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The American Legion Online Update Story
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Eye on China: How big a threat?
As Chinese troops kill civilians in Tibet, as protests erupt at embassies worldwide, and as calls for an Olympic boycott swell to a chorus, now is probably a good time to take a look at recent news about China's military capabilities. In our government, two schools of thought exist as to how big a threat is posed by the communist juggernaut: the Pentagon's (backed by the State Department) and the one championed by Michael McConnell, U.S. director of national intelligence.
While the Pentagon warns that China's unprecedented military buildup is a prelude to an invasion of Taiwan and possible war with the United States or Asian nations, McConnell dismisses the notion that Beijing is rattling its saber. "We judge that any Chinese regime," McConnell wrote recently, "even a democratic one, would have similar goals." But if China were a democracy, would its soldiers be shooting Tibetans right now?
On March 4, The Washington Post reported that China increased its military budget by 17.6 percent - just about the same increase as last year's. Beijing's $59 billion defense budget still doesn't compare to U.S. expenditures, which stand at nearly $600 billion if you include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet David Sedney, who handles East Asian matters for our Defense Department, warns that China's military buildup "has been characterized by opacity, by the inability of people in the region - and around the world - to really know what ties together the capabilities that China's acquiring with the intentions it has."
The Post also noted that China is now capable of launching ballistic missiles against U.S. aircraft carriers and other warships. The Pentagon's latest annual report claims these missiles demonstrate that China has mastered the art of precision-missile targeting. Perhaps the Chinese theft of U.S. warhead designs and other secrets in the 1990s had something to do with that powerful lesson learned.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates isn't fooled by official Chinese defense-spending figures. "Part of the issue is what we don't know," he said at a March 5 news conference. "I think that there's general agreement that the Chinese military budget that we see is only a portion of what the Chinese spend." Gates also talked about how China and the United States have both shown their abilities to shoot down satellites in outer space. He said the U.S. has no intention of developing anti-satellite technology, and that our recent shoot-down of a decaying satellite was done in order to deal with a "potential emergency."
Besides the obvious threat of Chinese military clout, another more insidious problem looms ever larger: home-grown Chinese computer hackers. CNN reported this month on a community of computer hackers living in a bare-bones apartment (with three state-of-the-art computers) on the island of Zhoushan, a major Chinese naval base just south of Shanghai. These youthful Chinese computer wizards are part of a civilian "cyber militia" who attack government and private Web sites around the world. They claim to have hacked into the Pentagon's Web site and downloaded information; they also claim the Chinese government is secretly paying them.
"First, you must know about the Web site you want to attack," says cyber-militiaman Xiao Chen. "There is a saying, ‘Know about both yourself and the enemy, and you will be invincible.'" Beijing denies any attempt to hack into sensitive U.S. Web sites, although the Pentagon recently said that computer networks here and in western Europe were hit last year by "multiple intrusions," many of them originating in China.
"These hacker groups, in my opinion, are not agents of the Chinese state," said intelligence analyst James Mulvenon in the CNN report. "They are sort of useful idiots for the Beijing regime." Mulvenon added the communist regime tolerates such hackers, as long as they don't attack Web sites inside China.
For example, these hackers could probably figure out a way to let their fellow Chinese watch video feeds of protests and violence in Tibet. But if you use the Internet in China, a search for "Tibet" is only bound to produce travel features. If China were a democracy, would this be the case?
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