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2 China's show of strength ups
military ante By Willy Lam
Large-scale air and naval maneuvers off
China's southeast coast last week demonstrated the
post-17th Party Congress leadership's
determination to project hard power in view of
tension in the Taiwan Strait. The week-long war
games, which coincided with Beijing's sudden
cancellation of the USS Kitty Hawk battle group's
Hong Kong port call, are also meant to convey
Beijing's displeasure with Washington's recent
decision to sell weapons to
Taiwan and to honor the Dalai
Lama.
Moreover, this show of force
reflects the commitment of President Hu Jintao,
who was re-elected chairman of the Central
Military Commission (CMC) at the congress, to
speed up the modernization of the People's
Liberation Army's (PLA) already formidable
arsenal.
The military drills, which
started on November 19, covered a wide swath of
the Pacific, including sensitive terrain east of
Taiwan and north of the Philippine archipelago.
While official PLA media have been reticent about
the exercises, Hong Kong papers and
military-related websites in China noted that
their purpose was to simulate a "pincer attack" on
Taiwan as well as a naval blockade.
Elite
battalions from PLA Air Force units under the
Guangzhou and the Nanjing Military Regions, as
well as the East and South China Sea Fleets, were
involved. They deployed hardware including
Russian-made Kilo-class submarines, Sovremmy-class
destroyers and indigenously developed Flying
Leopard jet-fighters. Among new weapons tested at
the maneuvers were 022 stealth missiles and
Russian-made SS-N-27 "Club" anti-ship cruise
missiles.
Several hundred commercial
flights along China's southeast coast - the
majority of which originated from airports in
Shanghai and Guangzhou - were postponed during the
exercises. It was not until last Saturday that the
East China Civil Aviation Bureau lifted the highly
disruptive aviation control (People's Daily,
November 26). Li Jingao, an official of the CAAC
East China Air Traffic Management Bureau, claimed:
"The delay resulted from a backlog caused by the
control in previous days." Military analysts noted
that PLA authorities did not want the Kitty Hawk
battle group - whose 8,000-odd sailors had earlier
planned to spend Thanksgiving in Hong Kong - to be
in the vicinity.
This is despite the fact
that during his visit to Beijing earlier this
month, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his
hosts made new pledges to boost
confidence-building measures, including
establishing a military-to-military hotline. On a
deeper level, the Kitty Hawk incident reflected
Beijing's anger at Washington's plan to sell
Taiwan a $940 million upgrade to its Patriot II
anti-missile shield. Beijing apparently also
wanted to protest President George W Bush's
presence at a congressional ceremony last month
honoring the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibet's
pro-independence movement and deemed a
"separatist" by Beijing.
There are also
indications that this stupendous muscle-flexing
was targeting more than the usual suspects; for
examples Taiwan and the United States. Parts of
the exercises took place close to the disputed
Paracel Islands, including the Hoang Sa and Truong
Sa archipelagos in the South China Sea, a few
islets whose sovereignty is claimed by Vietnam.
Last Friday, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry
pointed out that the war games were a "violation
of Vietnam's sovereignty".
Le Dung, the
Vietnamese ministry's spokesman, said, "It is not
in line with the common perception of senior
leaders of the two countries as well as the spirit
of the recent meeting between the two prime
ministers on the sidelines of the 13th ASEAN
Summit in Singapore."
A Beijing source
close to the Taiwan policy establishment said the
Central Military Commission and the Communist
Party's Leading Group on Taiwan Affairs - which is
also headed by Hu - were worried about possible
"tricks" by the Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP), the pro-independence ruling party in
Taiwan, in the run-up to the presidential
elections scheduled for next March.
The
source said that Beijing was most worried that the
Taiwan military might engineer a "military crisis"
with the PLA, which would then serve as a pretext
for the DPP administration to postpone the
elections or even to impose martial law. Last
Sunday, Taiwanese President and DPP chairman Chen
Shui-bian indicated that proclaiming martial law
was an option if the opposition Kuomintang (KMT,
or Nationalist Party) continues to side-step
electoral procedures for the upcoming Legislative
Yuan elections.
While Chen later withdrew
his threat, Beijing remained concerned that the
DPP leadership might again resort to wild cards
given the fact that the KMT presidential
candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has consistently
outpolled the DPP's Frank Hsieh in island-wide
surveys.
The Chinese civilian leadership
has largely assumed a low profile on the Taiwan
issue. In his address to the 17th Congress,
President Hu even dangled the possibility of a
"peace accord" with Taiwan. Yet the post-17th
Congress leadership has been at the same time
hedging its soft bet on the KMT by making thorough
preparations for what Hu called "military
struggles" against pro-independence elements on
the island. As outgoing Defense Minister General
Cao Gangchuan put it earlier this
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