Seven Reasons China Will Start a War By 2017
By David Archibald in American
Thinker
- Regime Legitimacy
Very few people in China believe in
communism anymore, including almost all of the 80 million members of the
Chinese Communist Party. The party itself is now a club for mutual
enrichment. The legitimacy of the party ruling China is derived from the
notions that democracy does not suit China and that the party is the
organisation best placed to run the country. The latter is based on an
ongoing improvement in conditions for the bulk of the population. In the
absence of economic improvement, some other reason must be found for the
population to rally around the party’s leadership. This may explain the sudden
base-building
that started in the Spratly Islands in October 2014.
China’s
public debt grew from US$7 trillion in 2007 to US$28 trillion in 2014. This
is on an economy of US$10 trillion per annum. A high proportion of the
economic growth of the last seven years is simply construction funded by
debt. The real economy is much smaller.
The Chinese government is likely to
see the contracting economy and realise that issuing more debt won’t have an
effect on sustaining economic activity. Thus the base-building was
accelerated to allow the option of starting their war. This is a life and
death matter for the elite running the party. They are betting the farm
on this. If this gamble does not work out then there is likely to be a
messy regime change.
- Chosen Trauma
Japan treated the Chinese as
sub-humans during World War 2. Before that, Japan starting mistreating
China by attacking it in 1895, not long after they started industrializing
themselves. That was followed by Japan’s 21 demands on the Chinese state
in 1915. The Nationalist government in China started observing National
Humiliation Day in the 1920s. Then followed the Mukden Incident of 1931 and
China’s start to World War 2 in 1937.
During the poverty of the Mao years,
the Japanese were forgiven for World War 2. Mao and Deng were pragmatists and
said that Japan couldn’t be punished forever. China’s recent prosperity
has allowed the indulgence of Japan-hating to be resurrected as a form of state
religion. National Humiliation Day is observed again on the 18th
September. The party has directed that television take up the theme of
Japanese aggression. Today 70% of prime time television in China is
movies about World War 2. There are at least 100 museums in China
dedicated to the Japanese aggression of World War 2.
The regime generates and sustains
anti-Japanese sentiment to give it the option to go to war.
- Being Recognised As Number One
The Chinese are a proud
nation. They actually resent the fact that the United States is
considered to be the number one nation on the planet. China also realises
that to be recognised as number one, they have to defeat the current number one
in battle. This is why it won’t be just creeping increments in Chinese
aggression. They need a battle for their own psychological reasons.
This means that they will attack the
United States at the same time that they attack Japan. Because surprise
attacks are more successful, it will be a surprise attack on US bases in Asia
and the Pacific and perhaps well beyond. This most likely will include
cyber-attacks on US utilities and communications.
China has structured its armed
forces for a short, sharp war. Of any country on the planet, they are
possibly the most prepared for war. They have one year of grain
consumption in stock and even a strategic pork reserve. They have just
filled up their strategic petroleum reserve of about 700 million barrels.
China’s war has nothing to do with
securing resources or making their trade routes secure. Some western
analysts have projected those notions onto China to rationalise what China is
doing. The Chinese themselves have not offered these excuses. To
China it is all about territorial integrity, which is sacred and not the
profane stuff of commerce.
- Humiliating The Neighbours
China
claims that the whole of the sea within its claim is Chinese territory, not
just the islands. When China gets around to enforcing that claim, foreign
merchant vessels and aircraft will have to apply for permission to cross it.
Non-Chinese warships and military aircraft will not be allowed to enter
it. The Chinese claim extends to 4° south, almost to the equator.
The worst affected country will be
Vietnam, which will be bottled up to within 80 km of its coast. Japan
realises that its ships from Europe and the Middle East will have to head
further east before heading up north through Indonesia and east of the
Philippines. Singapore will be badly affected because the passing trade
will drop off.
Japan will become quite isolated
because its aircraft will have to head down through the Philippines to almost
the equator before heading west.
China ranks the countries of the
world in terms of their comprehensive national power, which the Chinese
consider to be the power to compel. This is a combination of military
power, economic power and social cohesion. When it is enforced, the
nine-dash claim will do a lot of compelling of China’s neighbours.
- Strategic Window
Chinese strategists see a window of
strategic opportunity for China early in the 21st century, though
they haven’t publicly outlined the basis for that view. But we can make a
good stab at it. Firstly, an air of inevitability is important in winning
battles. While China is perceived to have a strong, growing economy that
is crushing all before it, that perception of inevitability rubs off on China’s
military adventures. To use that perception, China has to attack before
its economy contracts due to the bursting of its real estate bubble. This
explains the current rush to build the bases in the Spratly Islands.
Another problem for China is that
its aggression and increased military spending has caused its neighbors to
rearm and form alliances. China is better off attacking before its
neighbors arm themselves further.
Another consideration is the US
presidential electoral cycle. President Obama is perceived to be a weak
president and the Chinese might rather attack before he is replaced.
President Obama has made the right noises, though, about Chinese irredentism
and the coming war remains quite popular in the US military, in that the
different services are jockeying for position, which means they have official
blessing to the highest level. President Obama does have some
inconsistent policies that aid China, though, in that while a strong economy is
needed to fight China, his administration is doing its best to choke the US
economy with carbon dioxide-related regulations. The two ends are
mutually exclusive.
President Obama spent a period of
his childhood in Indonesia and would have heard a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment
(the Chinese were and are more successful merchants and shopkeepers) in those
formative years. As with Valerie Jarrett’s childhood in Iran, this will
affect policy.
- Great-State Autism
This is a term created by the
strategist Edward Luttwak to describe the fact that China is seemingly
oblivious to the effects of its actions on its neighbours. China sees
itself as the center of the world and purely through the lens of its own
self-interest. This has the practical result that China could not perceive the
possibility of things not going the way it wants them to. Luttwak also
considers that the Chinese overestimate their own strategic thinking. He
says that China doesn’t have a strategy so much as a bag of stratagems, most of
which involve deception.
- President Xi Jinping
While preparation for this war
started in the 1980s, the recent ramp up in aggression has been at the
direction of President Xi who, in his formative years as a party apparatchik,
was impressed by how the war with Vietnam in 1979 was used to consolidate power
in the politburo. President Xi has accumulated more power than any
Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping. He is using an anti-corruption campaign to
purge political opponents. Chinese leaders are supposed to only rule for
ten years before standing aside. Just two years into his presidency, Xi’s
supporters have raised the possibility of resurrecting the position of chairman
of the party (abolished by Deng to stop another Mao) so that Xi could continue to
rule from that position. President Xi is a nasty piece of work who has
been toughened up by his life experiences. At the age of 15, he was sent
to live and work with peasants in the yellow earth country after his father was
purged. His accommodation was a cave. His stepsister suicided due
to his father’s oppression by the Red Guards.
Japan
Japan sees this war being thrust
upon it and is approaching it with a great deal of foreboding. It sees it
as being inevitable, though Prime Minister Abe did ask to meet President Xi in
Indonesia recently. President Xi intends to kill many tens of thousands
of Prime Minister Abe’s countrymen, so the meeting was strained.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Abe addressed a joint session of the US Congress, part of his making the rounds to make
sure everyone is on the same page with respect to absorbing and repelling the
Chinese attack.
United States
The United States believes that a
rules-based wold order needs to be maintained for global security and
prosperity, including its own prosperity, because that relies upon world trade
to a large extent. So for the United States, this war will be about preserving
access to the global commons. The US military establishment has not kept
the public up to date with all of China’s preparations for war, probably
because they do not want to be perceived to be causing escalation. But
the US military is in no doubt that China will start a war. The main
unknown is the timing.
Chinese aggression has been a
godsend to the US Navy, which had lacked a credible threat and had faced
ongoing shrinkage. There is a tendency to overstate the efficacy of enemy
weapons systems. The Chinese would have read the US Navy reports on their
weapons systems, which would have emboldened them further.
How The War Will Be Conducted
There will be two main theatres of
operation: the East China Sea north of Taiwan and the South China Sea west of
the Philippines.
China claims sovereignty over the
Senkaku Islands (last occupied by the Japanese about 100 years ago) and the
entire Ryuku chain from the Yaeyama Islands at the southern end to Okinawa in
the north. If it is going to seize the Senkaku Islands, it might as well
seize the Yaeyama Islands at the same time. To that end, China is
building up a military base in the Nanji Islands about 300 km west of the
Senkakus. This includes a 10-pad helicopter refuelling base which suggests
that the initial assault will be led by helicopters overflying Japan’s coast
guard vessels around the Senkakus.
China has a substantial fishing
vessel fleet and merchant shipping totalling 70 million tons. It has been
using its fishing fleet to harass the Japanese coast guard around the Senkakus
and as far east as the Osagawa Islands, which includes Iwo Jima. This
suggests that fishing vessels could be used to land Chinese Special Forces to
widely attack Japanese bases that would normally be considered to be well back
from the front line. These forces would be used sacrificially to cause
maximum mayhem to dispirit the Japanese defense. In the north, the
Chinese approach would be to seize and hold against the Japanese and US counter
attack.
In the South China Sea, China is
building seven massive forts and one airstrip. The forts are designed
with flak towers standing out from the corners so that each tower has at least
a 270° field of fire. The forts seem to be designed to take a large
amount of punishment and hold out until they can be relieved. China wins
if it is still in the possession of these forts by the end of the war.
China is likely to start the war in
the south with attacks on other countries’ bases in the Spratly Islands and US
bases in the region, as far east as Guam. A long war will be bad for
China in that the run down to the Spratly Islands from Hainan Island is very
exposed, both for ships and aircraft. Vietnam has been upgrading its
radars and one hopes all the non-Chinese combatants will be sharing targeting
information. US AWACS over the Philippines will be able to track Chinese
targets handed over from Vietnam. Singapore is likely to operate its
F-15s out of Cam Ranh Bay. Chinese aircraft that survive the run down
will be at the end of their range by the time they get to the Spratly
Islands.
The US Marines have taken up a
number of bases in the Philippines with the intention of mounting the attack
that will remove the Chinese from their newly constructed forts. A number
of US weapons systems, such as the USS Zumwalt, may have to be rushed into
service to that end.
In the bigger picture, Japan and
China will try to blockade each other, mostly with their submarine
forces. Japan’s navy has a qualitative edge over China and is most likely
to win the blockade battle.
Industry throughout Asia will be
badly affected by the war, but Chinese industry in particular is likely to
grind to a halt quickly, and this will eventually cause social
disruption. The longer the war goes on, the worse China’s relative
position becomes. Meat will disappear from the Chinese diet. Unsold
soybeans will pile up in US warehouses.
The removal of the Chinese bases in
the Spratly Islands will allow a peace settlement with whoever ends up running
China. It will be one of the most pointless, stupid and destructive wars
in history, but that is what is coming.
David Archibald, a visiting fellow
at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014)
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