China's Military Strategy Toward the U.S.A.: View from Open Sources

摘要

One key issue in understanding the Chinese military is what framework to use. The most common is to compare the PLA to the current US armed forces, and then to find the PLA to be pathetic. This framework leads many China specialists to be deeply upset at anyone who sees a threat from China now or in the future. Chinese authors also condemn the 'China Threat Theory' as an elaborate and sinister deception. One Chinese author in a Beijing Review article even claims the theory was invented in Japan. There are many other frameworks, however, besides using current US armed forces as the standard to 'prove' that the PLA is backward. Among them, one possible framework is the 'transformation' framework. Inside the Pentagon, the press has reported for many years there are many efforts to 'transform' US armed forces in the next two or three decades. Work began in the last few years on these 'transformation' efforts in the US, so this framework of looking at the world is not yet well known to the many retired US military officers who constitute the majority of 'work force' who write for open publication about the Chinese military. The consensus of this group has been that China is too backward and too poor and too focused on economic development to be considered as a possible candidate for military 'transformation.' Indeed, this view would warn that Gordon Chang's book The Coming Collapse of China provides a more realistic China Threat' - the threat of collapse - than any Chinese effort at military transformation or military breakthrough capabilities. The author's understanding is that the research findings reported from the China military press will be completely dismissed by those who hold this viewpoint as nothing more than wishful thinking, mere aspirations or even a kind of magical thinking by the Chinese.