THE
COLD WAR IS NOT OVER
Monday, January 25, 1999China's
Arms Race The
world's most populous country wants the world's best military. Here's a look at
its plan. By DOUGLAS
WALLER Washington In January
1991, as American bombs rained onto Iraq, CNN's live attack coverage found a
particularly appreciative audience five time zones away, in Beijing. To the
Chinese, the Gulf War was a revelation--an introduction to 21st century tactics
and weaponry that pointed out, in the most graphic possible way, the limits of
China's massive but antiquated military. Smart bombs, flexible command and
control, and seamless, high-tech attacks dazzled the Chinese leadership, who
ramped up a campaign to upgrade the People's Liberation Army (P.L.A.) to
world-class status. The new buzz words in China's Ministry of Defense became
"limited war under high-tech conditions"--and China is now buying and
spying its way toward high-tech, superpower status as fast as it can. One result
has been more fretting in Washington about how China is retooling its vast
military. Particularly worrisome: massive Chinese spying on the U.S. A
top-secret congressional report delivered to the White House last month suggests
a stunning espionage effort being coordinated from Beijing, whose spy rings have
been stealing secrets in the U.S. for 20 years. The congressional committee set
out six months ago to probe allegations that two U.S. aerospace companies,
Hughes Electronics Corp. and Loral Space & Communications, provided China
with critical rocket-design information that helped improve its ballistic
missiles. The committee concluded that they had. But as the panel dug deeper,
"we were quickly led to far more serious problems," says its
Republican chairman, Representative Christopher Cox. U.S.
investigators say Beijing has taken a vacuum-cleaner approach to stealing
secrets, sucking up any kind of intelligence it can find. The official spy
organization is the Ministry of State Security. But it is supplemented by dozens
of other government departments, each of which runs some kind of intelligence
operation. Beijing also works through Hong Kong front companies or co-production
agreements with U.S. firms to glean military-related secrets. Investigators
say the Chinese still place a premium on human intelligence. Private citizens
visiting the U.S. are often coerced into collecting information for the state.
Others become sleeper agents, burrowing into international firms operating in
the U.S., to be called on when a job needs to be done. "The Chinese will
use anybody who's available or has access," says a CIA source. "It's
across the board." In the past
few decades, as U.S.-China relations have thawed, Beijing has had plenty of
access to exploit. Chinese scientists visiting U.S. nuclear-weapons labs in the
1980s, for instance, pilfered design information for the neutron bomb and the
Trident-II nuclear warhead. Commercial attaches prowling trade shows have been
spotted pocketing demonstration videos of weapons systems or dipping their ties
into chemical solutions on display so that secret formulas can be analyzed.
Chinese agents have even gone to U.S. military-surplus sales to buy scrapped
aviation hardware. Hughes and
Loral, which have been launching satellites aboard China's Long March rocket,
deny that they aided Beijing's missile program when they provided information to
correct faults that had caused two launch explosions. And Beijing has called the
charges "absurd and irresponsible." Inside the White House--which has
been pressing for closer relations with China--aides insist that Cox's report
hypes the Chinese intelligence threat. China's "great leap forward"
into espionage, they say, has yielded uneven results. Perhaps as a
consequence, while China has been privately spying, it has also been snapping up
more modern military gear in open, legitimate markets. The new P.L.A. is
populated with arms from France, Brazil, Israel and Russia. All of them consider
China a big customer. Partly to
help fund this modernization, the P.L.A. budget is growing; last year it rose
almost 13%, to $10.9 billion. The nation's top generals are leading all the
armed forces through an aggressive reorganization. The P.L.A. is streamlining
its force by 500,000 to bring it down to 2.5 million men, and replacing
war-fighting equipment, much of which is still 1950s vintage. In their place:
more modern weapons systems. China has so far bought from Russia three Kilo-636
attack submarines, two Sovremenny-class destroyers equipped with SS-N-22
antiship missiles, and 50 Su-27 attack jets. China
is also building up to 20 new Dongfeng-31 intercontinental ballistic missiles,
whose 8,000-km range could put nuclear warheads on U.S. soil. It's
also interested in cyberwar, to cripple U.S. computers, and antisatellite
weapons, to knock out communications and spy satellites. All this
technology requires a lot of hard currency and a new war-fighting doctrine.
While Chinese leaders can't buy or steal the latter, they don't need to. Joint
exchange programs with American and Russian officers have given them a glimpse
of alternative strategic thinking. Though the Chinese still practice massive
"active defense" maneuvers--leftover tactics from the old days of a
Soviet threat--Beijing's generals are putting more emphasis on night training,
infrared-vision equipment and so-called combined arms training in which air,
navy and ground forces are intended to interlock seamlessly in an attack. The
scenario that illuminates many of these ops: an attack on Taiwan. But new
war-fighting techniques haven't filtered down to the P.L.A.'s rank and file,
which hasn't demonstrated it can use "the nifty new pieces of hardware
Beijing has bought in a way that poses a credible threat," says Brookings
Institution expert Bates Gill. Indeed,
China's military will require decades to reach true superpower status. Some U.S.
analysts suggest the P.L.A. may be 30 years behind the U.S.--a nearly
insuperable gap. China's plans to launch cyberwar or antisatellite weapons may
sound scary, but they are a long way from reality. China's nuclear arsenal,
whose warheads aren't even attached to missiles in peacetime, is designed only
as a retaliatory force. Even with the Dongfeng-31 missiles online, Beijing's
strategic-missile force will be just one-eighteenth the size of Washington's.
Those limits mean that while Beijing may be able to put up a credible fight to
protect the homeland, it still can't "project" a large force thousands
of miles away--a capability that belongs uniquely to the U.S. At the very least, however, China's new military tools will alter the balance of power in Asia. Explains Ralph Cossa, who heads the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu: "China isn't trying to project power to San Francisco Bay. It's trying to project power to the South China Sea." Though China's leaders may want to restore their nation to its traditional Middle Kingdom status as Asia's dominant power, they must still face a formidable U.S. military presence in the Pacific. That doesn't necessarily mean war, but it almost certainly means more tension. "Are the Chinese building a gun that ultimately they're going to point at us?" asks Kent Harrington, a former CIA intelligence officer for Asia. "I don't think today we can reach that conclusion. But we need to talk to them about it now to make sure it doesn't happen in the future." In the meantime, the U.S. can expect the spies to keep coming. With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing and Mark Thompson/Washington
|