China PLA officer urges challenging U.S.
dominance
China should build the world’s strongest military and move
swiftly to displace the United States as the global “champion,” a
Chinese PLA officer says in a new book
reflecting swelling nationalist ambitions.
The call for China to abandon modesty about its global goals and
“sprint to become world number one” comes from a People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) Senior Colonel, Liu Mingfu, who warns that
his nation’s ascent will alarm Washington, risking war despite
Beijing’s hopes for a “peaceful rise.”
“China’s big goal in the 21st century is to become world number
one, the top power,” Liu writes in his newly published
Chinese-language book, “The China Dream.”
“If China in the 21st century cannot become world number one,
cannot become the top power, then inevitably it will become a
straggler that is cast aside,” writes Liu.
His 303-page book stands out for its boldness in a recent chorus
of strident Chinese voices demanding a hard shove back against
Washington over trade, Tibet, and arms sales to Taiwan, the
self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.
“As long as China seeks to rise to become world number one …
then even if China is even more capitalist than the U.S., the U.S.
will still be determined to contain it,” he writes.
Rivalry between the two powers is a “competition to be the
leading country, a conflict over who rises and falls to dominate
the world,” says Liu.
“The China Dream” does not represent government policy, which
has been far less strident about the nation’s goals.
But Liu’s book testifies to the homegrown pressures on China’s
Communist Party leadership to show the country’s fast economic
growth is translating into greater sway against the West, still
mired in an economic slowdown.
Liu is a professor at the elite National Defense University,
which trains rising officers, and the appearance of his book
underscores that calls for Beijing to take a hard stance against
Washington reach beyond nationalist views on the Internet to
include voices in the military elite.
“This book represents my personal views, but I think it also
reflects a tide of thought,” Liu told Reuters in an interview. “We
need a military rise as well as an economic rise.”
The next marker of how China’s leaders are handling these
expectations may come later this week, when the government is
likely to announce its defense budget for 2010, after a 14.9
percent rise last year on the one in 2008.
Another PLA officer has said this year’s
defense budget should send a defiant signal to Washington after the
Obama administration went ahead in January with long-known plans to
sell $6.4 billion worth of arms to Taiwan.
“I think one part of ‘public opinion’ that the leadership pays
attention to is elite opinion, and that includes the PLA,” said Alan Romberg, an expert on China and Taiwan at
the Henry L. Stimson Center, an institute in Washington D.C.
“I think the authorities are seeking to keep control of the
reaction, even as they need to take (it) into account,” Romberg
said in an emailed response to questions.
Liu’s book was officially published in January, but is only now
being sold in Beijing bookstores.
LIGHTING A FIRE IN AMERICA’S BACKYARD
In recent months, strains have deepened between Beijing and
Washington over trade, Internet controls, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan
and President Barack Obama’s meeting with Tibet’s exiled leader,
the Dalai Lama, who China reviles.
China has responded with angry words and a threat to sanction
U.S. companies involved in the Taiwan arms sales. But it has not
acted on that threat and has allowed a U.S. aircraft carrier to
visit Hong Kong.
China’s leaders do not want to jeopardize ties with the United
States, a key trade partner and still by far the world’s biggest
economy and military power.
Over the weekend, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said he wanted
trade friction with the United States to ease. U.S. Deputy
Secretary of State James Steinberg is due to visit Beijing this
week.
Yet Beijing policy-makers have to tread increasingly carefully
to balance rival domestic and foreign demands on how to handle
Washington, said Jin Canrong, a professor of international
relations at Renmin University in Beijing.
“Chinese society is changing, and you see that in all the
domestic views now on what China should do about the United
States,” said Jin. “If society demands a stronger stance, ignoring
that can bring a certain cost.”
Liu and other PLA officers say they see
little chance of avoiding deepening rivalry with the United States,
whether peaceful or warlike.
“I’m very pessimistic about the future,” writes another
PLA officer, Colonel Dai Xu, in another
recently published book that claims China is largely surrounded by
hostile or wary countries beholden to the United States.
“I believe that China cannot escape the calamity of war, and
this calamity may come in the not-too-distant future, at most in 10
to 20 years,” writes Dai.
“If the United States can light a fire in China’s backyard, we
can also light a fire in their backyard,” warns Dai.
Liu writes that China and the United States can manage their
rivalry through peaceful economic competition and vying for wider
influence in coming decades, when Beijing will emerge as the
undoubted global leader.
But as China grows into the world’s top economy, it will also
need the world’s strongest military force to deter the wary United
States from challenging China’s emerging pre-eminence, Liu
argues.
The PLA should be so powerful the United
States “would not dare and would not be able to intervene in
military conflict in the Taiwan Strait,” writes Liu.
“Turn some money bags into bullet holders.”