BEIJING — Later this month, over four days that are yet to be disclosed, the most important generals in both the United States and China will face each other and see if they can set the world's most dangerous military relationship on a safer track. Their task is to reduce the risk that any of the flashpoints proliferating on China's periphery will escalate into war with the United States.
More...
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is known as an affable and straight-talking army man. So too is Gen. Fang Fenghui, his counterpart at China's People's Liberation Army (PLA).
"Fang is smart, he's impressive, he's his own person and he wants to make a more professional force," says one of several recent visitors who has spent productive hours with him in Beijing.
PLA leaders have always calculated that their interests are best served by allowing minimal genuine communication and revealing nothing about capabilities, intentions or systems of command. But as China's military gets bigger and more powerful, there are signs that the calculus of secrecy is changing.
Does China have "more than 100 nuclear weapons," as the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated in 2006, or 3,000, as guesstimated by a recent Georgetown University study? In what circumstances would it use them and who has the power to press the button?
Could Dempsey tell the difference between the launch signature of one of the PLA's anti-ship ballistic missiles, with a conventional warhead, and a nuclear weapon on its way to the United States? If he urgently phoned the hotline to the Zhongnanhai Telecommunications Directorate, would he actually get through to Fang?
Until recently, the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's famous dictum -- "hide one's capacities and bide one's time" -- helped the PLA build its strength without triggering a neighborhood arms buildup in response. Its intentions were sufficiently ambiguous to discourage more powerful countries from pushing it around while its capabilities were not so scary as to provoke a serious defensive response.
But after two decades of double-digit budget hikes, the PLA can no longer use secrecy to disguise its capabilities. It has flight-tested a stealth fighter, deployed the world's first anti-ship ballistic missile -- dubbed the "assassin's mace" in China -- and launched its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. "A bigger power does not have the option of appearing weak," says Christopher Ford, the former U.S. special representative for nuclear nonproliferation.
SUBJECTS:
