TAIPEI - American predictions on the speed
with which China modernizes the People's
Liberation Army (PLA) have more than once proved
embarrassingly wrong. A factor for the dangerous
shortcoming is researchers' reluctance to flip
through open-source material from China, according
to a latest study.
A newly-published
report from the US-China Economic and Security
Review Commission [1] singles out the development
of four Chinese weapon systems that has been
grossly underestimated.
There's the
Yuan-class diesel-electric attack submarine, which
was unexpectedly unveiled in 2004, and to the
astonishment of US analysts even came along with
air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems, greatly
enhancing the subs' endurance. Then there's the
anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon, which in 2007 destroyed
China's own satellite in
a successful test firing, and the Dongfeng-21D,
the ballistic anti-ship missile, announced in
2010, that can reputedly take on US aircraft
carriers. Early in 2011, it was the test flight
footage of China's prototype fifth-generation J-20
stealth fighter that caused a worldwide stir.
All these weapon systems had been subject
to some form of Western monitoring, but estimates
expected them to reach operational capabilities
years later than they did.
One of the
study's conclusions is intriguing. It suggests
that a good deal of blame for researchers' failure
to circumvent Chinese "information denial and
deceptions", as well as to avoid underestimations
and misjudgments, is a general failure to exploit
open-source Chinese-language materials.
"Some of the past flaws in analysis on
China's weapons program could have been partially
corrected by increased attention to open-source
materials, particularly in regards to academic
technical journals and related publications," the
study finds.
"Increased attention to the
messages in authoritative PRC [People's Republic
of China] media and political science publications
would also have improved understanding of the
worldview of the Chinese leadership."
United States observers furthermore make
the mistake of taking statements from the Chinese
government on military policy at face value, even
as they could either be deceptive, or simply
issued by agencies that have no real say over
military matters, it adds.
While it is
difficult to grasp why Western researchers
spending their entire careers studying the PLA
would choose to neglect military-related
literature from China, they, too, have their
convincing arguments. As Beijing refuses to
divulge important technical and tactical
literature, what ends up being actually published
is meant as a deception anyway, deliberately
laying false trails for China's opponents, they
say.
It's furthermore argued that
open-source research can only represent the tip of
the iceberg of information, and what should be
taken into account much more completely than
Chinese-language academic technical journals is
material on Chinese internal politics and
preferably that from non-Chinese, and therefore
trustworthy, sources.
United States
researchers who do actually resort to
Chinese-language material even often enough come
under attack by their academic peers. John F
Copper, a professor of international studies at
Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, shed light
on one such example in an interview with Asia
Times Online.
"Michael Pillsbury is one of
the few military experts in the US that reads
Chinese," Copper said, referring to a senior
defense policy adviser, whose idea that Washington
should establish intelligence and military ties
with Beijing became US policy during the Jimmy
Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations.
"He published using this skill and became
disliked by many people in the US government and
academia because of what he said about China's
progress," Copper said.
Copper then
brought into account that many other US military
experts on China do not rely on reading Chinese
documents. Copper said this could be due to the
perception that it would amount to a too
formidable task to both assess the military
significance of China's progress and read Chinese.
He also pointed out that it has been said that
naivete and racism plays a certain role in the
attitude of not realizing that China's military
produces breakthroughs in leaps and bounds.
To illustrate that it could well be an
intolerable lot slipping through the West's
fingers, Copper then took a historical excursion.
"Many China experts have no realization of
China's historical attainments in weapons. Most of
them know that China invented gunpowder but
believe they never used it for anything. They take
little or no notice of the fact China invented the
crossbow, missiles, etc," Copper said.
Westerners almost never take on explaining
the historical fact that the Mongols - though in
the old days only numbering a few million and
illiterate - managed to built the largest empire
in human history, Copper furthermore pointed out.
"How did they do this? They learned Chinese and
utilized the advanced military technology that
China possessed."
Another US academic who
came under fire for drawing extensively on
Chinese-language open-source material is James
Holmes, an associate professor at the US Naval War
College and co-author of Red Star over the
Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to US.
Maritime Strategy.
According to
Holmes, at least as important as a naval fleet's
technical characteristics on paper - tonnages,
fuel capacity, missile ranges, etc - is the human
factor. He who neglects Chinese literature doesn't
know how well seamen and airmen will handle all
the weapons and tactics they'll have at hand in
battle, and neither will they come to understand
how China's strategists think, let alone its
political cast.
Holmes argues that the
political leadership in Beijing is bombarded by
conflicting opinions of military advisors, and
only by taking these voices' commentaries that are
often published in Chinese media or learned
journals thoroughly into account, US analysts can
fully apprehend which schools of thought end up
shaping the decision-making processes in China in
the end of the day.
In an interview with
Asia Times Online, Holmes emphasized that there
are actually two "languages" involved with
studying Chinese military development, namely
Mandarin and the language of strategy, operations,
and tactics, but that the circle of people who
speak both "languages" fluently is rather small.
He then expounded on mistakes seemingly
being made.
"There is a tendency to
[neglect open-source material but to instead] see
official documents as the final authority on
important matters and to insist that the way to
understand and forecast developments is to learn
to read between the lines in these
government-issued writings - to discern all the
coded messages that supposedly lurk in there,"
Holmes said.
"But although reading and
parsing official documents provides an important
part of the picture, it's just not the whole
picture. [It has to be taken into account that]
the authors of such documents have a range of
incentives and pressures, from ideological to
group-think to simple careerism, that may shade
what they write." Holmes finally took on the
wide-spread notion that all Chinese open-source
information is censored and thus worthless. "It's
worth pointing out that the People's Republic of
China is no Soviet Union, morbidly obsessed with
secrecy," he said.
"It is open and
transparent for a closed society. Indeed, we would
rate China above democratic India and Japan along
this axis. We recently had a Chinese book on fleet
tactics delivered to our doorstep in Rhode Island,
courtesy of Amazon.cn."
Note 1. The US-China Economic and Security Review
Commission was created by the United States
Congress in October 2000 with the legislative
mandate to monitor, investigate, and submit to
congress an annual report on the national security
implications of the bilateral trade and economic
relationship between the United States and the
People’s Republic of China, and to provide
recommendations, where appropriate, to congress
for legislative and administrative action.
Jens Kastner is a Taipei-based
journalist.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times
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