RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events China Views U.S. As Its Primary Enemy

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CHINESE DEFECTOR SAYS: CHINA'S ENEMY IS THE U.S.

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

China's communist leaders view the United States as their main enemy and are working in Asia and around the world to undermine U.S. alliances, said a former Chinese diplomat.

Chen Yonglin, until recently a senior political officer at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, Australia, said in an interview that China also is engaged in large-scale intelligence-gathering activities in the United States that, in the past, netted large amounts of confidential U.S. government documents from agents.

"The United States is considered by the Chinese Communist Party as the largest enemy, the major strategic rival" Mr. Chen told The Washington Times in a telephone interview from Australia, where he is in hiding after breaking with Beijing in May.

All Chinese government officials are ordered to gather information about the United States, "no matter how trivial", he said.
"The United States occupies a unique place in China's diplomacy," Mr. Chen said.

A pro-democracy activist who took part in the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Mr. Chen, 37, spent 10 years as a Foreign Ministry official.

He said he defected and sought political asylum in Australia to highlight repression of the Chinese people by their government and the ruling Communist Party, as well as the repression of dissidents such as democracy activists and the Falun Gong spiritual group.

Most Chinese government activity in the United States involves information-gathering carried out by military-related intelligence officers or civilians linked to the Ministry of State Security, Mr. Chen said.

"I know that China once got a heavy load of confidential documents from the United States and sent it back to China through the Cosco ship," Mr. Chen said, referring to the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Co.

The information was "very useful" to China's military and related to "aircraft technology" he said.

The Chinese also send political police abroad to monitor overseas Chinese and others in North America who Beijing considers opponents of the regime, he said.

China's government has targeted Australia as part of its "money diplomacy" and is working hard to persuade Australia not to send troops to help the United States in any conflict over the Republic of China (Taiwan), Mr. Chen said.

China has sought to influence Australia's government through high-level political visits and favorable trade and by offering contracts on energy-related products.
The goal is to force Australia to become part of a China-dominated "grand neighboring region" in Asia and to "force a wedge between the U.S. and Australia," he said.

The U.S. government has a close intelligence relationship with Australia and has been working to build stronger military ties, as the Pentagon shifts its global strategy toward Asia with the planned deployment of more arms in the western Pacific region to counter a Chinese military buildup.

Mr. Chen said he is "frustrated" that the Australian government in May turned down his request for political asylum, a move he thinks was linked to Australian government fears of upsetting Beijing.

Mr. Chen also said he fears that Chinese agents could kidnap him, as they have done with other exile dissidents. He said he prefers to stay in Australia with his wife and child, but also could seek asylum in the United States if Australia threatens to send him back to China, which he fears would endanger his life.

Two other Chinese government officials also defected recently in Australia and have revealed Chinese government spying activities.

Mr. Chen also provided new insights into the closed world of China's ruling power structure and political tensions between President Hu Jintao and former President Jiang Zemin.

President Hu is not fully in control of the government and military, and Mr. Jiang continues to wield power behind the scenes through allies in the armed forces, he said.

"Hu is still in the shadow of Jiang and will be until Jiang dies," Mr. Chen said.

The Chinese leader, however, launched his own version of Chinese ideology at the end of last year that calls for education in advancing the Communist Party.

Asked whether Mr. Hu will bring democratic reform to China, Mr. Chen said the Chinese leader is the beneficiary of the dictatorship and, therefore, is unlikely to make changes.

"For the past 16 years, a lot of people have been looking to see if the Communist Party can change from the top down to the low levels, but nothing changes," Mr. Chen said.

On China's military buildup, Mr. Chen said Beijing is following the strategy of former leader Deng Xiaoping, who urged China to "bide our time, build our capabilities", military as well as economic and political.
"What that means is that when the day is mature, the Chinese government will strike back," he said.

Mr. Chen said the danger of a war over Taiwan is growing.

"That is possible as Chinese society is getting more unstable," he said.
"Once any serious civil disobedience occurs, the government may call for a war across the Taiwan Strait to gather [political] strength from people."

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PrincessElisa said:


Why are we doing business with them again?

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PrincessElisa said:
Yeah.......we've been told this for ages.

Why are we doing business with them again?

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U.S. SEES TAIWAN CRISIS IN TWO YEARS

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.

China's military buildup includes an array of new high-technology weapons, such as warships, submarines, missiles and a maneuverable warhead designed to defeat U.S. missile defenses. Recent intelligence reports also show that China has stepped up military exercises involving amphibious assaults, viewed as another sign that it is preparing for an attack on Taiwan.

"There's a growing consensus that at some point in the mid-to-late 1990s, there was a fundamental shift in the sophistication, breadth and re-sorting of Chinese defense planning," said Richard Lawless, a senior China-policy maker in the Pentagon.
"And what we're seeing now is a manifestation of that change in the number of new systems that are being deployed, the sophistication of those systems and the interoperability of the systems."

China's economy has been growing at a rate of at least 10 percent for each of the past 10 years, providing the country's military with the needed funds for modernization.

The combination of a vibrant centralized economy, growing military and increasingly fervent nationalism has transformed China into what many defense officials view as a fascist state.

"We may be seeing in China the first true fascist society on the model of Nazi Germany, where you have this incredible resource base in a commercial economy with strong nationalism, which the military was able to reach into and ramp up incredible production," a senior defense official said.

For Pentagon officials, alarm bells have been going off for the past two years as China's military began rapidly building and buying new troop- and weapon-carrying ships and submarines.
The release of an official Chinese government report in December called the situation on the Taiwan Strait "grim" and said the country's military could "crush" Taiwan.


Earlier this year, Beijing passed an anti-secession law, a unilateral measure that upset the fragile political status quo across the Taiwan Strait. The law gives Chinese leaders a legal basis they previously did not have to conduct a military attack on Taiwan, U.S. officials said.


The war fears come despite the fact that China is hosting the Olympic Games in 2008 and, therefore, some officials say, would be reluctant to invoke the international condemnation that a military attack on Taiwan would cause.


ARMY OF THE FUTURE

In the past, some defense specialists insisted a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be a "million-man swim" across the Taiwan Strait because of the country's lack of troop-carrying ships.

"We left the million-man swim behind in about 1998, 1999" the senior Pentagon official said.
"And in fact, what people are saying now, whether or not that construct was ever useful, is that it's a moot point, because in just amphibious lift alone, the Chinese are doubling or even quadrupling their capability on an annual basis."

Asked about a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, the official put it bluntly:
"In the 2007-2008 time frame, a capability will be there that a year ago we would have said was very, very unlikely. We now assess that as being very likely to be there."

Air Force Gen. Paul V. Hester, head of the Pacific Air Forces, said the U.S. military has been watching China's military buildup but has found it difficult to penetrate Beijing's veil of secrecy over it.
While military modernization itself is not a major worry, "what does provide you a pause for interest and concern is the amount of modernization, the kind of modernization and the size of the modernization," he said during a recent breakfast meeting with reporters.

China is building capabilities such as aerial refueling and airborne warning and control aircraft that can be used for regional defense and long-range power projection, Gen. Hester said.


It also is developing a maneuverable re-entry vehicle, or MARV, for its nuclear warheads.

The weapon is designed to counter U.S. strategic-missile defenses, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The warhead would be used on China's new DF-31 long-range missiles and its new submarine missile, the JL-2.

Work being done on China's weapons and reconnaissance systems will give its military the capability to reach 1,000 miles into the sea, "which gives them the visibility on the movement of not only our airplanes in the air, but also our forces at sea," Gen. Hester said.

Beijing also has built a new tank for its large armed forces. It is known as the Type 99 and appears similar in design to Germany's Leopard 2 main battle tank. The tank is outfitted with new artillery, anti-aircraft and machine guns, advanced fire-control systems and improved engines.

The country's air power is growing through the purchase of new fighters from Russia, such as Su-30 fighter-bombers, as well as the development of its own fighter jets, such as the J-10.

Gen. Hester compared Chinese warplanes with those of the former Soviet Union, which were less capable than their U.S. counterparts, but still very deadly.

"They have great equipment. The fighters are very technologically advanced, and what we know about them gives us pause for concern against ours," he said.



MISSILES ARE ALSO A WORRY


It is their surface-to-air missiles, their [advanced] SAMs and their surface-to-surface missiles, and the precision, more importantly, of those surface-to-surface missiles that provide, obviously, the ability to pinpoint targets that we might have out in the region, or our friends and allies might have," Gen. Hester said.

The advances give the Chinese military "the ability... to reach out and touch parts of the United States": Guam, Hawaii and the mainland of the United States, he said.

To better deal with possible future conflicts in Asia, the Pentagon is modernizing U.S. military facilities on the Western Pacific island of Guam and planning to move more forces there.

The Air Force will regularly rotate Air Expeditionary Force units to Guam and also will station the new long-range unmanned aerial vehicle known as Global Hawk on the island, he said.

It also has stationed B-2 stealth bombers on Guam temporarily and is expected to deploy B-1 bombers there, in addition to the B-52s now deployed there, Gen. Hester said.
Projecting power

China's rulers have adopted what is known as the "two-island chain" strategy of extending control over large areas of the Pacific, covering inner and outer chains of islands stretching from Japan to Indonesia.

"Clearly, they are still influenced by this first and second island chain," the intelligence official said.


The official said China's buildup goes beyond what would be needed to fight a war against Taiwan.

The conclusion of this official is that China wants a "blue-water" navy, capable of projecting power far beyond the two island chains.

"If you look at the technical capabilities of the weapons platforms that they're fielding, the sea-keeping capabilities, the size, sensors and weapons fit, this capability transcends the baseline that is required to deal with a Taiwan situation militarily," the intelligence official said.

"So they are positioned then, if [Taiwan is] resolved one way or the other, to really become a regional military power as well."

The dispatch of a Han-class submarine late last year to waters near Guam, Taiwan and Japan was an indication of the Chinese military's drive to expand its oceangoing capabilities, the officials said.
The submarine surfaced in Japanese waters, triggering an emergency deployment of Japan's naval forces.

Beijing later issued an apology for the incursion, but the political damage was done.

Within months, Japan began adopting a tougher political posture toward China in its defense policies and public statements.
A recent Japanese government defense report called China a strategic national security concern. It was the first time China was named specifically in a Japanese defense report.



ENERGY SUPPLY A FACTOR


For China, Taiwan is not the only issue behind the buildup of military forces.

Beijing also is facing a major energy shortage that, according to one Pentagon study, could lead it to use military force to seize territory with oil and gas resources.

The report produced for the Office of Net Assessment, which conducts assessments of future threats, was made public in January and warned that China's need for oil, gas and other energy resources is driving the country toward becoming an expansionist power.

China "is looking not only to build a blue-water navy to control the sea lanes [from the Middle East], but also to develop undersea mines and missile capabilities to deter the potential disruption of its energy supplies from potential threats, including the U.S. Navy, especially in the case of a conflict with Taiwan," the report said.

The report said China believes the United States already controls the sea routes from the oil-rich Persian Gulf through the Malacca Strait.
Chinese President Hu Jintao has called this strategic vulnerability to disrupted energy supplies Beijing's "Malacca Dilemma."

To prevent any disruption, China has adopted a "string of pearls" strategy that calls for both offensive and defensive measures stretching along the oil-shipment sea lanes from China's coast to the Middle East.

The "pearls" include the Chinese-financed seaport being built at Gwadar, on the coast of western Pakistan.
And commercial and military efforts to establish bases or diplomatic ties in Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and disputed islands in the South China Sea.

The report stated that China's ability to use these pearls for a "credible" military action is not certain.

Pentagon intelligence officials, however, say the rapid Chinese naval buildup includes the capability to project power to these sea lanes in the future.

"They are not doing a lot of surface patrols or any other kind of security evolutions that far afield," the intelligence official said.
"There's no evidence of [Chinese military basing there] yet, but we do need to keep an eye toward that [ potential ] expansion.




The report also highlighted the vulnerability of China's oil and gas infrastructure to a crippling U.S. attack.

"The U.S. military could severely cripple Chinese resistance [during a conflict over Taiwan] by blocking its energy supply, whereas the [People's Liberation Army navy] poses little threat to United States' energy security," the report said.

China views the United States as "a potential threat because of its military superiority, its willingness to disrupt China's energy imports, its perceived encirclement of China and its disposition toward manipulating international politics," the report said.

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Pariah said:
Truth be told: This is the scariest development I have ever imagined in my life. They have the largest army in the world and were trained in artillery by the Russians. They can invade and defend concurrently with an equally effective amount of force from both actions. They have nuclear missiles pointed at the United States--I live in one of them!! They just got finished successfully testing LIBMs a few weeks ago. And if they attack, they'd almost certainly envelop two of America's friends in the process (Taiwan and Japan).

I'd sign up for the war and most definitely fight it..... But I won't be coming back.

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Pig Iron said:
Yeah, but if the US is spread too thin by stupip incursionist 70 virgin fuckers we won't be able to defend except in a draft and Hilary won't allow it and Bush wouldn't do it in an election year....

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PJP said:
Bush was criticized 2 or 3 years ago for calling China a startegic competitor. Nothing will ever come of this. China is practical. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. They may view us as an enemy......but we are a much too valuable business and trading partner for the relationship to ever sour to the point of war. If China felt like they could mess with us they would have totally taken over Taiwan, Korea and Japan by now.

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The reason they haven't done this is they are afraid of us.

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They know we won't get involved in a land war in Asia (the begining of the end for all conquerors)

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so what option does that leave us?......Incinerate them....all of them.....and believe me we would do it.......just like it may happen in the Middle East someday.

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the G-man said:
The odds of China actually invading us are pretty slim.

The odds of China invading someone else that we are supposed to then protect, or of starting a shooting war with the former USSR are what I'm worried about.

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PJP said:
It would be WWIII....even France would send us some divisions so they could quickly surrender to the Chinese.

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PJP said:
You don't think the NATO alliance would go into effect if we were invaded. It would be WWIII....even France would send us some divisions so they could quickly surrender to the Chinese.

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PenWing said:
China wants to be left alone in it's own, self-sufficient corner of the world. Okay, so it wants a very large corner, but it wants to be left alone. Thing is, it will need to subjugate other nations to create this little corner. In contrast, the US does need the same thing, but it goes about it a little differently. The US tries to create stable governments where people can live in freedom, and where the US can purchase what it needs. I know this is a very simplistic break down of what's going on, but sometimes things are just that...simple.

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PenWing said:
Fact is, we may have to give up Taiwan. We cannot allow Japan and Korea to fall into China's hands, though. Having them sign into the treaty would tell China we mean business, but it could also escalate their actions towards Taiwan. The US has to be willing to lose Taiwan to mainland China. All of this could be enough to stall further action. For a time.

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r3x29yz4a said:
Chinese people are short. We should build tree houses and when they invade...we pull up the ladders.

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Captain Sammitch said:
They have LRBMs, most likely ICBMs as well. But as far as we know, most of their missile force is based in silos or other stationary facilities, not rail-mobile like North Korean nukes. I am pretty sure we know where most of them are, thanks to Japanese intelligence assets. So why not sabotage 'em?

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Because it would not be an easy task. It's a large land mass and missles can be hidden all over the place. How do you propose to dissable them ALL at once? Leaving only 10% operational would be a disaster. Attempting to do so would be an act of war in itself, precipatating the thing which you supposedly want to avoid. The best proven defense against a nuclear threat is still MAD. Time to dust off the cold war acronyms I guess.

I was hoping my child wouldn't have to grow up in a world of MIRVs and throw weights. I recall explaining to her what the cold war was about and in innocence she looked at me and said 'Why would anyone build something like that???'.

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magicjay38 said:
What if we held a Treasury auction and China didn't come?

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