In January 2021, Xi asks his troops to be ready to ‘act at any second’. China is clearly worried.
New Delhi: Apart from the Korean War of the 1950s, every war that China has fought has been to distract attention from internal issues. Make no mistake—Cold War 2 or Hot Peace 1 is with us, provoked by the biggest thug in human history—Xi PingPong of China.
1962: Mao Zedong attacked India when the disaster of his Great Leap Forward became apparent (50 million Chinese killed).
1969: China attacked the USSR when the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were tearing China apart.
1979: Deng Xiaoping attacked Vietnam when he was being challenged for leadership by the Gang of Four led by Mao’s widow (Mao died in 1976).
2020: As China faltered internally and externally, Xi Jinping attacked India and became aggressive in the South China Sea.
2021: Seduced by its own delusions, China takes on the world.
Is China preparing for war? Yes, it is.
Irrational nationalism and irredentism are extremely dangerous—a cardinal mistake China is making today.
We live in a world of “loose bipolarity” or non-polarity in which powers such as India, Japan, the Anglosphere countries, Germany, and the European Union have a lot more room to make independent geopolitical decisions on their own. No longer tied to either superpower’s apron strings, the rising nations of today cannot and must not be complacently counted to just robotically fall in line.
Yet China expects its chamchas to unquestioningly accept its diktat.
The besetting sin of China’s foreign policy is intellectual sclerosis. It has seen how its foreign allies invariably succumbed to American blandishments, and the Communist Party thinks it can use that as a template for economic domination and military coercion.
If the dumb Chinese leadership thought that a change of guard in the White House would be manna from heaven, Joe Biden’s first interview to the New York Times published on 2 December 2020 was a rude shock. That was soon after CNN broke a story, based on leaks from behind China’s Great Wall of Disinformation, on how China, through misleading public data, obfuscated the origin and progress of its virus that has devastated the world.
The top US Intelligence official John Ratcliffe wrote in an op-ed on 3 December 2020 in the Wall Street Journal that “the intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the US and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically” labelling China the biggest threat to democracy and freedom worldwide since the second world war and saying it was bent on global domination.
Speaking to the National People’s Congress (China’s rubber stamp Parliament) in May 2020, Prime Minister Le Keqiang said: We will thoroughly implement Xi Jinping’s thinking on strengthening the armed forces and the military strategy for the new era. We will continue to enhance the political loyalty of the armed forces, strengthen them through reform, science and technology, and the training of capable personnel, and run the military in accordance with law. We will uphold the Party’s (not Government’s) absolute leadership over the people’s armed forces and strictly implement the system of ultimate responsibility resting with the chair of the Central Military Commission.
China’s relative isolation and lack of contact with equivalent civilisations in history results in China often misjudging other countries and displaying a form of great power autism, a lack of empathy or understanding of how others think and how they might react.
The best long-distance runner ultimately gets exhausted. The present leaders of China grew up in a USA-USSR dominated world. With the demise of the USSR, they want to replace it.
The plans for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” extend to 2049, the year marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. By then, according to its present leaders, China should emerge as a global superpower. The nobler the goals and the farther into the future their fulfilment, the greater the sacrifices one can demand from the people.
When it comes to the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” nothing like civil liberties or cumbersome constitutional processes should come in the way, according to Beijing’s view. Dissenters, human rights activists, even their lawyers, end up in jail.
The People’s Liberation Army certainly has more military hardware and money than most others do, but the average Chinese soldier has nowhere near the courage, capability, competence, and conviction of his Indian counterpart. He does not have the same zeal in defending his motherland as India’s jawans, NCOs, JCOs and officers have. Comparatively speaking, Chinese soldiers are mere chaff, not even good enough for riot control. At the end of the day, the Chinese soldier is just a slave of an authoritarian system which dares not even give him a decent public burial for fear of losing face. China’s one child system has created conditions where each body bag means two grieving parents and four grieving grandparents with no progeny left to make offerings to the ancestors or to sweep their tombs at the annual Qingming Festival.
Over the past decade, the People’s Liberation Army has been lavished with money and arms. China’s military spending rose by 83% in real terms between 2009 and 2018, by far the largest growth spurt in any big country. The splurge has enabled China to deploy precision missiles and anti-satellite weapons that challenge American supremacy in the western Pacific. Xi Jinping says his “Chinese dream” includes a “dream of a strong armed forces”. That, he says, involves “modernising” the PLA by 2035 and making it “world-class”—in other words, beating America by mid-century
However, Xi has realised that there is little point in grafting fancy weapons onto an old-fashioned force. During the Cold War, the PLA evolved to repel the Soviet Union and America in big land wars on Chinese soil. Massed infantry would grind down the enemy in attritional battles.
In the 1990s Chinese leaders, alarmed by American prowess in the Gulf war of 1991, decided to focus on enhancing the PLA’s ability to fight “local wars under high-technology conditions”. They were thinking of short, sharp conflicts on China’s periphery, such as over Taiwan, in which air and naval power would be as important as ground forces. PingPong decided that winning such wars required changing the armed forces’ structure. He has also been trimming the armed forces’ bloated ranks, though they remain over 2 million strong.
Since 2015 the PLA has shed 300,000 men, most of them from the land forces, which have lost one-third of their commissioned officers and shrunk from 70% of the PLA’s total strength to less than half (though happily the army has kept its dance troupes, which it had been told it would lose).
By contrast, the marines are tripling in size. Navy and air-force officers have gained more powerful posts, including leadership of two theatre commands. This reflects the PLA’s tilt towards the seas—and the skies above them.
Political culture is a problem. “The structures that China is trying to emulate are based on openness, on delegation of authority and collaboration” opines an expert. Modern warfare requires decentralised decision-making because cyber and electronic warfare can sever communications between commanders and units. Militaries that are founded on democratic principles are going to be much more adept at adapting to that environment.
In July 2020, Xi Jinping called for more reforms in the PLA to cope with the changing international situation as tensions deepened over the disputed South China Sea after an international tribunal struck down China’s claims over the area. “Reform is a comprehensive and revolutionary change, and obstacles and policy issues that may hold back reform measures must be addressed so as to build a strong armed forces commensurate with China’s international status” Xi said.
In January 2021, Xi asks his troops to be ready to “act at any second”. China is clearly worried.
A recent Global Times article (Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece) warns about possible “preemptive action” on the seas by the Indian Navy (recalling Xi Pingpong’s exhortation to his troops to be ready for battle). The President of India or of the USA is the ceremonial chief of the military, but the operational decisions are left to the General.s Field Marshal General Admiral Air Chief Marshal Xi PingPong decides everything himself.
Meeting top military officials in October 2020, he ordered them to be “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure, and absolutely reliable”, to focus on how to win in wars, to pioneer reforms and innovation, to scientifically manage commanding a unit, to lead troops in accordance with the strictest standards and to take the forefront in complying with laws and regulations.
He also told the officers to strengthen party-building within the military and to continue to intensify combat-ready training and exercises, to keep carrying out reforms in the national defence system and the military, and to carefully consider strategic issues concerning the PLA’s future development.
Nazi Germany (like today’s China) emphasized non intellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labour, simplicity) elevating the self-esteem of the little man.
Intellectuals, especially those who questioned the spreading poison, were effectively silenced, respect for the teacher metamorphosed into resentment, trust into suspicion (remember the Cultural Revolution in China during which Xi denounced his parents?).
Is Xi PingPong’s favourite read Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”? It expressed Hitler’s racist ideology, identified the Aryan as the “genius” race, and declared the need for Germans to seek living space (lebensraum) in the East. China’s landgrab is all around.
As the Chinese pandemic recedes with time and is brought under control by effective vaccination programmes (with India in the global lead), the world will concentrate on economic reconstruction. Most countries are likely to turn inwards to revive national economies and concentrate on healthcare to keep future Chinese pandemics at bay.
The first step would be to address the issues of inadequate healthcare support and public fear of the pandemic, since national economies are dependent on the quality of human capital.
The post-virus era will also see a churning of the international order, as China’s expansionist role and hegemonic aspirations lead to strategic realignments in various geographies.
For the economic revival of nations, the imperatives are food security, healthcare, re-skilling of the workforce, and generating employment. This will require cooperation at the national, regional, and international level. But no one will turn to China as it suffers from severe TDS, Trust Deficiency Syndrome.
Xi’s reputation as a liar is well established. In September 2015, in the White House, PingPong conned Barack Obama by assuring him that China would not militarize the South and East China Seas. See what happened.
In 2021, no one trusts the Communist Party of China or its God called PingPong.
Ambassador Dr Deepak Vohra is Special Advisor to Prime Minister, Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau; and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil.