The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is rocketing ahead in its immense military procurement spending spree despite a cooling economy, but officials in the United States are using the economic slowdown as one excuse to slash defense modernization programs.
That was the message from a panel forum of the Center for National Policy (CNP), a Washington think tank, probing how the economic plunge might affect Chinese military buildup plans. In all likelihood, the deep recession won’t have much of an effect, experts said.
Kristen Gunness, a China advisor with the U.S. Navy speaking for herself, and Jacqueline Newmyer, president and CEO with the Long Term Strategy Group, a Massachusetts think tank, offered their thoughts on the issue at the CNP event.
Neither speaker sees communist leaders in China permitting the economic cool-down to affect the Chinese economic buildup, when they were asked whether the recession is causing stretched resources so that the PLA would be told to back off from its procurement of cutting edge submarines, planes, missiles of all ranges, and much more.
“I haven’t seen a lot of evidence” of that, Gunness said. If Chinese economic growth that has soared at a 13 percent rate, and still expands at an 8 percent clip, were to decelerate further, China still might be able to expand its military spending at a double-digit rate, Gunness said. In other words, China isn’t imposing any limit on robust defense spending because of the economic recession, even though the United States is imposing such strictures on its weapons procurement programs.
China continues to add roughly 100 more missiles each year along its coastline, pointed across the Taiwan Strait toward Taiwan, with no slackening of that effort, Newmyer noted.
That doesn’t mean, however, that there is no chance the global economic slump can have an effect on the gargantuan Chinese military machine.
For example, Newmyer sees a likelihood that as the internal Chinese economy slows, China may become more bellicose and create friction with other countries.
“I think there is a chance, or a likelihood, of increased friction between China and other external countries,” Newmyer predicted. That especially would be true for some “Middle Eastern nations and possibly also the U.S., and in the case of more serious concern about internal unrest in China, I think China’s relations with the West, and with India, or with Japan would be implicated there.”
In other words, don’t hope that the recession will hamper a rising China buying arms at a furious pace, or make Beijing less belligerent.
“So I think contrary to our hopes — which would be that the downturn would have the effect of causing China to turn inwards and reduce the chances for any kind of external problem — I think in fact there’s reason to think, and to worry, that the downturn would lead to a greater chance of conflict abroad for China,” Newmyer said.
As the economic slowdown continues, that may create insecurities so that “China may feel compelled to take actions that appear more belligerent abroad,” Newmyer said, meaning “a greater chance of conflict abroad.”
Thus far, “the economic crisis has not affected the PLA much, if at all,” Gunness stated. A soaring $70.2 billion official defense budget masks something like $105 billion to $150 billion in true yearly outlays, she added.
Clearly, as China acquires long-range power projection capabilities, Beijing is operating under a major military plan that goes far beyond any invasion of Taiwan, which is but 100 miles from the mainland, Newmyer said.
Anti-ship missiles, anti-satellite capabilities, strategic forces modernization including road-mobile solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles and much more signal that Chinese military ambitions are pushing outward, far from the most populous nation on the planet.
“To be sure, there still are limitations” in Chinese military power, but the net effect is that the balance of forces in the region is shifting as Beijing acquires ever more clout, Newmyer said, even as U.S. influence may be declining.
The U.S. Navy fleet size, she noted, is but 280 vessels, while the Chinese fleet has 631 assets, though to be sure the American ships and submarines may have greater capabilities and technologies.