island.

The PLA simply does not have enough transport ships to make the crossing, and those it does have are remarkably vulnerable to Taiwanese anti-ship cruise missiles, guided rockets, smart cluster munitions, mobile artillery and advanced sea mines – not to mention its elite corps of American-trained fighter and helicopter pilots. Even if some lucky PLA units could survive the trip (not at all a safe assumption), they would be rapidly overwhelmed by a small but professional Taiwan military that has been thinking about and preparing for this fight for decades.

Going forward it will be important for the U.S. and its allies to recognize that China’s military is in many ways much weaker than it looks. However, it is also growing more capable of inflicting destruction on its enemies through the use of first-strike weapons. To mitigate the destabilizing effects of the PLA’s strategy, the U.S. and its allies should try harder to maintain their current (if eroding) leads in military hardware. But more importantly, they must continue investing in the training that makes them true professionals. While manpower numbers are likely to come down in the years ahead due to defense budget cuts, regional democracies will have less to fear from China’s weak but dangerous military if their axes stay sharp.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/china.../?allpages=yes

The article does a very interesting analysis of the Chinese forces and its capabilities.

How far is the author valid in his contentions?

[Firn]

First I'm actually surprised that my posts were actually not that bad regarding the huge challenges facing the Chinese economy. I covered at least partly the inefficient overinvestment, the too heavy & cheating hand of the state the dangerous nature of the banking system, the financial repression and the WMP.

However I failed to note the key link between the high saving rate and the public overinvestment plus the financial repression. I likely overestimated the positive effect of the large rural labour pool and I was rather blind to the switch of a vast sector of the Chinese economy towards a capital-intensive one. All that capital with it's likely negative costs and all the bad incentives in the often corrupt public hands won't bring the corresponding return in public wealth. It is important to point out that the export sector with it's small and medium private enterprises is still labour-intensive.

A cool videographic of the Economist regarding migration. Keep in mind that the 'move to the West' makes me now think about Italian's strategy of closing the North-South gap. Short-term growth was achieved by big public works but in the long term it was a mostly a big waste of national ressources with much getting sliced off by corruption and the organized crime. It generally more inefficient to bring work places to the people instead of supporting people going to the work places. Brazil failed with a similar project in the some forty years ago. *

I have no idea how strong or able the Chinese military but there are at least two likely big problems for the Chinese leadership:

1) Taiwan on it's own seems unlikely to (quickly) fall to an invasion or to give up after conventional missile 'strategic bombing'

2) Taiwans allies could, as noted in the other thread, inflict in the longer run terrible damage on the Chinese economy by choking it's martime international and possibly coastal trade.

*I think there are strong arguments that some of the big public spending in Far-Wes is intended to incentivise the settlement of Han Chinese, to 'pacify' those provinces in the long term. This is of course a classic in history, with the Roman colonists and the British settlers in Ulster and the New World being famous examples.

[carl]

Ray:

I think that report is quite tendentious. Some of the things he says are meaningless. For example when he says the Reds still use Badger bombers as if that is a horrible fault. It doesn't matter if the Badger is old, what matters is the missile it carries. Shoot, we still use the B-52. The whole report if filled with things like that.

He also says the Reds can't do something they probably wouldn't even consider, heading straight across the Strait. A very large part of Taiwan's regular forces are on Kinmen island which is right off the mainland and depends upon the mainland for water. Another large chunk of their forces are on some other islands in the middle of the strait. I read an article that said the smart thing to do would be to take those places in sequence. Besides Taiwan is an island. You can blockade the place into submission.