Page 2 of 3 One thing China can't offer
Africa By Bright B Simons,
Evans Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe
want to
locate a copy of Evan Medeiros' testimony to the
US-China Economic and Security Review Commission,
July 28, 2003).
The core challenges In increasing evidence is a system that
remains somewhat stagnant even as more resources
are poured into it. In an interesting report
prepared by Patrick Draude of the US Naval College
for the Defense Technical Information Center in
February
2003, the author writes:
Years of economic surplus have
provided China with the means to significantly
improve and modernize its armed forces through
procurement of foreign weapons systems,
primarily from Russia. The purchasing of these
systems demonstrates a profound operational
weakness within the PLA - the inability of its
military industrial complex to design, develop
and produce indigenous state-of-the-art military
equipment.
Almost every expert agrees
that China's is almost 25 years behind other
military-industrial complexes of similar size and
scope. In particular, integrative and control
systems for assembling ideas, technical know-how
and assorted material elements into robust,
uniform military or dual-use technological systems
are woefully substandard. The core issue is of
course productivity. Overcapacity, quality and
reliability constraints continue to dog the great
majority of principal ongoing projects.
Rampant bureaucracy, a middle management
rendered ineffectually risk-averse by a
supervision culture that rewards conformity and
paper-pushing rather than initiative-taking, and a
statistics-obsessed control system that
"incentivizes" fraud are the main issues
identified by experts with respect to low
productivity.
Competitive procurement
practices exist on paper but are easily thwarted.
The newly created General Armament Department of
the PLA, a linchpin in the reform agenda, lacks
well-exposed project managers. For this and many
other reasons procurement remains tainted by
cronyism, leading to a growing concentration of
major projects in particular procurement
establishments. One expert has cited the example
of the lack of competition between missile
producers for state contracts, reducing, it would
seem, any incentive for price productivity.
To cover obvious flaws the CCP continues
to plow in subsidies on the pretext of
safeguarding strategic national assets. Like most
of the ostensibly market-driven reform programs in
China, it appears that the modernization of the
military-industrial system is only skin-deep. (The
book COSTIND Is Dead, Long Live COSTIND,
edited by Richard Yang, is recommended to
interested readers. COSTIND stands for the Chinese
Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for
National Defense.)
Intellectual-property
concerns pervade the entire Chinese economy, not
just the military-technology sector, and
admittedly every country in the world strives to
steal as much information beneficial to its
security as it can, but the scale of China's
military-industrial espionage is breathtaking. The
US Federal Bureau of Investigation is aghast.
Among the thefts of technology attributed to
Chinese operatives are the entire documentation of
the much-regarded Aegis battle-management system,
B-2 stealth-bomber technology designs, and
blueprints of whole classes of fighter jets.
One may argue that since everyone does it,
it doesn't really matter if someone does too much
of it. But in fact such espionage can be so much
more counter-productive to young national
innovative systems such as China's where it can be
likened to "technology dumping" (as an analogy for
the trade variant), with severely damaging
long-term effects for domestic innovation.
Even the vaunted Chengdu-built J-10
fighter, which is supposed to mark the beginning
of China's domestic self-sufficiency, upon serious
scrutiny does almost nothing of the sort. Many
independent experts believe that the radar and
fire-control systems are in essence a
reverse-engineering of the Israeli ELM-series
system, and the core engine technology is in
essence a Russian clone. Indeed, Israel's
disbanded Lavi warplane project continues to
supply a critical, in our view too critical,
component of China's advanced aeronautical
project, including the development of the J-10.
Hence China's continued reliance on its Russian
Su-27 fleet for much of its tactical
aerial-warfare needs.
So what does all
this have to do with the issue of military
cooperation between China and African countries?
The African connection First,
it must be emphasized, such cooperation in itself
is not new. China has managed security diplomacy
by a two-prong strategy since the early Cold War
era. Like any other communist country during the
Cold War, it saw its survival as linked to the
proliferation of communist, particularly Maoist,
ideas worldwide and was therefore, within the
context of rivalry with the Soviet Union, ready to
lend support to any guerrilla movement professing
Marxist beliefs. When it lost out in Angola, it
compensated with gains in the southeast of the
continent.
The second driver of Chinese
security interests in Africa is arms trading,
though even this was tinged with ideological
survival and supremacy. After Somalia fell out
with Russia, it turned to China in the early
1980s. China became the dictator Mohamed Siad
Barre's source of heavy-duty armament. Bombers,
including both F-6s and F-7s, battery guns,
anti-aircraft rocketry and artillery devices of
all shapes were supplied to the Mogadishu
strongman, sometimes on credit. To keep Barre
hooked on this extravagant habit, China arranged
some novel financial instruments. Somalia was
allowed to binge on weapons in exchange for
territorial fishing privileges for Chinese
trawlers.
However, in keeping with the
evolution of China's global status, there have
been subtle and not-so-subtle but always dramatic
transformations of China's military-industrial
relationship to Africa.
There has been an
intensification of arms trading, but also in an
array of other relations, in multiple directions.
Over the past decade only Russia has sold more
weaponry to Africa. China, always more skilled
than the West in soliciting goodwill, goes the
extra mile to make its presence desirable.
Impoverished Zimbabwe since 2003 has
handed over more than US$250 million of military
contracts to China. Perhaps as a thank-you note,
China installed a radar system on the roof of
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