(IHT) U.S. tries to forge closer military ties with China

The International Herald Tribune carried an excellent article on thaw in US-China military ties. Cheers, Kosuke

U.S. tries to forge closer military ties with China;
Pentagon reaching out to a generation of officers who see it as the enemy

BY MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING

(ABSTRACT)
One reason the Pentagon has persistently sought closer relations with the People's Liberation Army is that it does not want U.S. forces to remain unknown to their up-and-coming Chinese counterparts.

(FULL TEXT)
The United States pronounced its military relationship with China ''back on track'' last week after a meeting here between ranking officials of the Pentagon and the People's Liberation Army.

Tell that, however, to Lt. Cmdr. Tony Cao.

Commander Cao is an officer of the People's Liberation Army Navy. Days before the Pentagon's top Asia official arrived for talks last week in Beijing, Commander Cao was aboard a frigate in the Yellow Sea, conducting China's first-ever war games with the Australian Navy - and noting, pointedly, that the Americans were not invited. Nor are they likely to be, he told Australian journalists in slightly bent English, until ''the United States stops selling the weapons to Taiwan and stopping spying us with the air or the surface.''

As the often-frigid relations between the U.S. and Chinese militaries again warm ever so slightly, it is officers like Commander Cao, rising through the ranks of China's armed forces, who are drawing new attention from Washington.

While China's top military leaders are known quantities, its future leaders remain unknowns. One reason the Pentagon has persistently sought closer relations with the People's Liberation Army, often in the face of rebuffs, is that it does not want U.S. forces to remain unknown to their up-and-coming Chinese counterparts.

Older P.L.A. officers may remember a time, before the Tiananmen Square protests set relations back, when the U.S. and Chinese forces made common cause against the former Soviet Union. Younger officers have only known an anti-U.S. military.

''The P.L.A. combines an odd combination of deep admiration for the U.S. armed forces as a military, but equally harbors a deep suspicion of U.S. military deployments and intentions towards China,'' David Shambaugh, a leading expert on the Chinese military at George Washington University in Washington, said in an e-mail.

The stakes rise as China's armed forces, once a fairly ragtag group, steadily become more capable and take on bigger tasks. The navy, the centerpiece of China's military expansion, has added dozens of surface ships and submarines in the last decade and is widely reported to be planning construction of an aircraft carrier, the most potent weapon in the naval arsenal. The maneuvers with Australia in the Yellow Sea last month were but the most recent in a series of Chinese excursions to places as diverse as New Zealand, Britain and Spain.

China is also reported to be building an anti-ship ballistic missile base in the southern province of Guangdong, with missiles capable of reaching the Philippines and Vietnam. The base is regarded as an effort to enforce China's territorial claims to vast areas of the South China Sea claimed by other nations - and to threaten U.S. aircraft carriers that now patrol the area unmolested.

Even improved Chinese forces pose little threat to a far more capable U.S. military. But their increasing range and ability - and the certainty that they will strengthen further - make it crucial to help lower-level officers become more familiar with the Americans, experts say, before a chance encounter blossoms into a crisis.

''These past few years are part of a process where a group of young officers in China are beginning to rise up to a more senior position,'' said Huang Jing, a scholar of China's military and leadership at the National University of Singapore. ''All militaries need a straw man, a perceived enemy, for solidarity. And as a young officer or soldier, you always take the strongest of straw men to maximize the effect. Chinese military men, from the soldiers and platoon captains all the way up to the army commanders, were always taught that America would be their enemy.''

From the Chinese military's view, this year has offered ample evidence of the United States' ill will.

The Chinese effectively suspended official military relations early this year after President Barack Obama held a meeting with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, and approved a $6.7 billion arms sale to Taiwan, which China regards as its territory.

Since then, the P.L.A. has bristled as the U.S. State Department offered to mediate disputes between China and its neighbors over ownership of Pacific islands and valuable seabed mineral rights. And when the U.S. Navy conducted war games with South Korea last month in the Yellow Sea, not 640 kilometers, or 400 miles, from Beijing, the rhetoric from senior Chinese officers was apoplectic.

The United States ''is engaging in an increasingly tight encirclement of China and constantly challenging China's core interests,'' Rear Adm. Yang Yi, a naval commander, wrote last month in two hawkish articles in The P.L.A. Daily, the military newspaper. ''Washington will inevitably pay a costly price for its muddled decision.''

In truth, little in the U.S. actions is new. Mr. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, not only hosted the Dalai Lama, but awarded him Congress's highest civilian honor in 2007. U.S. arms sales to Taiwan were mandated by Congress in 1979 and were a fixture of U.S. policy for years before that. U.S. warships regularly ply the waters off China's coast and frequently practice with South Korean ships.

But a confluence of factors appears to be dictating the P.L.A.'s sharp response.

One is the impending change of China's government leaders in 2012. In the jockeying for advantage before that turnover, no politician is willing to be seen as weak, and the military has gained new leeway to publicly push its more aggressive views on foreign policy.

Another is the new assertiveness that has followed China's rise to global prominence.

''Why do you sell arms to Taiwan? We don't sell arms to Hawaii,'' said Liu Mingfu, a professor at National Defense University in Beijing and the author of ''The China Dream,'' a nationalistic call to succeed the United States as the world's leading power.
''In the past China simply tolerated this silently for the sake of the overall situation of U.S.-China relations,'' Mr. Liu said. ''But now times have moved on, the world is more civilized, and China is stronger. The Chinese people have a higher requirement for national dignity and demand more respect. Americans should understand this.''

That official military relations are resuming despite the P.L.A.'s sharp language is likely a function of international diplomacy. President Hu Jintao of China is scheduled to visit Washington soon, perhaps as early as January, and U.S. experts had predicted that China would resume military ties as part of a general effort to smooth over rough spots before the state visit.

Chinese military leaders, who earlier this year snubbed a proposal by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to visit Beijing, signaled last week that that visit would be scheduled soon. And Wednesday, the state-run news agency, Xinhua, said Defense Minister Liang Guanglie would meet with Mr. Gates next week at a security conference in Hanoi.

None of that seems to signal any basic change in the Chinese military view of the Pentagon.

A leading Chinese expert on international security, Zhu Feng of Peking University, said that the Chinese military's hostility toward the United States was not new, just more open. And that, he said, was not only the result of China's new assertiveness, but its military's inexperience on the world stage.

China's military has had a strictly domestic mission - until now. ''Chinese officers' international exposure remains very limited,'' Mr. Zhu said.

October 7, 2010