BUT THE SPECTER OF WAR is not the only possible explanation for Xi's saber rattling and demands for combat readiness. For even as Japanese leaders and U.S. officials were publicizing their concerns this winter about a region on the brink of naval conflict, it became clearer that Xi and his close military confidants are squarely focused on domestic politics. Indeed, Gen. Liu Yuan -- the same reputedly hawkish princeling general thought to be close to Xi, who had blasted corruption in the military -- counseled in an essay published Feb. 4 in state media that China's dream of modernization had twice been shattered by war with Japan. "Today, our economic construction has arrived at a critical moment. We must never let it be broken by an incident," he wrote, referring to the Diaoyus. "The U.S. and Japan are scared of us catching up, and they will do anything to contain China's development, so we must not be fooled."
At the same time, another top-level document emerged: a speech delivered in December by Xi himself, in which he gave thundering confirmation that the PLA's primary function is to defend the regime, not China. This was the lesson learned from the Soviet Union's collapse, he said. "In the Soviet Union, where the military was depoliticized, separated from the party, and nationalized, the party was disarmed," Xi warned, according to an extract of his speech that was published by journalist Gao Yu and broadly corroborated by other sources. "A few people tried to save the Soviet Union; they seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again because they didn't have the instruments to exert power." Nobody in the vast Soviet Communist Party, Xi averred, "was man enough to stand up and resist."
Xi, then, has ultimately chosen to defend the Communist Party against internal political threats rather than prepare it to face external military threats. There is little doubt the Communist Party has been sharpening its identity in a post-communist world by defining itself against the West, fanning nationalist fervor, and promising a restoration of China's ancient grandeur. Xi thus has little choice but to keep pumping enormous resources into a war machine if he is to justify his party's continuing monopoly on power. "This dream can be said to be the dream of a strong nation," Xi told sailors on board the destroyer Haikou. "And for the military, it is a dream of a strong military."
To many observers, however, his speech seemed to confirm that China's provocations against Japan were in fact "evidence of profound domestic insecurity rather than rational policy," a Beijing diplomat who closely studies China's military machinations told me. "It is the fact of party control," he says, "that makes the PLA weak. Everything else -- the corruption, the risk aversion, the hierarchy -- is a symptom of that."
Then, too, there is the very real risk that if China or Japan miscalculates over the Senkaku Islands and actually does spark a war, China may lose. That, at least, is the assessment of several military analysts with whom I spoke, who believe Japan's disciplined, professional forces would prevail even without direct U.S. intervention. More broadly, I have heard growing doubts about China's actual fighting capabilities in some sections of the Chinese military, foreign diplomatic corps, and U.S. academia, many of whose members are revising their views on the PLA. "Our assessment is they are nowhere near as effective as they think they are," a Beijing-based defense attaché from a NATO country told me.
What if the recent drums of war are a sign of China's weakness and not its impressive new strength? "When Xi tells his troops to be ready for war, it's really an admission that they're in disarray," says the defense attaché. "He's saying, 'You guys are drunk, fat, and happy, siphoning off all the money into private accounts, and you need to get real.'"
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