Reality intrudes on China's military contingency plans (Reality or Japanese Propaganda)

[Daedalus]

A hastily erected partition hides the site of a fiery Tiananmen Square car crash blamed on Uighur extremists.


China's tightened security in a turbulent western province and the southern deployment of its first aircraft carrier are intimately linked to the Communist Party's plans for surviving a worst-case military scenario: a clash with the U.S.

At the same time, these moves reveal weaknesses in China's position.

China has stepped up policing in Xinjiang, an autonomous region home to much of the country's Uighur ethnic minority, following what authorities labeled a terrorist attack. A car carrying Uighurs slammed into a barrier in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in late October, bursting into flames within sight of the giant portrait of Mao Zedong. Since then, police have detained many Uighurs in Xinjiang and Beijing.

Deep in the heart of China

Party leaders see Xinjiang "as one refuge in an emergency," a person familiar with Chinese national security says. In the event of a shooting war with the U.S., top party officials would abandon Beijing for underground bunkers in Xinjiang, Tibet and Yunnan Province -- all of which lie far inland -- where they would seek to mount a resistance to the Americans, this person says, citing military contingency plans.

All-out war between China and U.S. seems a remote possibility. The two powers have grown economically interdependent, something that never happened to the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Still, military planning, like chess, requires thinking many moves ahead.

China has been expanding its armed forces at a rapid clip. But taking into account both countries' overall military strength, including battle experience, the U.S. could be expected to gain the advantage in the early stages of a conflict. Situated relatively near the coast, Beijing, the Chinese government's nerve center, would present an inviting target for an American strike.

Inspired by Mao's inland retreat during the revolutionary era, today's Chinese leaders, too, believe holing up in the heartland could preclude an easy surrender. Uighur unrest thus threatens a potential safe haven.

Southern assets

Like the clampdown on Xinjiang, China's recent dispatch of the Liaoning, its first aircraft carrier, for exercises in the South China Sea has a deeper significance.

Chinese military planners envision resorting to a trans-Arctic nuclear strike against the U.S. with ballistic missiles launched from submarines in the South China Sea. The USSR employed a similar strategy during the Cold War, turning the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan's Hokkaido, into a virtual Soviet lake. China apparently hopes to someday station a carrier fleet in the South China Sea and establish the air superiority needed to guard its precious ballistic missile submarines.

That would likely prove no easy task. U.S. strategy -- a glimpse of which was revealed by an unclassified summary of the Air-Sea Battle Concept in May -- could frustrate Chinese attempts at "area denial" in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, Uighur unrest continues. On both fronts, China appears short of where it wants to be.

China's eagerness to keep potential enemies at bay, as also apparent in its declaration of an air defense identification zone over the East China Sea, looks like overreach stemming from weakness.

Reality intrudes on China's military contingency plans- Nikkei Asian Review