China and Kitthawk. A more detailed report


PPP: There a lot more meat in this report. Willy Lam is a former
senior journalist with the HK South China Morning Post(?) I believe.
He was a much respected journalist who provide inside stories of
mainland China usually not available to western journalists. After
the HK handover he ran afoul of the mainland authorities and was
forced out of his decades old newspaper post. After drifting awhile
professionally the American right wingers of course were delighted in
recruiting him. The Jamestown foundation is one of the more wellknown
American Think Tanks, a thinly disguised right wing, Israel is always
right, socialists and commies are evil type of place. Don't even ask
about Muslims. I am speculating on Willy's career choice. He
resisted at first and finally realised that he had to eat too. Other
publishers would use his articles as an independent contributor but
would never put him on staff lest they offend China.



China's show of strength ups military ante
By Willy Lam
December 1, 2007, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IL01Ad02.html

Large-scale air and naval maneuvers off China's southeast coast last
week demonstrated the post-17th Party Congress leadership's
determination to project hard power in view of tension in the Taiwan
Strait. The week-long war games, which coincided with Beijing's sudden
cancellation of the USS Kitty Hawk battle group's Hong Kong port call,
are also meant to convey Beijing's displeasure with Washington's
recent decision to sell weapons to



Taiwan and to honor the Dalai Lama.

Moreover, this show of force reflects the commitment of President Hu
Jintao, who was re-elected chairman of the Central Military Commission
(CMC) at the congress, to speed up the modernization of the People's
Liberation Army's (PLA) already formidable arsenal.

The military drills, which started on November 19, covered a wide
swath of the Pacific, including sensitive terrain east of Taiwan and
north of the Philippine archipelago. While official PLA media have
been reticent about the exercises, Hong Kong papers and
military-related websites in China noted that their purpose was to
simulate a "pincer attack" on Taiwan as well as a naval blockade.

Elite battalions from PLA Air Force units under the Guangzhou and the
Nanjing Military Regions, as well as the East and South China Sea
Fleets, were involved. They deployed hardware including Russian-made
Kilo-class submarines, Sovremmy-class destroyers and indigenously
developed Flying Leopard jet-fighters. Among new weapons tested at the
maneuvers were 022 stealth missiles and Russian-made SS-N-27 "Club"
anti-ship cruise missiles.

Several hundred commercial flights along China's southeast coast - the
majority of which originated from airports in Shanghai and Guangzhou -
were postponed during the exercises. It was not until last Saturday
that the East China Civil Aviation Bureau lifted the highly disruptive
aviation control (People's Daily, November 26). Li Jingao, an official
of the CAAC East China Air Traffic Management Bureau, claimed: "The
delay resulted from a backlog caused by the control in previous days."
Military analysts noted that PLA authorities did not want the Kitty
Hawk battle group - whose 8,000-odd sailors had earlier planned to
spend Thanksgiving in Hong Kong - to be in the vicinity.

This is despite the fact that during his visit to Beijing earlier this
month, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his hosts made new
pledges to boost confidence-building measures, including establishing
a military-to-military hotline. On a deeper level, the Kitty Hawk
incident reflected Beijing's anger at Washington's plan to sell Taiwan
a $940 million upgrade to its Patriot II anti-missile shield. Beijing
apparently also wanted to protest President George W Bush's presence
at a congressional ceremony last month honoring the Dalai Lama, leader
of Tibet's pro-independence movement and deemed a "separatist" by
Beijing.

There are also indications that this stupendous muscle-flexing was
targeting more than the usual suspects; for examples Taiwan and the
United States. Parts of the exercises took place close to the disputed
Paracel Islands, including the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa archipelagos in
the South China Sea, a few islets whose sovereignty is claimed by
Vietnam. Last Friday, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry pointed out that
the war games were a "violation of Vietnam's sovereignty".

Le Dung, the Vietnamese ministry's spokesman, said, "It is not in line
with the common perception of senior leaders of the two countries as
well as the spirit of the recent meeting between the two prime
ministers on the sidelines of the 13th ASEAN Summit in Singapore."

A Beijing source close to the Taiwan policy establishment said the
Central Military Commission and the Communist Party's Leading Group on
Taiwan Affairs - which is also headed by Hu - were worried about
possible "tricks" by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the
pro-independence ruling party in Taiwan, in the run-up to the
presidential elections scheduled for next March.

The source said that Beijing was most worried that the Taiwan military
might engineer a "military crisis" with the PLA, which would then
serve as a pretext for the DPP administration to postpone the
elections or even to impose martial law. Last Sunday, Taiwanese
President and DPP chairman Chen Shui-bian indicated that proclaiming
martial law was an option if the opposition Kuomintang (KMT, or
Nationalist Party) continues to side-step electoral procedures for the
upcoming Legislative Yuan elections.

While Chen later withdrew his threat, Beijing remained concerned that
the DPP leadership might again resort to wild cards given the fact
that the KMT presidential candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has consistently
outpolled the DPP's Frank Hsieh in island-wide surveys.

The Chinese civilian leadership has largely assumed a low profile on
the Taiwan issue. In his address to the 17th Congress, President Hu
even dangled the possibility of a "peace accord" with Taiwan. Yet the
post-17th Congress leadership has been at the same time hedging its
soft bet on the KMT by making thorough preparations for what Hu called
"military struggles" against pro-independence elements on the island.
As outgoing Defense Minister General Cao Gangchuan put it earlier this
month: "Should Chen Shui-bian be bold enough to concoct major events
[in the direction] of independence, we shall take drastic measures to
uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity at any cost."

The two most powerful bodies in the polity - the Politburo Standing
Committee (PSC) and the CMC - are filled with cadres and generals with
long-standing expertise on Taiwan. Three PSC members have served as
either governor or party secretary of Fujian, the "frontline province"
opposite Taiwan. They are Chairman of the Chinese People's Political
Consultative Conference Jia Qinglin, Secretary of the Central
Commission for Disciplinary Inspection He Guoqiang, and
fifth-generation rising star Xi Jinping, the front-ranked secretary of
the Central Committee Secretariat.

The CMC is replete with Taiwan Strait specialists. This include
Defense Minister designate General Liang Guanglie, a veteran commander
of war games off the Taiwan coast; the newly promoted Chief of General
Staff, General Chen Bingde, a former commander of the Nanjing Military
Region; Air Force Commander General Xu Qiliang, who was once based in
Fujian; and Naval Commander Admiral Wu Shengli, a former vice-chief of
the East Sea Fleet. Since becoming CMC chief in late 2004, Hu has
promoted a large number of alumni of the Nanjing Military Region,
which has "jurisdiction" over the strait.

On a larger scale, last week's provocative exercises tally with the
overall pattern of power projection that began early this year with
the destruction of an old weather satellite by state-of-the-art PLA
missiles. The feat, which apparently signaled Beijing's readiness to
join the militarization of space, was followed by the country's
successful effort late last month to put a Chinese-made satellite into
the moon's orbit.

Moreover, the PLA has for the past year deviated from its past
practice of keeping newly developed weapons under wraps. Semi-official
military websites regularly run stories and pictures that showcase the
prototypes or just-completed versions of soon-to-be-deployed hardware
ranging from the Jin-class submarine - which is capable of carrying
nuclear-tipped cruise missiles - to the nation's first aircraft
carrier.

Apart from telling Taiwan independence forces - and their sympathizers
in the United States and Japan - that Beijing has the wherewithal to
maintain national unity, Beijing is flexing its military muscle in a
fashion befitting an emerging quasi-superpower. Referring to the 17th
Congress, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences strategist Hong Yuan
pointed out that "the [defense] concerns of the new leadership and the
force projection of China's military have gone way beyond the Taiwan
Strait".

Hong sees the coming five years as "a period of rapid development in
areas ranging from the PLA's establishment, institutions and hardware
to the extent and means of force projection".

Moreover, the display of the country's new-found achievements in
weaponry and aeronautics serves to strengthen internal cohesiveness, a
long-standing Communist Party goal. As Premier Wen Jiabao put it on
Monday while displaying China's first close-up satellite pictures of
the moon: the feat is a "major manifestation of the increase in our
comprehensive national strength and the ceaseless enhancement of our
innovative ability". Wen added, "[The project] will have a tremendous
significance toward boosting the cohesiveness of the people."

Chinks in the Chinese armor, however, have become apparent in the
course of Beijing's bold display of military prowess. The latest war
games have demonstrated poor coordination among the Communist Party,
government and military departments. For example, it was not until
November 21 that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered its
snub to the Kitty Hawk (suggesting the delay may be the result of
policy discrepancy); however, the ministry reversed itself a day later
by saying that the Chinese had now granted permission to the port call
for "humanitarian reasons".

This was in apparent reference to the hundreds of the crew's family
members who had flown into Hong Kong in anticipation of Thanksgiving
festivities. The battle group, however, was well on its way back to
its Japan home base, and there was no question of it turning back to
Hong Kong.

The Kitty Hawk affair has cast a pall over seemingly positive
developments in US-Chinese military relations. Most notably, there is
the issue of military transparency, which was raised by Secretary
Gates during his visit to China. The military drills were not reported
by any official Chinese media. There are also indications that the PLA
did not alert relevant Chinese government departments, let alone
countries in the Asia-Pacific region, of the maneuvers.

These developments may also cast a shadow over the Chinese navy's
first-ever port call in Japan this week. The Shenzhen missile
destroyer will be in Japan for four days in what the two countries
hope will be a symbolic confirmation of the thaw in bilateral ties.

The increasing assertiveness of Hu and his generals, however, could
potentially stoke the "China threat" theory in Japan, the United
States, and Southeast Asian countries that still have territorial
disputes with China.

Willy Wo-Lap Lam is a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He
has worked in senior editorial positions in international media
including Asiaweek news magazine, South China Morning Post and the
Asia-Pacific Headquarters of CNN.

(This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation. Used with
permission.)






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