China

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Every news channel I watched tonight had a package on how China, and her economy, will be the big story of 2008. Did anyone notice how China has avoided economic calamity? Did anyone notice the change of laws earlier this year allowing China to invest in US and UK banks?

Many people forget that the biggest discussion in politics before 9/11 was not terrorism, but rather US-Sino relations, especially following the Hainan island incident.

In my opinion, September 11 simply shifted the focus away from a problem that still remains: the growing threat China poses to US interests. While the US is embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan, with her military severely tested, we have to ask has the China ‘problem’ disappeared. Clearly the answer is no. It has simply taken a back seat.

John Ikenberry, who is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, writes in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs about this subject.

He is less afraid of growing Chinese power, but more concerned with how the US will cope with the changes over the next 20 years. He concludes:

The key thing for U.S. leaders to remember is that it may be possible for China to overtake the United States alone, but it is much less likely that China will ever manage to overtake the Western order. In terms of economic weight, for example, China will surpass the United States as the largest state in the global system sometime around 2020. (Because of its population, China needs a level of productivity only one-fifth that of the United States to become the world’s biggest economy.) But when the economic capacity of the Western system as a whole is considered, China’s economic advances look much less significant; the Chinese economy will be much smaller than the combined economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development far into the future. This is even truer of military might: China cannot hope to come anywhere close to total OECD military expenditures anytime soon. The capitalist democratic world is a powerful constituency for the preservation — and, indeed, extension — of the existing international order. If China intends to rise up and challenge the existing order, it has a much more daunting task than simply confronting the United States.

The “unipolar moment” will eventually pass. U.S. dominance will eventually end. U.S. grand strategy, accordingly, should be driven by one key question: What kind of international order would the United States like to see in place when it is less powerful?

This might be called the neo-Rawlsian question of the current era. The political philosopher John Rawls argued that political institutions should be conceived behind a “veil of ignorance” — that is, the architects should design institutions as if they do not know precisely where they will be within a socioeconomic system. The result would be a system that safeguards a person’s interests regardless of whether he is rich or poor, weak or strong. The United States needs to take that approach to its leadership of the international order today. It must put in place institutions and fortify rules that will safeguard its interests regardless of where exactly in the hierarchy it is or how exactly power is distributed in 10, 50, or 100 years.

Fortunately, such an order is in place already. The task now is to make it so expansive and so institutionalized that China has no choice but to become a full-fledged member of it. The United States cannot thwart China’s rise, but it can help ensure that China’s power is exercised within the rules and institutions that the United States and its partners have crafted over the last century, rules and institutions that can protect the interests of all states in the more crowded world of the future. The United States’ global position may be weakening, but the international system the United States leads can remain the dominant order of the twenty-first century.

He argues that the US needs the West - Europe etc - in order to survive in a new political order. We shall see, I guess. Can the US stomach a return to liberalism? A Democratic White House in 2008 would be a good start.

I do know investing in Asia Pacific and China over the next 25 years will pay rewards. It’s just figuring out how to do it properly.

What we can probably expect from China in the near future is specific demonstrations of strength—like its successful forcing down of a U.S. Navy EP-3E surveillance plane in the spring of 2001. Such tactics may represent the trend of twenty-first-century warfare better than anything now happening in Iraq—and China will have no shortage of opportunities in this arena. During one of our biennial Rim of the Pacific naval exercises the Chinese could sneak a sub under a carrier battle group and then surface it. They could deploy a moving target at sea and then hit it with a submarine- or land-based missile, demonstrating their ability to threaten not only carriers but also destroyers, frigates, and cruisers. (Think about the political effects of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, off the coast of Yemen in 2000—and then think about a future in which hitting such ships will be easier.) They could also bump up against one of our ships during one of our ongoing Freedom of Navigation exercises off the Asian coast. The bumping of a ship may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind that in a global media age such an act can have important strategic consequences. Because the world media tend to side with a spoiler rather than with a reigning superpower, the Chinese would have a built-in political advantage.

And so it has come to pass. Robert Kaplan wrote that in the Atlantic in June 2005. Just over two years later we have this:

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk - a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.

By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.

According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.

The Americans had no idea China’s fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication, or that it posed such a threat.

One Nato figure said the effect was “as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik” - a reference to the Soviet Union’s first orbiting satellite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age.

You can draw your own conclusions from the Chinese action.

James Fallows congratulates Liam Casey on his winning of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Casey was featured in the recent China special edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Fallows:

Casey informs me that in the last day or two he has received a number of congratulatory messages from contractors and business associates. These are not just about the august E&Y award but also about a long, detailed report on Casey’s company and the larger Shenzhen economy, which has just appeared in the local Guangzhou newspaper. It’s all in Chinese; it is illustrated with elegant photos by Michael Christopher Brown; in fact it is written by me; and it is a word-for-word translation of our original article. China’ cavalier approach to copyright and the whole notion of intellectual property: this time it’s personal.**

Cian has posted some pics from his recent adventures in China. So that’s what these young ‘uns do during their summer between college years - feck off to China for a month.

Wouldn’t have happened in my day.

Meanwhile, in Foreign Affairs two writers weigh up the recent Chinese anti-satellite missile test. Bates Gill holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is the author of Rising Star: China’s New Security Diplomacy. Martin Kleiber is a Research Assistant at CSIS.

Curiously and worryingly, they argue that the recent test was carried out without the consent of the regime, but was done independently by the PLA.

Why did Beijing act when it did? Why would China carry out such a provocation when it has so painstakingly built up its image as a “peacefully rising” country and a “responsible great power” seeking a more “harmonious world”? What kind of a counterpart is China?

The real answer may be simpler — and more disturbing. Put bluntly, Beijing’s right hand may not have known what its left hand was doing. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its strategic rocket forces most likely proceeded with the ASAT testing program without consulting other key parts of the Chinese security and foreign policy bureaucracy — at least not those parts with which most foreigners are familiar. This may be a more troubling prospect than anything the test might have revealed about China’s military ambitions or arms control objectives.

They believe that the same applied in the recent past:

In April 2001, soon after a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance plane collided, it became apparent that the Chinese military was not fully disclosing what it knew about the incident. Military authorities on Hainan Island, where the EP-3 was forced to land, did not provide full or accurate details of the incident to Beijing — especially not to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — frustrating efforts by U.S. and Chinese diplomats to resolve the crisis.

Similarly, in early 2003, the PLA at first suppressed information about the spread of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), even though military doctors in the Guangzhou Military Region had been aware of an outbreak in southern China since January. Even when SARS spread to major military hospitals in Beijing in late February and early March, the PLA did not report these cases to civilian authorities. The news broke out only after a whistle-blowing PLA doctor informed the media that one hospital had 60 SARS patients and had had six SARS-related deaths. The information appeared in Time magazine in early April, prompting the Chinese government to mobilize to confront SARS and deal with the PLA’s cover-up.

Any new US administration will find it hard to deal with a regime who has ASAT tests such as the recent one - not only did it come completely out of the blue, it also is thought to be the bigget man-made creation of space debris:

For years, Chinese nuclear strategists had been quietly warning their U.S. counterparts that the PLA was working toward acquiring an ASAT capability. The most recent test was part of an ongoing series of ASAT trials, including one involving laser weapons that blind satellites. But the 2006 Pentagon report on the PLA’s modernization appears to have underestimated China’s capabilities: it claimed that China could destroy or disable a satellite only by attacking it with a nuclear-armed missile. In January, the PLA successfully tracked and destroyed a satellite with a direct, kinetic impact, suggesting that it was further along than the U.S. government had assumed.

This realization surely will prompt more scrutiny of China’s aerospace programs. The ASAT incident has already breathed new life into U.S. missile defense projects and the development of advanced technologies to counter the threat that China and other countries may pose to U.S. space-based assets. And it will strengthen arguments for proposed regulations that would impose tough export controls and further restrict high-tech trade with China, particularly in aerospace and information technologies.

The ASAT test has also cast doubt on China’s reliability as a global partner. China’s move, many informed observers believe, has generated and thrown into orbit more space debris than any other single human event, putting at risk China’s own satellites and those of other countries for decades to come. In performing the test, Beijing not only demonstrated its capacity to threaten U.S. military assets in space but also showed a lack of concern for other countries’ interest in the safe operation of satellites for day-to-day civilian activities, such as weather forecasting, financial transactions, and telephone calls.

They conclude:

For Beijing, preventing miscommunication will require better controlling the signals it sends to its neighbors and the United States. It is up to the leadership in Beijing to decide how to do this — by showing a greater willingness to break through the country’s legendary stovepiped bureaucracy, by establishing a more effective interagency process, by bringing more key players from across the security and foreign policy bureaucracy to engage with international partners, by strengthening the hand of state ministries and reining in the PLA. All of these would be difficult undertakings. But China’s growing weight in world affairs means that Beijing must do more to demonstrate its stated intentions. In the meantime, the United States — and much of the rest of the world — will be left wondering what kind of partner China can actually be.

I had not realised the PLA were such a rogue element within the regime. Military coup anyone?

Holy fuck. I genuinely had no idea that US nuclear missiles had increased in accuracy by such a degree in the last 15 years. Assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame Keir Lieber and Daryl Press who was a consultant on military analysis projects for the U.S. Department of Defense for 13 years, write in the Atlantic’s China special about any war between the US and China. The statistic:

During the Cold War, U.S. submarines posed little danger to China’s silos, or to any other hardened targets. Each warhead on the Trident I missiles had little chance—roughly 12 percent—of success. Not only were those missiles inaccurate, their warheads had a relatively small yield. (Similarly, until the late 1980s, U.S. ICBMs lacked the accuracy to carry out a reliable disarming attack against China.) But the Navy’s new warheads and missiles are far more lethal. A Trident II missile is so accurate, and the newer W88 warhead so powerful, that if the warhead and missile function normally, the destruction of the silo is virtually assured (the likelihood is calculated as greater than 99 percent).

In reality, American planners could not assume such near-perfect results. Some missiles or warheads could malfunction: One missile’s rockets might fail to ignite; another’s guidance system might be defective. So a realistic counterforce plan might assign four warheads to each silo. The U.S. would “cross-target” the missiles, meaning that the warheads on each missile would each go to different silos, so that a silo would be spared only if many missiles malfunctioned. Even assuming that 20 percent of missiles malfunctioned—the standard, conservative assumption typically used by nuclear analysts—there is a 97 percent chance that every Chinese DF-5 silo would be destroyed in a 4-on-1 attack. (By comparison, a similar attack using Cold War–era Trident I missiles would have produced less than a 1 percent chance of success. The leap in American counterforce capabilities since the end of the Cold War is staggering.)

And casualties from any US first strike on Chinese silos could be quite low:

Improved accuracy now allows war planners to target hardened sites with low-yield warheads and even airbursts. And the United States is pushing its breakthroughs in accuracy even further. For example, for many years America has used global-positioning systems in conjunction with onboard inertial-guidance systems to improve the accuracy of its conventionally armed (that is, nonnuclear) cruise missiles. Although an adversary may jam the GPS signal near likely targets, the cruise missiles use GPS along their flight route and then—if they lose the signal—use their backup inertial-guidance system for the final few kilometers. This approach has dramatically improved a cruise missile’s accuracy and could be applied to nuclear-armed cruise missiles as well. The United States is deploying jam- resistant GPS receivers on other weapons, experimenting with GPS on its nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, and planning to deploy a new generation of GPS satellites—with higher-powered signals to complicate jamming.

The payoff for equipping cruise missiles (or nuclear bombs) with GPS is clear when one estimates the civilian casualties from a lower-yield, airburst attack. We asked Matthew McKinzie, a scientific consultant to the Natural Resources Defense Council and coauthor of the 2006 study, to rerun the analysis using low-yield detonations compatible with nuclear weapons currently in the U.S. arsenal. Using three warheads per target to increase the odds of destroying every silo, the model predicts fewer than 1,000 Chinese casualties from fallout. In some low-yield scenarios, fewer than 100 Chinese would be killed or injured from fallout. The model is better suited to predicting fallout casualties than to forecasting deaths from the blast and fire, but given the low population in the rural region where the silos are, Chinese fatalities would be fewer than 6,000 in even the most destructive scenario we modeled. And in the future, there may be reliable nonnuclear options for destroying Chinese silos. Freed from the burden of killing millions, a U.S. president staring at the threat of a Chinese nuclear attack on U.S. forces, allies, or territory might be more inclined to choose preemptive action.

I guess this would beg the question as to why the US needs missile defence. If they can take out the entire Chinese arsenal in one go, how hard would it be to take out the whole of Iran’s future arsenal?

China are holding off on a space walk - but their prowess (regardless of reliance on Russian technology) is increasing.

China’s planned space walk mission has been put back by six months and will not now take place until 2008.

The scheduled launch of the Shenzhou VII rocket will be the country’s third manned mission, but senior consultant to the country’s space programme, Huang Chunping, admitted that “Shenzhou VII was a complicated program that needed careful tests and trials”, New Scientist reports.

This week’s Economist carries a special report on China, I thought this map to be quite interesting. It details US troop deployments in countries within China’s reach.

In Central Asia, the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a security forum comprising four Central Asian states plus China and Russia, is increasingly challenging America’s military presence in the region. In July the SCO, prompted by China and Russia, demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from member states. In August, China and Russia staged their first joint military manoeuvres since the cold war. “Peace Mission 2005”, billed as a counter-terrorist exercise, looked far more like preparation for a Chinese assault on Taiwan.

On the Korean peninsula, China and America have been drawn together by a common desire to prevent tensions over North Korea’s nuclear programmes from turning into a full-blown crisis. America has praised China’s role in hosting talks aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its projects. But China has also deftly used the process to boost its ties with South Korea, a participant in the talks whose conciliatory approach to the north is often closer to China’s than America’s.

Despite tensions between South Korea and America over how to handle North Korea, their defence relationship remains solid for now. But China has an eye on the longer term when, if relations between the two Koreas improve sufficiently, greater uncertainty will arise about the need for American bases in the south.

It looks like a success for China, their prowess in space technology continues to grow.

Events like this might not seem all that important right now. But the next big area up for grabs is space, and whoever dominates space will dominate the planet. Hence the rising American interest in both protecting it’s existing assets in orbit, and it’s plans to stop anyone else from having as much dominance as they do. It’s what any hegemon in it’s right mind would do.

It might seem in the realms of science fiction now, but it really is inevitable that space-based weapons will become a reality, treaties will be ignored. And think about it, whoever controls an orbital array can strike anywhere in the world at any time, with a non-nuclear weapon that can and would be used. It’s a ticket to global dominance that would be quite difficult to overcome, and Russia and China would not be up to it combatting it alone.

New Scientist has more here.

Perhaps the most interesting essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is about China’s energy strategy. David Zweig, Director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the author of Internationalizing China: Domestic Interests and Global Linkages and Bi Jianhai, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the center.

What I noticed about the essay was often the Malacca Straits were mentioned:

Negotiations for a pipeline that would transport Caspian Sea oil to China through Kazakhstan are slowly moving forward, but China remains heavily dependent on international sea-lanes, especially through the Strait of Malacca and other navigational chokepoints, to bring oil from Africa and the Middle East.

But its growing dependence on oil, especially from the Middle East, will make it more actively concerned with sea-lanes, in particular the Strait of Malacca and the Taiwan Strait, both of which its oil tankers use. Zhang Yuncheng, an expert at the Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations, in Beijing, believes that China would face an energy crisis if its oil supply lines were disrupted and that whoever controls the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean could block China’s oil transport route.

Concerns about safety in the Strait of Malacca are not new, but the potential for terrorism to target oil tankers in the region has understandably been taken more seriously since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Although the coastal states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have long patrolled the strait to ensure free passage, now that four-fifths of China’s imported oil comes through it, Beijing increasingly shares that interest. The Taiwan Strait has also long been a source of concern, since it is seen as a possible battleground between China and Taiwan were Taipei ever to declare full sovereignty. With China increasingly reliant on foreign resources, Beijing is now also worried that Taiwan could threaten China’s supplies.

But China’s oceangoing navy is small, and with a U.S. naval base at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, and India’s navy dominating the mouth of the Strait of Malacca, Beijing seems to feel vulnerable about its limited capacity to patrol on its own. President Hu has reportedly commented on the problem, which he calls “the Malacca dilemma,” and considers it key to China’s energy security. He is concerned that “certain powers [read 'the United States'] have all along encroached on and tried to control the navigation through the strait.”

Speaking at a conference at Hong Kong University last February, he argued that countries along the Strait of Malacca have the main responsibility to protect the strait and that China is willing to cooperate with them. He also expressed the hope that China, Japan, and South Korea could work together to ensure the flow of energy to Northeast Asia. And although he said that he believes U.S. influence is expanding in the Strait of Malacca, he expressed no concern about it. Thus, although Beijing is trying to build its own capacity to secure sea-lanes, it clearly wishes to continue to cooperate with — and sometimes free-ride on — the United States, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, to keep the straits open.

That both governments want stability in the Malacca and Taiwan straits does not pit them against each other — just the opposite. Moreover, developing an oceangoing navy to defend far-off sea-lanes is an arduous and expensive project, which will take Beijing decades to complete. In the meantime, China must cooperate with the United States to maintain its sea-passage security, in particular the security of its energy shipping lanes. This should not be a problem, so long as China and the United States avoid war over Taiwan.

So what you might say. Here is a Wiki reference on the Malacca Straits.

The essay is also full of various jibes and apparent sneering (at least in my estimation) at US foreign policy. For example in relation to the oil trade with Sudan, despite massive human rights violations there:

Beijing has brushed off accusations that it is helping to prop up Khartoum. “Business is business. We try to separate politics from business,” said then Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong in the summer of 2004. “I think the internal situation in the Sudan is an internal affair, and we are not in a position to impose upon them.” Meanwhile, Beijing has deftly protected its oil interests there. In September 2004, it successfully watered down a UN resolution condemning Khartoum, undermining U.S. efforts to threaten sanctions against Sudan’s oil industry. As if oblivious to the tensions created by Beijing’s maneuvering, two highly respected Chinese professors argued this past April that China’s assistance in turning Sudan into an oil-exporting state shows how China is raising standards of living in the developing world.

To their assertion that by buying oil from Sudan, China is helping raise the standards of living in Sudan I say, well, bullshit. Buying oil from a country does not necessarily equate to this, nor it seems, does it ever happen. It is argued that:

According to Homi Kharas, a chief economist at the World Bank, 45 percent of China’s total annual imports come from developing countries, and these sales help developing states offset the increased cost of crude oil and gas.

But surely suggesting that China is doing developing countries a favour is a little much?

I digress. In relation to the issue of the Malacca Stait, the writers note:

In February, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that although the Pentagon was watching China’s growing naval power, he could not confirm reports that in a decade the size of the Chinese fleet would surpass that of the U.S. Navy. But in May, Rumsfeld challenged Beijing to explain why it is increasing its military investments when China faces no major threat. Assistant Secretary of State Hill, for his part, does not perceive China as a serious threat to the United States; he has said that China’s rise is not a zero-sum game for Washington. Others claim that China will need to expand more than its military capacity to remain secure. Bernard Cole of the National War College, for example, has argued that “Beijing will not be able to rely on its navy alone to protect its vital [sea-lanes], but will have to engage [in] a range of diplomatic and economic measures to ensure a steady supply of energy resources.”

Cui Tiankai, the director general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, has confirmed the view that whatever Beijing’s efforts to boost its navy, China will continue to rely heavily on diplomacy and cooperation. Speaking at a conference at Hong Kong University last February, he argued that countries along the Strait of Malacca have the main responsibility to protect the strait and that China is willing to cooperate with them. He also expressed the hope that China, Japan, and South Korea could work together to ensure the flow of energy to Northeast Asia. And although he said that he believes U.S. influence is expanding in the Strait of Malacca, he expressed no concern about it. Thus, although Beijing is trying to build its own capacity to secure sea-lanes, it clearly wishes to continue to cooperate with — and sometimes free-ride on — the United States, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, to keep the straits open.

Reading between the lines it is safe to assume that once China has a blue-water navy, and that is their aim, the need for diplomacy and cooperation will be lessened. Considering the rumours that China recently started construction on a 78,000 tonne aircraft carrier I think it is safe to assume that in tandem with the growth in GDP of the Chinese economy, the Chinese military will continue to grow until such time that it can safely defend its commercial fleet and secure the Malacca Strait should it need to.

I spent the morning reading essays in the latest issues of Foreign Affairs, as ever there lots, and all make very interesting reading. One that caught my attention in my particular was by Zheng Bijian, Chair of the China Reform Forum, a nongovernmental and nonprofit academic organization. He has also drafted key reports for five Chinese national party congresses and held senior posts in academic and party organizations in China.

His essay concerns China’s future, where he believes China will act entirely peacefully, but will not make exceptions when it comes to doing business with rogue regimes, as the US would wish.

He begins with some facts:

Since starting to open up and reform its economy in 1978, China has averaged 9.4 percent annual GDP growth, one of the highest growth rates in the world. In 1978, it accounted for less than one percent of the world economy, and its total foreign trade was worth $20.6 billion. Today, it accounts for four percent of the world economy and has foreign trade worth $851 billion — the third-largest national total in the world. China has also attracted hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment and more than a trillion dollars of domestic nonpublic investment. A dozen years ago, China barely had mobile telecommunications services. Now it claims more than 300 million mobile-phone subscribers, more than any other nation. As of June 2004, nearly 100 million people there had access to the Internet.

That is 100 million accessing the Chinese version of the Internet don’t forget.

He goes on to outline 3 primary ‘grand’ strategies:

The first strategy is to transcend the old model of industrialization and to advance a new one. The old industrialization was characterized by rivalry for resources in bloody wars and by high investment, high consumption of energy, and high pollution. Were China to follow this path, it would harm both others and itself. China is instead determined to forge a new path of industrialization based on technology, economic efficiency, low consumption of natural resources relative to the size of its population, low environmental pollution, and the optimal allocation of human resources. The Chinese government is trying to find new ways to reduce the percentage of the country’s imported energy sources and to rely more on China’s own. The objective is to build a “society of thrift.”

The second strategy is to transcend the traditional ways for great powers to emerge, as well as the Cold War mentality that defined international relations along ideological lines. China will not follow the path of Germany leading up to World War I or those of Germany and Japan leading up to World War II, when these countries violently plundered resources and pursued hegemony. Neither will China follow the path of the great powers vying for global domination during the Cold War. Instead, China will transcend ideological differences to strive for peace, development, and cooperation with all countries of the world.

The third strategy is to transcend outdated modes of social control and to construct a harmonious socialist society. The functions of the Chinese government have been gradually transformed, with self-governance supplementing state administration. China is strengthening its democratic institutions and the rule of law and trying to build a stable society based on a spiritual civilization. A great number of ideological and moral-education programs have been launched.

He concludes:

China does not seek hegemony or predominance in world affairs. It advocates a new international political and economic order, one that can be achieved through incremental reforms and the democratization of international relations. China’s development depends on world peace — a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.

Is it just me or does that sound really really nice, but just not very believable?

So Rupert Murdoch is criticising Yahoo for its policies in China. Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York during the UN summit, the Economist reports that Murdoch castigated Yahoo:

FIERCELY independent media mogul and defender of democracy everywhere—that was the Rupert Murdoch on display at a Bill Clinton-organised conference in New York on September 16th. The News Corporation chairman castigated Yahoo! for leading Chinese authorities to the identity of a local dissident journalist, subsequently jailed for ten years. He excoriated Beijing’s policymakers as “paranoid�? for reversing an opening of the mainland media market. And he admitted that his own business in China had “hit a brick wall�?. In August, News Corporation’s Star TV had its innovative joint-venture with Qinghai Satellite, a regional broadcaster, cancelled; and since July, it has been investigated for illegally selling decoders to forbidden News Corp channels.

What is curious is that despite trying to cosy up to a succession of Chinese Presidents, Murdoch still remains on the periphery of the media landscape, perhaps is because he is not towing the line as Yahoo and Microsoft have been.

Richard Waghorne recently noted the staggering statistics about China in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs:

Consider this sobering information: the most recent influenza pandemic, of 1968-69, emerged in China, when its population was 790 million; today it is 1.3 billion. In 1968, the number of pigs in China was 5.2 million; today it is 508 million. The number of poultry in China in 1968 was 12.3 million; today it is 13 billion. Changes in other Asian countries are similar. Given these developments, as well as the exponential growth in foreign travel over the past 50 years, an influenza pandemic could be more devastating than ever before.

I am very concerned about the inevitable flu pandemic that will hit the world, and based on the 1918-19 pandemic we could be in for quite a few deaths. While one can’t directly relate population figures to death rates from the 1918-19 pandemic to now, one could hazard a guess.

The population of the world in 1919 was circa 2 billion, it now stands at over 6.5 billion. Estimated deaths in 1919 were 100 million globally, but that figure could be much higher. Given the ease of travel, increases in medical technology (at least in the West where they can be implemented), and the ratio of poor to rich people in the world, what would be a fair figure to guess at for projected deaths from the next pandemic? I would hazard 500 million, but feel free to point to any studies into this.

So for those of us in the small island at the edge of Europe, what precautions have been taken? I have no idea, so I fired off an email to the NDSC:

Q. Are you aware of any specific precautionary measures the Irish government have taken with regard to a possible or indeed inevitable influenza pandemic?

Q. Are there any plans or trials to license the sale of antiviral drugs such as oseltamivir phosphate, amantadine or rimantadine?

Q. Given that zanamivir is the only licensed antiviral, have the government stockpiled this drug in any way, shape, or form?

Q. How many mechanical ventilators are there available in the Republic, and are there any stockpiled?

Q. How quickly could Ireland gain adequate numbers of vaccines in the event of an outbreak of Type A influenza?

Q. Does the Irish government have any specific emergency planning in relation to an influenza pandemic?

I will let you know how it goes.

A little disturbing:

In Britain, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States.

In France, 58 percent had an upbeat view of China, compared with 43 percent who felt that way about the U.S. The results were nearly the same in Spain and the Netherlands.

The United States’ favorability rating was lowest among three Muslim nations which are also U.S. allies — Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan — where only about one-fifth of those polled viewed the U.S. in a positive light.

Only India and Poland were more upbeat about the United States, while Canadians were just as likely to see China favorably as they were the U.S.

Why is China seen in such a good light?

I meant to post this a while ago, but Atlantic journalist Robert Kaplan has responded to criticism of his recent cover story. He deals with some of the issues raised, that I mentioned here. It seems Kaplan was mostly responding to Thomas Barnett, as he deals specifically with issues Barnett raised. Kaplan notes:

The article has elicited some rants on the Web that express the following concerns. First, that in return for highlighting the military viewpoint, I am granted unusual access to the military. In fact, I am granted access because I am willing to spend six months yearly away from my family, out of e-mail contact for weeks on end, living in tight quarters with enlisted men, on deployments that the public would find fascinating but rarely gets to hear about because they often lack hard-news value. Any reporter, including a left-wing one, willing to do this would find many doors open for him in the military. Second, and related, is the criticism that I have bought into the Pacific Command-Navy view of the world. The PACOM view of the world is one that I judge to be worth knowing, especially as it constitutes one of the big blocks of the China story that has gotten relatively little attention from the media. The PACOM viewpoint offends those on the right who see nothing good about China because it is not yet a democracy, and thus believe that the whole concept of managing and constraining China’s military is doomed to fail without more hard-line policies. It also offends those on the other side of the political aisle, who define any reference to China’s growing military capability as war-mongering. Pacific Command, whatever its shortcomings and internal divisions, falls in the reasonable middle between these extremes. My conclusion is expressed in the article’s last “callout”: that China’s reemergence is natural and legitimate. But PACOM, as a military organization, is forced to think in worst-case scenarios, even as it chooses moderate Bismarckian methods to prevent their occurrence. I have internalized that outlook in my narrative.

Remember, we worst-cased the scenario in our original invasion of Iraq and got the best possible result. But we best-cased the occupation and got the worst possible result. Worst-casing China may be the way to peaceful outcomes.

This article introduces PACOM to the reader. That is probably the most important thing that it does, because I’m making a bet in this article: that PACOM is going to be in the news a lot over the next years and decades. Even if China emerges peacefully, there is going to be relatively more military activity in the Pacific. Yet PACOM is not monolithic, and will change. The new combatant commander, Admiral William Fallon, a carrier aviator, comes from a different tradition than the previous PACOM commander, Admiral Thomas Fargo, a submariner. Admiral Fallon may turn out to be more of a traditionalist in regards to China and other matters. Submariners—who have been very active in the post-Cold War off the coasts of the Balkans, Iraq, and elsewhere—can tend to be a bit more aggressive.

On the subject of aircraft carriers specifically:

We will have aircraft carriers or the equivalent of them through most of this new century. The question is, Should we invest in building even more of them? Or rather, should we just keep upgrading the ones we have in a slow gradual phase-out over many decades? This is something about which there are terrible fights that get very, very technical. The bad thing about putting all your marbles in carriers is that at some point adversaries will be able to penetrate their defense shield. The good thing about them, as you saw during the tsunami, is they’re offshore bases for all intents and purposes.

Apologies to those who have not been following this debate.

Nick Kristoff’s piece about China and blogging has been making the rounds on the blogosphere - it is a good piece, and well worth a read. To save you clicking the link, here’s the whole thing:

The Chinese Communist Party survived a brutal civil war with the Nationalists, battles with American forces in Korea and massive pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. But now it may finally have met its match - the Internet.

The collision between the Internet and Chinese authorities is one of the grand wrestling matches of history, visible in part at www.yuluncn.com.

That’s the Web site of a self-appointed journalist named Li Xinde. He made a modest fortune selling Chinese medicine around the country, and now he’s started the Chinese Public Opinion Surveillance Net - one of four million blogs in China.

Mr. Li travels around China with an I.B.M. laptop and a digital camera, investigating cases of official wrongdoing. Then he writes about them on his Web site and skips town before the local authorities can arrest him.

His biggest case so far involved a deputy mayor of Jining who is accused of stealing more than $400,000 and operating like a warlord. One of the deputy mayor’s victims was a businesswoman whom he allegedly harassed and tried to kidnap.

Mr. Li’s Web site published an investigative report, including a series of photos showing the deputy mayor kneeling and crying, apparently begging not to be reported to the police. The photos caused a sensation, and the deputy mayor was soon arrested.

Another of Mr. Li’s campaigns involved a young peasant woman who was kidnapped by family planning officials, imprisoned and forcibly fitted with an IUD. Embarrassed by the reports, the authorities sent the officials responsible to jail for a year.

When I caught up with Mr. Li, he was investigating the mysterious death of a businessman who got in a financial dispute with a policeman and ended up arrested and then dead.

All this underscores how the Internet is beginning to play the watchdog role in China that the press plays in the West. The Internet is also eroding the leadership’s monopoly on information and is complicating the traditional policy of “nei jin wai song” - cracking down at home while pretending to foreigners to be wide open.

My old friends in the Chinese news media and the Communist Party are mostly aghast at President Hu Jintao’s revival of ideological slogans, praise for North Korea’s political system and crackdown on the media. The former leaders Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji are also said to be appalled.

Yet China, fortunately, is bigger than its emperor. Some 100 million Chinese now surf the Web, and e-mail and Web chat rooms are ubiquitous.

The authorities have arrested a growing number of Web dissidents. But there just aren’t enough police to control the Internet, and when sites are banned, Chinese get around them with proxy servers.

One of the leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement, Chen Ziming, is now out of prison and regularly posts essays on an Internet site. Jiao Guobiao, a scholar, is officially blacklisted but writes scathing essays that circulate by e-mail all around China. One senior government official told me that he doesn’t bother to read Communist Party documents any more, but he never misses a Jiao Guobiao essay.

I tried my own experiment, posting comments on Internet chat rooms. In a Chinese-language chat room on Sohu.com, I called for multiparty elections and said, “If Chinese on the other side of the Taiwan Strait can choose their leaders, why can’t we choose our leaders?” That went on the site automatically, like all other messages. But after 10 minutes, the censor spotted it and removed it.

Then I toned it down: “Under the Communist Party’s great leadership, China has changed tremendously. I wonder if in 20 years the party will introduce competing parties, because that could benefit us greatly.” That stayed up for all to see, even though any Chinese would read it as an implicit call for a multiparty system.

So where is China going? I think the Internet is hastening China along the same path that South Korea, Chile and especially Taiwan pioneered. In each place, a booming economy nurtured a middle class, rising education, increased international contact and a growing squeamishness about torturing dissidents.

President Hu has fulminated in private speeches that foreign “hostile forces” are trying to change China. Yup, count me in - anybody who loves China as I do would be hostile to an empty Mao suit like Mr. Hu. But it’s the Chinese leadership itself that is digging the Communist Party’s grave, by giving the Chinese people broadband.

Kaplan’s Atlantic cover story has stirred quite a hornet’s nest of discussion. It stems from a rather heated response by Thomas Barnett. This led to it being reproduced by praktike over at Liberals Against Terrorism. Matthew Yglesias then got involved in the ‘aircraft carrier’ debate, if you can call it that. He also points to a piece in TAP by Ted Carpenter and Justin Logan. Instapundit later picked up the Yglesias remarks.

While I do take some of the points made in criticism of Kaplan, I would not agree with some of the rather ill-considered arguments of Barnett. One of the main bones of contention is this passage from Kaplan’s piece, which is debated at length over on Yglesias’ blog.

To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range—all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile’s hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers.

Another post, another month. I see Kaplan’s piece has appeared in the Atlantic. More soon.

Robert Kaplan said some things that got my interest in an interview he did recently on BookTV. He recently spent an amount of time on a US missile cruiser in the Pacific, and believes that the next major military buildup may be in the field of naval power. His remarks are well worth reading:

China is re-emerging as a great power, the way we [United States] emerged as a power in the late 1870s and the 1880s. What happened? We had all this economic dynamism as a result of the industrial north’s victory in the Civil War, and as a result we had Marine landings in the Samoas, in the Hawaiian islands, on the western coast of South America. Because our dyanamic economy, let us go, forced us to go outward to protect new interests, trading interests, and once we were out there in the Samoas and Hawaii suddenly we were interested in Japan and even futher. So we didn’t expand consciously with any nefarious imperialistic motive, it was just a dynamic society and economy forced us outward, and gave us greater ambitions.

You can see that happening in China today. China is not just developing light quiet diesel submarines, but nuclear submarines. Which means it has oceanic, bluewater, i.e. imperial, ambitions throughout the Pacific. They may not be democrats but they want to provide a first world liberating life style for a good chunk of their 1.3 billion citizens, which means protecting energy and sea lanes from the Middle East. And they are not going to depend on the US Navy and the burgeoning Indian Navy to do that….What we are entering upon is a new naval-oriented cold war with China. It need not be violent, it might contain and deter China hopefully without needlessly provoking it. But we will be challenged in the Pacific by the Chinese Navy.

I had Kaplan’s words in mind reading two recent articles.

The first was one in the IHT concerning European and Chinese cooperation over Galileo, the new GPS system. The US is just a little concerned. The piece noted:

Analysts who study the People’s Liberation Army say that the skill China would gain from participating in the system’s development would allow it to close an information gap that now gives the United States the advantage in the precise targeting of missiles and “smart weapons.” The system would also allow Chinese military leaders to greatly improve their command and control of forces in the field.

China’s acquisition of the Galileo system is seen by these analysts as a major setback to U.S. efforts to limit China’s access to advanced military technology. Critics of China’s participation in the Galileo project say that the EU is, in effect, assisting China’s military modernization despite the embargo.

In their latest defense white paper, published in 2004, Chinese military planners make it clear that the use of advanced information technology is a top priority in efforts to make the army a modern force.

“Access to secure navigation satellite signals is absolutely essential to the PLA realizing its vision,” said Rick Fisher, vice president of the Washington-based International Assessment and Strategy Center.

It continued:

Missiles are at the forefront of the Chinese military’s strategy for gaining the upper hand over Taiwan, a democratically governed island that Beijing regards as a renegade province.

Taiwan’s defense minister, Lee Jye, said in Parliament on March 9 that mainland China had 700 missiles aimed at the island.

Modern antiship and antiaircraft missiles are also weapons the Chinese military planners hope would deter any U.S. intervention in a conflict over Taiwan, according to military analysts.

One can see why American strategic interests would be under threat. The second article concerns the state of the US Navy. There has been recent controversy surrounding the stealth DD(X) Destroyer, with Defence Department officials now saying that the total number of ships will be far smaller than originally planned:

The Navy’s new destroyer, the DD(X), is becoming so expensive that it may end up destroying itself. The Navy once wanted 24 of them. Now it thinks it can afford 5 - if that.

The price of the Navy’s new ships, driven upward by old-school politics and the rusty machinery of American shipbuilding, may scuttle the Pentagon’s plans for a 21st-century armada of high-technology aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

Shipbuilding costs “have spiraled out of control,” the Navy’s top admiral, Vern Clark, told Congress last week, rising so high that “we can’t build the Navy that we believe that we need in the 21st century.”

The first two DD(X)’s are now supposed to total $6.3 billion, according to confidential budget documents, up $1.5 billion. A new aircraft carrier, the CVN-21, is estimated at $13.7 billion, up $2 billion. The new Virginia-class submarine now costs $2.5 billion each, up $400 million. All these increases have materialized in the last six months.

The number of ships is also set to drop:

Mr. Dur of Northrop Grumman said that new ships’ costs are going up because the number of ships the Navy wants is going down. Five years ago, the Navy foresaw a fleet as large as 375 warships. Now it says it may go as low as 260.

Mr. Dur said his company invested in equipment and people, expecting the Navy to buy ships at a steady rate. When the Navy’s plans “change dramatically from year to year, the assumptions we make are radically altered,” he said. “That generates extraordinary costs.”

If Congress and the Navy would steadily spend more money buying more ships, he said, the costs for each ship would shrink.

Following tensions with Taiwan, China is now in a war of words with Japan. Japan asked for an apology but Beijing responded:

Beijing has no reason to apologise over a wave of anti-Japanese protests, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing has said. His Japanese counterpart, Nobutaka Machimura, had gone to Beijing seeking an apology, but Mr Li said the real issue was Japan’s wartime atrocities. Protests have continued in Chinese cities - with 10,000 people marching in Shenzhen, in the south.

Interesting stuff on Newsnight tonight, I hope they archive this one:

Our Science Editor, Susan Watts, has been speaking to the banned Chinese film director, Li Yang. His new film, “Blind Shaft”, was shot in the small private coal mines of northern China.

Unofficial figures suggest up to 10,000 deaths a year occur in China’s mines.

In a wide-ranging interview, Li Yang tells Susan about his latest film on people-trafficking between China and the UK and how devalued lives, at the heart of the story of China’s coal mines, have become a theme of his work.