China's Emergence as a Superpower (till 2014)

[Dayuhan]

That puts paid to China being a peaceful nation and carrying out legitimate activities.

And to the vehement protestations that China is no threat to Philippines!!!!!!

I didn't realize that news readers made policy in China. Muist be a strange place.

I wonder what new 'twist' the Chinese supporters will give.

I wouldn't know, find one and ask.

Dayuhan, you must be a very fine dancer. You buy six subs at once, you are in a mighty big hurry to get serious naval power. Period. Given the constraints of lead time for construction, building bases, training and working up crews and all the other things that go with it, 2009 was yesterday. That yesterday was before the current round of incidents, but after the incidents before that.

Besides, racing to buy all those subs starting just a very few years ago might be viewed as prescient.

You don't actually know that they were racing, or in a big hurry. They could easily have been discussing that purchase for a decade, and delaying it until it seemed affordable: e.g. until a period of consistent high economic growth. You're making assumptions based on your own picture of the situation.

Look here:

http://www.defence.gov.au/dio/documents/DET_10.pdf

Scroll to page 8, and you'll see that Vietnamese military spending actually decreased during the period in question: in absolute terms, as a % of GDP, and as a % of government spending.

Overall, the data in the charts on that page doesn't present much of an argument for a SE Asian arms race.

Do we have a major interest there? It seems to me the SCS is a tertiary concern for the US.

It would be a primary concern for anyone who wants to argue that the US needs to raise military spending, and certainly there are people with a strong vested interest in making that argument.

There's also a strong emotional component here that has nothing to do with any definable interest. It's difficult for some Americans to accept that the US could have a peer competitor in any part of the world, or that the US may not have absolute military superiority at all places at all times. However, given the economic realities, I'd say that's something we just need to learn to deal with: we've survived peer competition before, no reason we can't do it again. Insisting that the US must remain as the world's sole superpower regardless of economic capacity strikes me as an unrealistic and self-destructive policy goal.