{"id":110928,"date":"2017-11-30T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T12:01:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2023-01-08T11:05:19","modified_gmt":"2023-01-08T11:05:19","slug":"some-thoughts-on-china-recent-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/2017\/11\/30\/some-thoughts-on-china-recent-military\/","title":{"rendered":"Some thoughts on China&#39;s recent military budget and carrier announcement"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><h3 class=\"post-title entry-title\" itemprop=\"name\"><\/h3>\n<div class=\"post-header\"> <\/div>\n<p>In case you guys have missed it, two of the big announcements out of the National People&#8217;s Congress this past week are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chinadaily.com.cn\/china\/2009-03\/05\/content_7540399.htm\">the call for Aircraft Carrier<\/a> by Admiral Hu Yanlin and the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/asia-pacific\/7922699.stm\">14.9% increase in military budget<\/a>.<br \/>I&#8217;d  first like to address the aircraft carrier issue, since we&#8217;ve been  talking about this for a while now.  I think China&#8217;s aircraft carrier  ambition can go all the way back in the 80s and you can read about it in  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sinodefence.com\/research\/aircraft-carrier\/China_Aircraft_Carrier_Ambition.pdf\">Scott Cooper&#8217;s<\/a> work on this.  Just to list some of the very reasons for China wanting carriers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Prestige  &#8211; It&#8217;s humiliating to a lot of Chinese people that countries like  Thailand, India and Brazil have carriers and China does not.  It also  doesn&#8217;t help that Japan and South Korea are both basically completing  attack helos that can operate STOL aircraft.<\/li>\n<li>National Power &#8211;  This point is very similar to prestige.  At current time, China is part  of the permanent 5 in UNSC, the world&#8217;s 3rd largest economy and the  world&#8217;s largest creditor nation.  It is already a superpower in  economical and political terms, but its military still lags behind the  other two.  It really needs a few carriers to show its military  strength.  India, the other growing Asian power, is looking to have 3  carriers by the end of the next decade, shouldn&#8217;t China be looking for  something greater than that?<\/li>\n<li>Maritime\/Energy Interest &#8211;  China is very dependent on the shipping line from Africa\/Middle East to  its ports.  If these shipping lines get cut off, the Chinese economy  will be in deep trouble.  At the moment, China doesn&#8217;t have the  projection capability to even protect its commercial fleet from  countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.  The Chinese navy  would have no way of winning a conflict around the Malacca Straits  against any of these countries.  In addition, Indian navy can probably  cut off Chinese shipping lines at the moment.  That really is an  extremely scary proposition for Chinese military planners if we think  about how easily their ally Pakistan is to get in a conflict with India.<\/li>\n<li>Future  strategic needs &#8211; China is not likely to have an aircraft carrier  commissioned with an air wing until at least late next decade.  Even if  it fast track through building carriers, building a naval air wing and  learning about carrier operations, it still probably would not establish  any kind of competence until 2030.  For a country that is already  dependent on global maritime trade and have commercial interest in all  corners of the world, I think it&#8217;s very likely China will have even more  urgent needs for aircraft carriers in the next 20 years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Having  mentioned all of that, I think it has become clear in the last 2 years  that China is definitely going to start work on a carrier.  As early as  2005, they had discussions with Russians about Su-33 after Peace Mission  2005.  There were also rumours in 2006 that they bought 50 Su-33s,  although that has turned out to be a premature announcement.  A couple  of years ago, they basically unofficially told Admiral Keatings that  they are going to build carriers.  We have also seen a model of an  aircraft carrier in the model for the new JiangNan shipyard.  There have  been other evidences here and there in the past few years.  I think at  this point, the work for the carrier has already started for a couple of  years and we will start seeing pictures of it in the JiangNan shipyard  by 2010-2011.  The decision had already been made when they first  brought up the possibility of aircraft carrier.  All the announcement  since have been to prepare the world for the inevitability.<\/p>\n<p>As  for what the carrier group will look like, I found this photo yesterday  which contained basically the crown jewel of the South Sea Fleet (with  052B, 052C, 054A, 094 and 071).<\/p>\n<p>I  would imagine when the first aircraft carrier gets commissioned, it  will join the South Sea Fleet with these ships as the escorts.  It  provides a nice snapshot of what a future carrier group would look like.   Without a question, SSF is being prepared as the first fleet to have  an aircraft carrier amongst the 3 major fleets.  It has 5 of the 8 major  replenishment ships, 4 of the most modern destroyers (168-171), 2 054A  (will become 4 in probably a year and half), a nuclear submarine  flotilla with 093s and 094s, the 071 LPD and many modern diesel  submarines too.  A lot of the recently added ships into the fleet seemed  to be part of this planned escort group for a force projection fleet.   In addition, it seems that the newly constructed Sanya base will be the  home base for a new Ocean going fleet that will be sprung out of South  Sea Fleet and operate to protect Chinese commercial interest in the  shipping line, South Asia, Middle East and Africa.<\/p>\n<p>For the second part, there was an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/world\/0,1518,542506,00.html\">interview<\/a> a while back that addressed this.  This is probably the most important part.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>SPIEGEL:  Many experts believe that the official budget figures are vastly  understated. Do they include the costs of military research and of the  People&#8217;s Armed Police and the space program?<\/p>\n<p>Chen: They do  include the costs of research, but not for the People&#8217;s Armed Police.  Only the military portion of our space program is paid for under the  defense budget.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Western governments have long expressed  doubt about the accuracy of the officially announced budget and the pace  of increase.  The Pentagon often states it to be 2 or 3 times the  official figure.  I think a lot of that is based on past figures when  imports from Russia constituted a much larger portion of the real  military spending.  Back then, they might import $3 billion from Russia  in just the hardware and probably more on servicing\/training when the  official military budget was less than $20 billion.  Now, they barely  import anything from Russia and the official budget is $70 billion.  I  would think that the real military budget is higher if they include PAP  and some other stuff, but there is no way that it would be even twice as  much as the official one.  RAND did a report on this in 2005 and I  think the figure they came up with was somewhere between 1.5 to 2 times  the official budget.  With the current condition as I mentioned, the  ratio of real to official budget must have dropped further.  The other  big issue that many countries have raised recently is in dramatic  increase in military budget.  In fact, South Korea and Australia sort of  made a joint call for concern and greater transparency after the budget  was announced.  Now, I can see that a lot of governments like South  Korea and Japan, that are traditional competitors in East Asia, would  feel this way in this economical depression.  But even through this  tough time, the Chinese economy still grew 9% last year and is probably  going to grow somewhere between 7 and 8% this year.  The % of gov&#8217;t  budget spent on the military actually decreased this year from last  year.  Last year&#8217;s increase was very high at 17%, but it was supported  by a 13% GDP growth from the year before.  It really isn&#8217;t like China is  increasing military expenditures excessively when it&#8217;s citizens are  starving.  Back in the 80s when the economic liberalization first  started, they had consecutive years of double digit cuts in military  budget even when the economy was growing at over 10%.  So, I think these  complaints about increased military expenditures from numerous  countries to be very hypocritical.  One of the common notions that I  heard is that Chinese military budget should increase at the pace of the  economic growth.  In the Bush years, the American military budget went  up by an average of 7% a year even as its economic growth was much less  than that.  Instead of balancing its budget, its excessive spending for  different gov&#8217;t programs including military expenditure helped cause the  current economic depression.  Even this year, when the 4th quarter GDP  dropped by 6%, they are still increasing the military budget by 4%.  If  we compare that to China, they have a very low budget deficit and public  sector debt even with the increases in gov&#8217;t size and military  expenditure.  Of course, China needs to be more transparent about how  its money is spent, but I think it is slowly moving toward that  direction.  The recent white paper is part of that process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In case you guys have missed it, two of the big announcements out of the National People&#8217;s Congress this past week are the call for Aircraft Carrier by Admiral Hu Yanlin and the 14.9% increase in military budget.I&#8217;d first like to address the aircraft carrier issue, since we&#8217;ve been talking about this for a while [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnextjob.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}