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China

ANALYSIS: The China-Taiwan military balance
By James H Nolt

This paper was published in a book: Winston L Yang and Deborah A Brown, eds, Across the Taiwan Strait: Exchanges, Conflicts and Negotiations (Center for Asian Studies, St John's University, New York, 1999), pp. 181-219.

Numerous authors claim that China's military modernization will create a new superpower and threaten the balance of power in Asia in the coming decades. Just as people only grow older, militaries only modernize. What matters for balance of power is not absolute, but rather relative modernization. Most writings on China's military modernization neglect comparisons of China with its most likely enemies. Despite rapid economic growth, China is actually becoming weaker militarily relative to Taiwan and all of its other potential rivals (except Russia, which has declined even faster). China's military equipment is the most backward of any large or medium-sized power. It is much inferior, for example, to the equipment used by Iraq during the Gulf War. Military training in China is also inferior to that of its major neighbors. Although as a nuclear power China could conceivably practice nuclear terrorism (at enormous cost to its relations with the rest of the world), China's conventional military capability is surprisingly limited. This paper focuses on military capabilities, which are relatively easy to discern, rather than intentions, which are changeable, covert and often disguised by public posturing.

China's most aggressive military posturing against Taiwan in recent years came around the time of Taiwan's first ever presidential election in 1996. Unarmed ballistic missiles were fired into waters not far off the northern and southern coasts of Taiwan. At the same time, small-scale naval and air exercises were held that included a simulated amphibious invasion. The implied threat of the missile tests and landing exercises caused great concern in Taiwan, which was also reflected in a temporary downturn in the stock market. The US reacted by sending two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait, warning China that the US might act to protect Taiwan in the event of any actual use of force against the island. Since 1996 there have been no further incidents of this type and China's relations with the US have improved. Still, many are worried that the saber-rattling of 1996 presages a new assertiveness by a China that does not shy away from threats of force.

China's awkward military blustering is a product of frustrated weakness, not strength. Chinese leaders have been disappointed by the autonomy of Taiwan and by what they see as the unreasonable resistance of Western leaders to China's full participation in the world community. On the other hand, the West seems not to appreciate China's quite substantial demilitarization since the 1970s. China's military strength is now often being exaggerated both by China itself, to avoid being taken for granted by the West, and by Western commentators, some of whom are merely ignorant of China's limited military capabilities, while others are interested in promoting a new justification for maintaining high military spending in the post-Cold-War era. In this climate, China's self-assertion may backfire, contributing to its further isolation. The West, Taiwan, ASEAN and others in the Pacific region must recognize their own relative strength and security to avoid overreacting to China's occasional blustering in order to continue to develop the mutual benefits of economic cooperation with China, and to nurture warmer ties in the future.

China has no real military options in dealing with Taiwan. Others have discussed at least three major ways China could use military force against Taiwan: 1) invasion, 2) blockade (or mere harassment of flights and shipping) and 3) missile attacks (with or without nuclear warheads). I argue below why none are practical military options. Taiwan's military modernization is proceeding more rapidly than China's. Thus, despite China's more rapid economic growth, its capacity to threaten Taiwan militarily is not increasing; in fact, it is probably decreasing. I conclude by suggesting why the ''China threat'' seems to many US commentators to be increasing, when, objectively, China's continuing neglect of its military portends the opposite.

The Fourth Modernization

Ever since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping proclaimed the Four Modernizations (of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and the military) as China's national goal, the military has been running a poor fourth. China's military (the People's Liberation Army, or PLA) continues to be the world's largest, measured by personnel strength, however, weapons procurement has been cut so much since the early 1970s that nearly all Chinese troops are equipped with aging and increasingly obsolete weapons. Only a very small proportion of the Chinese forces are equipped with weapons as modern as those typical abroad. Chinese military equipment is, on average, considerably less advanced than what the Iraqis used during the 1991 Gulf War. In contrast to the rapid growth and modernization of China's civilian economy, China's military technology is actually falling further behind that of the other major powers and most of its neighbors.

Chinese military effort peaked at over 10 percent of GDP during 1969-71, when Chinese leaders feared imminent war with the Soviet Union, and has been declining ever since. It is now about one quarter of that peak percentage.[1] The biggest cuts were in 1972, after the death of Defense Minister Lin Biao, and in 1978, after the accession of Deng as China's paramount leader.[2] Military procurement was cut in half from 1978 to 1982 and fell another 20 percent by 1986. Real military spending continued to fall by about 3.5 percent per year during the 1980s. It has increased slightly since 1989, but still continues to decline as a percentage of GDP. Although calculations of China's defense spending vary widely because of Chinese secrecy, researchers agree on these basic trends. During the Deng years, factories producing for the military have been encouraged to switch production to civilian goods. By 1994, about 70 percent of the gross output of former arms industries was for civilians. That figure is expected to plateau at about 80 percent this year.[3]

China's major military cuts preceded the post-Cold War cuts in the US, Russia and Europe. US military spending has decreased recently, but not nearly as much as China's did earlier. Other major Asian powers, including Japan, the Koreas, Taiwan, India, and Pakistan, did not cut back their military effort as China did in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, these nations have steadily increased their real military spending as their economies grew. Japan, India, and Pakistan have expanded military spending at roughly the same rate as their economies grew, so that spending as a percentage of GDP remained approximately constant at about 1, 3, and 7 percent, respectively. During the 1990s, military spending rates in Taiwan and South Korea did not quite keep pace with their booming economies, but nevertheless real spending expanded significantly while China's stagnated. South Korea increased spending during the 1970s from around 4 percent of GDP to over 6 percent, maintained this during the early 1980s, then dropped slowly back down to around 4 percent during the 1990s. Taiwan's military effort has fallen from 8-9 percent during the 1970s to 4.6% in 1998. China's military spending, relative to that of its neighbors, has declined over the last three decades. China's military has declined relatively in both the quantity and quality of its arms. Meanwhile, Taiwan during the 1990s has re-equipped virtually its entire air force and navy with advanced weapons far superior to China's.

China's limited replacement of its aging stock of obsolete arms

Although the PLA has been declining in size since the 1970s, deeper cuts are yet to come since new weapons are being procured in numbers far too small to replace the huge stock of obsolete and worn out equipment of the bulk of the current forces. The PLA is now about 2.4 million, less than half of its peak in the 1970s. Cuts of hundreds of thousands per year continue. Yet China has not cut the size of the PLA nearly as much as it has cut its arms procurement (domestic production plus imports). Thus most old and obsolete weapons are not being replaced, so the average age and relative backwardness of Chinese weaponry is actually increasing: a fact seldom acknowledged amid the constant talk of China's military ?''modernization''. Old weapons are not only less technologically advanced, they are also more likely to wear out and difficult to maintain in serviceable condition. For example, the Chinese-made J-6 (MiG-19) fighter flown to South Korea in May 1996 by a North Korean defector was so worn out, according to a Japanese air force officer who inspected it, ''the aircraft could disintegrate if it engaged in air combat.''[4] Much of the existing inventory of Chinese weapons was built during the Cultural Revolution when production standards (not to mention technological prowess) were quite low. Meanwhile, other armed forces in the region, though smaller, have not made the deep personnel cuts that China has and are re-equipping more rapidly with modern weapons. Therefore China's large armed forces are deceptive. Its actual military strength is much less than raw numbers would indicate, and declining relative to most neighbors, including Taiwan. Furthermore, given China's large size and underdeveloped transportation network,[5] it would have difficulty concentrating a large portion of its armed forces against any one adversary.

The most backward of China's military branches is the most important one for modern warfare: the air force or PLAAF. Numerically, China has the world's second largest air force,[6] but this is only because it maintains a huge inventory of aircraft long considered obsolete elsewhere. In fact, China's warplanes, on average, are more backward than those of any other of the top 60 air forces in the world (including all those with more than 100 combat aircraft). Of China's roughly 4000 combat aircraft, two-thirds are obsolete Soviet models from the late 1940s and early 1950s, mostly MiG-19 variants.[7] The Soviets stopped producing the MiG-19 in the late 1950s, at about the same time China began producing it as the J-6. Chinese production of the J-6 continued into the early 1980s, years after the last MiG-19s retired from Soviet service. Production of the Q-5 ground-attack variant continued throughout the 1980s. The primitive jet engines of the J-6/Q-5 have never been upgraded and are quite inefficient by modern standards. Whereas most modern fighters can fly at least twice the speed of sound, these aircraft are barely supersonic. Their usefulness is further limited by their short range and small weapons payload. Worst of all, many lack radar, which is standard equipment for any modern fighter. Aircraft without radar cannot fight at night, in poor visibility, or at long range. They are vulnerable to unseen long-range attack from the radar-guided missiles of nearly any modern fighter. Those with radar have a weak and primitive set that is shorter range than those in use elsewhere. The Il-28 (Chinese: H-5) was the first Soviet jet bomber, developed fifty years ago, yet it still constitutes almost two-thirds of the Chinese bomber force. These thousands of obsolete aircraft would be worthless deathtraps in any campaign against Taiwan's very modern air force.

Even aircraft quality of the best third of PLAAF is no better than any other of the world's top 60 air forces and inferior to every other significant air force in Asia, except the North Korean, which is similar. Pilots in Taiwan, Japan, India, Pakistan and South Korea are also better trained than those in China, averaging more than twice as many flight hours per year. Nearly all of this top third of the PLAAF comprises Chinese-made F-7 and F-8 fighters and old Soviet Tu-16 (H-6) bombers, which are all decades behind the latest technology. Almost half of this top third are the earlier versions of the F-7. These are copies of early-model MiG-21s, which formed the mainstay of the Soviet air force during the 1960s, but had retired from Soviet service by the time China began mass-producing them in the 1980s. Although faster than the J-6/Q-5, these early-model J-7s have all of their other important disadvantages, including short range, limited weapons suite, and no radar. The PLAAF has only a few hundred of the radar-equipped J-7-III and J-8, which are comparable to the MiG-21MF and MiG-23: front-line Soviet fighters of the 1970s that still comprise a major part of some Russian-equipped air forces, such as those of India, Syria, Libya and Iraq. China's only really modern aircraft are 50 Su-27s (aka, J-11s) purchased from Russia during the 1990s, plus a handful built so far in China. China also agreed recently to purchase 30 modern Su-30 fighters from Russia at a cost of US$2 billion for delivery in 2002. Su-27/30s, also used by India, are in the same class as the Russian MiG-29, used by India and Malaysia; the French Mirage 2000, used by India and Taiwan; and the standard US fighters, the F-15, F-16, and F-18, used by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Japan, India, and Taiwan each have at least five times as many modern, high-performance aircraft as does China. Any one of these three would likely prove superior to China in the event of an air war, because China's large numbers of obsolete aircraft would have little effect. China is no longer mass-producing the J-7 or J-8, using its scarce funds instead to assemble in China about 15 per year of the much superior J-11/Su-27.[8] At that rate, the PLAAF's total combat strength will continue to plummet as thousands of obsolete aircraft wear out during the next decade.

The Chinese navy (PLAN) seems to be the most favored of the three services today. The navy is the only branch of the PLA that has actually increased its strength since Deng came to power in 1978. The surface navy grew throughout the Deng years, adding two or three seagoing warships (destroyers and frigates) each year during the 1980s. New construction has slowed down recently, however, to about one per year, and seems to be slowing further to release funds for purchasing Russian-built ships, beginning with two recently-ordered Sovremenny-class destroyers (aping the import-dependent trend of the PLAAF). A rapid building program during the 1970s brought the PLAN to a peak strength of over 100 submarines by the early 1980s. The submarine force has since declined to about half that, however, as old submarines wear out, since new construction dropped to two per year and is now slowing further to afford importation of expensive Russian Kilo-class submarines. The PLAN has become, at best, the world's sixth most powerful navy (after the US, Russia, UK, France, and Japan), but is more backward than any other major navy. Chinese naval technology has made few advances over the standard inherited from the 1950s cooperation with the Soviets. Maintenance and operational standards are not very high. The PLAN's best equipment is imported from France and Russia, but China can afford it only in very small quantities.

China posesses no aircraft carrriers, and nearly all of its fighter force has limited range, therefore, China's surface navy is quite vulnerable to air attack beyond China's coastal waters. Therefore the most important element of the PLAN is its submarine force. Submarines, being easier to hide than the surface navy, can more safely operate beyond the range of friendly air cover.

China has the world's third largest submarine force, however, much of it is non-operational and the entire force is technologically backward, despite the fact that China's most noteworthy naval technological accomplishment has been the design and development, at great expense, of nuclear-powered submarines.[9] The main thrust of this project was to add a few submarine-based ballistic missiles to China's nuclear weapons delivery capability, but the technology was also applied to produce five nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), launched 1971-90. Submarines depend on stealth for protection, yet the Chinese SSNs, like the earliest Soviet ones, are noisy, and thus relatively easy to detect and destroy. Their sonar and other electronic equipment was recently replaced by superior French gear, but it is not nearly as sophisticated as that of foreign SSNs. Like all other Chinese submarines, the SSNs' weapons torpedoes and cruise missiles are less sophisticated than those of the top naval powers. China has for some years been constructing a more modern nuclear submarine (Type 093) similar to the Russian Victor III class of the 1980s, but it is not expected to be completed before 2002.

The bulk of China's submarine force is several dozen copies of the non-nuclear Soviet R-class of the 1950s. China built 84 from 1962 to 1984, continuing to produce them for years after the last of the Soviet R-class was scrapped as obsolete. Jane's Fighting Ships estimates that about 30 are still active, but says, ''operational numbers are difficult to assess as no submarine spends more than a few days at sea each year because there are insufficient trained men. . . . [Anti-submarine] capability is virtually non-existent.'' Submarines are very difficult to operate, especially to operate effectively in combat. US and German navy experience in World War II was that a handful of ace captains working with top-notch submarine crews accounted for the vast majority of all ships sunk by submarines. China has no combat experience with submarines. Its crews spend so little time at sea that even their basic seamanship is questionable, let alone their combat ability.[10] The PLAN's inexperience must seriously impair the capability of most of its submarine force. It is interesting to note that Australia purchased from the Russian navy an operational F-class submarine, larger and more capable than China's R-class, as a museum exhibit open to public inspection in Sydney harbor.

Since completing the R-class in the mid-1980s, the Chinese have built diesel-electric submarines of their own design, but the rate of construction has dropped from over per eight per year in the later 1970s to no more than two per year since Deng's accession to power. Few details of these newer classes are available, but the 17 Type 035 'Ming' class and one new Type 039 'Song' class are slightly larger and 38 percent faster underwater than the R-class (Type 033). The 'Song' class represents a significant advance, because it can fire modern anti-ship missiles from underwater and is much quieter than the 'Ming' class. Two more are under construction, along with additional 'Ming' class submarines. China has recently purchased four modern Russian 'Kilo' class submarines. These are the first Chinese submarines quiet and capable enough to stalk enemy submarines. Jane's Fighting Ships says, ''If Russia has provided its more modern torpedoes, the acquisition of this class is a major step forward in China's submarine capabilities.'' The 'Kilo' and 'Song' classes are comparable to the Dutch, Swedish and German-designed submarines obtained by South Korea (9), Taiwan (2), Indonesia (2), Singapore (4), and India (14, including 10 'Kilo' class, plus 2 more building), but quite inferior to the 16 Japanese submarines and the six Swedish-designed submarines with revolutionary air-independent fuel-cell propulsion built in Australia. China's few modern submarines do not outclass forces available to several other Asian navies, not to mention the huge and sophisticated US and Russian submarine fleets.

Of the three services, the army has been cut the most in recent years. Its personnel strength of 1.8 million is about half of what it was in 1978 when Deng took over. Recent announcements promise further cuts of at least 20 percent. China's army equipment, though less obsolete than most of the navy and air force equipment, is nevertheless more backward than that of all neighboring Asian powers. China has the world's third largest tank force, but almost three-quarters of the PLA's 8,300 tanks are Type-59s: Chinese copies of the Soviet T-54 tank of the 1950s. Production of newer models has been very limited, far below the peak levels of Type-59 production in the 1970s and completely inadequate to replace existing stocks as they wear out. Although China has long land borders and potential enemies on every side, it has on order only 400 of its latest-model Type-85-III tank, while Taiwan, an island, recently bought 300 superior US M-60A3 tanks. At the current low rate of tank production, the PLA's ratio of tanks to combat troops, already low in this predominantly infantry army, will actually decrease unless further cuts are made in combat troop strength.

China's armed forces have always centered around the ground forces. In fact, the Chinese air force and navy are not independent and equal services, as in most countries, but subordinate parts of the army, or PLA. Mao Zedong's strategy of 'people's war'' against the threat of all-out invasion by the Soviet Union or the US reinforced the dominance of the ground forces until after Mao died in 1976. More recently, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the crucial role played by air power the Gulf War and in Kosovo, Chinese strategists have emphasized the greater possibility of limited wars conducted predominantly by naval and air forces, but the PLA has been slow to restructure and modernize to adapt to this change in strategic thinking. The existing armed forces remain more than adequate to defend Chinese territory against invasion, but they are inadequate for any significant offensive operations beyond China's borders and coastal waters. If current trends continue, and China does not greatly increase its arms procurement, China's armed forces must continue to shrink, both absolutely and relative to its neighbors. China is not poised to become a regional hegemon, let alone a superpower.




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