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China as a Regional Military Power
From: Columbia University
| By:
Andrew J. Nathan |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Militarily, China is barely a regional power in Asia. And yet, because of its size and location, China's role in the regional security structure is "a major concern globally," says Andrew J. Nathan (right), professor of political science at Columbia University and one of America's leading scholars of Chinese politics.
In this interview with Fathom, Nathan discusses China's military capability and vulnerability vis-à-vis Russia and Japan. |
Fathom: Is China an emerging world power? What makes it so? |
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| Andrew Nathan describes China's status as an emerging world power. | |
Andrew J. Nathan: There are all kinds of different elements of world power. The most common element that people look at is military power projection--the ability to put military power into any region of the world. And the fact is that only the United States has that capability. It involves transport capability, logistics capability, mid-air refueling, all these things that make it possible for us to carry out a war anywhere on the globe. |
The Chinese don't have that. Their navy, for example, is largely a coastal navy with a range of a few hundred miles. They have very few what are called blue-water ships that can go in the oceans, in the deep water. They don't have a single aircraft carrier. They don't have mid-air refueling capabilities, so their fighter aircraft can fight only a few hundred miles from the coast. They don't have an airlift capacity to send troops and supplies any distance. Their troops have to march or take trucks or trains to where they're going, so they can go only a short distance. And, in fact, Chinese troops have never penetrated far beyond Chinese borders. They've been in Korea; they've been in Vietnam; they've been in the border area with India, for example. But have there ever been Chinese troops fighting in the Middle East, in Africa, in places as far away as Japan, which is close to China? There never has been that instance. |
So, militarily, the Chinese are a coastal power. They're a regional power in the sense that other countries in the region, like, say, Japan, or a country like Indonesia, which is perhaps 600 or 1,000 miles away from China, still need to be alert to Chinese power. But actually the Chinese cannot threaten a country like Indonesia militarily. |
So they're not a power on the order of the big powers. And yet one might still say that the rise of China is the subject most concerning the rest of the world. Not everyone may agree with us, but at least it's not crazy to suggest that the biggest issue for American foreign policy to deal with in the next 10, 20 years is the rise of China. |
So the glass is half empty and half full. China's power is very limited, and yet it is a major concern globally. |
Fathom: Can you give us a sense of China's military capability vis-à-vis Russia and vis-à-vis Japan, in terms of its land army, air force, navy, as distinct from its capability to project power? |
Nathan: A static analysis would just be to line up the two militaries--Chinese and Japanese--and you could say that the Chinese military is very large, 3 or 3.5 million, and the Japanese is very small, a few hundred thousand, just minuscule. And the numbers of ships, planes and so forth in China are much greater. But the Japanese military is much more technologically advanced and has much better planes and ships. The Chinese possess missiles and nuclear weapons. These are a major piece of the Chinese armament package that they have for their reasons. The Japanese haven't got that stuff at all. It's against their political culture to possess such things. So this would be a static comparison of one against the other. |
But if we think about them in certain conflict scenarios, where would that conflict occur and how would it occur? There's probably no realistic way to imagine either of these countries invading the other. So that's not the game. But you could imagine a naval battle between the two--I'm not expecting it at all, but it's imaginable--over some island or something like this. And in that case, all the Chinese land troops, the 3 million land troops, are completely no use. They're not on the ocean. And the Japanese Self Defense Forces navy probably is superior to the Chinese navy, even though it has fewer ships. But that's also not a very realistic scenario. |
The comparison with Russia is very different. The Russian military has decayed a lot; we know that from its performance in Chechnya, from its desertion rates, from various things that the Russian military has been involved in. It has some areas of enormous technological sophistication: fighter planes, missiles. But as a working force it's disorganized, corrupt and demoralized. |
Here again, the trend is not to war. But if some unexpected events led to a war between China and Russia, that would be on land--the two countries have a huge land border--and in the air, potentially. But the major confrontation would be on land. And I could easily imagine the Chinese winning that, because, in land battles, organization and morale are very important. Tanks probably would be important in such a battle, and the Russian tanks are probably technologically superior but they may break down. They may not be well maintained. |
Fathom: In terms of the capability to project power, are both Japan and Russia superior to China? |
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| Andrew Nathan posits China as a future threat to Asian stability in the twenty-first century. | |
Nathan: There are many different ways and distances to project power. If we speak about the ability to project power a short distance, on the ocean, on the sea, then I think Japan is definitely superior. It has oceangoing warships. And it routinely patrols the sea-lanes up to a distance of 1,000 nautical miles from Japan, which is quite a long distance, reaching about as far as Taiwan. China doesn't do that. China really stays off the oceans. Russia has oceangoing fleets. So the answer is yes. |
But if you talk about projecting power on the scale that the US does, let's say, putting however many troops we put into the Persian Gulf war--and of course that's three months of building up troops--Japan can't do it, Russia can't do it. Nobody can do it except the US and to some extent our allies Britain and France. |
Fathom: In your book co-authored with Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, you talk a lot about Chinese military vulnerability in the region. Can you characterize that vulnerability? |
Nathan: China was invaded by imperialist powers in the nineteenth century, and by Japan in the 1930s, and saw the Americans get involved in the Taiwan issue in the 1940s and '50s, and had MacArthur in the 1950s in the Korean War say that he was going to cross the Chinese border. All that sets up a cast of mind in China, that they don't forget that they have been invaded many times. |
Then, if they look at the potential for invasion of China today--international-relations theorists will always distinguish between capabilities and intentions--the capabilities are there for other powers, especially the United States, to invade parts of China. |
As we were saying earlier, it would not be practical for the Japanese to invade. It might be practical for the Russians to invade parts of China. Certainly as recently as up until the fall of the Soviet Union, when the Russian military was in good shape, that was a real possibility. The Russians had half a million troops on the Chinese border, armed with missiles, with tanks and ready to invade. Today, maybe not. So that's the capability. |
On the intention side, of course, there isn't any such intention now. There's no American that I know of who says, "Let's invade China." But we do have Americans talking about keeping China from getting control over Taiwan. Not only do we have people saying that; that's the policy. |
We have a lot of people talking about Tibetan independence. Now, these are not the mainstream strategic thinkers of the United States, but there's some sympathy in American public opinion for Tibet. So, just to be clear, I think the chance of the US government aiding Tibetan independence or invading China is less than zero. That doesn't exist. But there are voices in favor of some kind of help to Tibetan independence. |
So, in terms of intention, that isn't there. And there's no intention by Russia, Japan or anybody to invade China. There's potentially the intention of some smaller countries to challenge Chinese claims in the South China Sea. |
The Chinese are pretty safe on intention. But, as we know, the intention structure of the international system has a way of changing. Unthinkable things have occurred recently, like the fall of the Soviet Union and things of that sort. |
The job of military people in every country is not to count on the current intentions of potential adversaries but to build up capabilities. And it's in that sense that China is vulnerable, still. |
Fathom: What is China's strategic goal in the Asia-Pacific region? |
Nathan: I think the Chinese have a long-term strategic goal that is not within their reach right now, which is to become a global power and have global reach and power projection and have a voice in the security affairs of all regions like the Middle East and all that. But that's way, way down the road. |
More immediately, their goal is certainly, first of all, to defend their own territory, which in their mind includes Taiwan, which they have to get hold of before they can start to defend it. Also, in their mind that territory includes their claimed area of the South China Sea, as well as various reefs and islands that are contested by other people. So this is a huge amount of ocean off of China where the Chinese want to develop the ability to defend their claims. They also want to defend their interests all around their border, say, in Central Asia, where you have elements of instability, such as Muslim fundamentalist rebels. |
But the question of power projection should not be seen solely in a military light. Because as soon as you want to defend your borders, it automatically means you want to influence the people sitting on the other side of those borders. And that entails the ability to get deferential treatment from the Central Asian governments, the Vietnamese, the Koreans, both North and South, the Japanese, the Indonesians and others, looking hundreds of miles off from Chinese borders. So I think what they aim at now is to achieve enough influence and prestige in all of these regions so that they're confident that no other actor in those regions is going to take measures that are detrimental to Chinese interests. And that's as much a diplomatic exercise as it is a military exercise. It's not something you just do militarily without consulting the other guy. |
Fathom: Does it mean that you have to be a dominant power in the region? |
Nathan: Yes. You have to have enough ways to hurt the other fellow so that he remembers to think about you before he does something. If that's what you mean by a dominant power, I agree. But you don't have to be a dominant power the way the US is a dominant power in some regions. I mean, the US is a dominant power or potentially a dominant power in many regions, in the sense that if anybody defies us we can crush those people one-sidedly by our own choice. |
I don't think China is going to become a dominant power that way. It would be nice for the Chinese if they could, but I don't think it's realistic. I think that their strategy for influencing a country like Japan or a country in Southeast Asia is not to say, "I can totally smash you if I need to," but to try to find a mix of diplomatic and military ways so that they will always be in the minds of every other country and their interests will be well understood. That's another definition of the word "dominant." |
Fathom: Beyond the preservation of its current borders and territories that China considers part of China, does China have territorial ambitions, that is, to make new claims? |
Nathan: No. I don't think they do. They're not planning to go out and say, "This piece of territory which I don't control today is mine and I want it back," with the exception of Taiwan, depending on how you interpret that. But with respect to Taiwan, they've already made that claim and that claim has been acknowledged by most of the world. |
In other border areas where they have disputes with countries--and they have had disputes with more than 10 countries--they've settled those disputes. They've settled it with Russia. They've settled it with the bordering Central Asian countries. They haven't settled it with India yet, but there are negotiations that have been going on for a decade, and I think it's clear that those negotiations will eventually lead to a settlement, but certainly no enlargement of Chinese claims. They settled with Laos. They have ongoing disputes, as I mentioned, with several countries in the South China Sea, but the Chinese claims are fixed. They're not going to be enlarged. |
Fathom: Do you see China as a force for peace in the twenty-first century in Asia? Or a potential threat to stability? |
Nathan: We've been talking a lot about the military dimension. And I think it might help in answering that question to broaden out to some of the other issues that are not so neat. |
Let's take arms proliferation. The Chinese could play a very destructive role anywhere by proliferating arms. For example, in the Middle East or in South Asia, without sending troops, without projecting power, as we've been talking about, the Chinese could damage regional stability in those regions by supplying, say, Pakistan, or by supplying, say, Iraq or Iran with nuclear or missile technology. |
Now, over the course of 20 years or so these types of supplies by the Chinese to countries like that have emerged as a major issue in the US-China relationship. And the Chinese, step by step, have cut off or have said they were cutting off these supply relationships to other countries. So they cut off the supply of nuclear power technology to Algeria; they cut off the supply of missile technology Syria--all of this at the behest of the United States. |
What remains very fuzzy to me right now--either because it's secret or even the CIA itself doesn't know--is what the state of Chinese supplies is, when the US continues to press the Chinese to stop and the Chinese are giving us mixed signals. They might not even be telling the truth, or their foreign ministry may agree to it and their arms companies may not do what the foreign ministry says. These issues are very complicated. |
Then your question is, will China contribute to stability or to instability in the coming century? We have to look at that issue, which I think is up in the air right now. |
Hopefully, as the US-China relationship deepens and as China achieves its status as a world power, it will see the need to stop these proliferating arms sales. But we can't take that for granted, because these arms sales are a moneymaker. And from a Chinese point of view, they also have a certain security rationale, because India is one of the main rivals to China and it behooves the Chinese to keep India's main rival viable as a military force, especially when the Pakistan political system is collapsing. How else can China aid its ally, Pakistan? |
Take Iran. It's right in the middle of the Middle East. It has the biggest population in the Middle East. It has a lot of influence in the Middle East, as well as in Central Asia. So, again, it behooves China to maintain close relations with Iran for a lot of reasons of its own. |
There are also other reasons that make it tempting for the Chinese to maintain these weapons supplies to these kinds of countries. |
Another way to look at your question is take a scenario like Korea, where we have this very slow process of the opening of North Korea. We don't know whether during that process North Korea will either collapse or launch some kind of military attack on South Korea. One doesn't know what North Korea's really up to. And, of course, China is the most influential country over the North Koreans. Not that it has much influence, but more than anybody else. And China has a tremendous stake in the outcome of things in Korea. |
If, for example, we went to sleep and 30 years later we wake up and, lo and behold, the entire Korean peninsula is under the control of or influence of the Americans, with American troops there, as they are now, but over the whole peninsula, China wouldn't like that. |
If things in Korea unfold in such a way that the Americans and Chinese are able to cooperate in achieving some sort of soft landing of the Korean scene, then the answer to your question will be yes, China contributed to peace in the region. But if not, then maybe not. |
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