Excessive Western pearl-clutching over new Chinese military technology is exactly what the Chinese regime wanted.
China’s hope is that reflexive Western fear mongering will drive poor policy decisions all over the globe. Yes, the Chinese military is certainly strong and getting stronger, but America’s chronic over-hyping of China’s military prowess only serves to make the Chinese military look stronger than it is. China reaps great geopolitical benefits from maintaining that perception.
This gear-driven defense hysteria is not good for the United States. Threat inflation incentivizes over-reaction and short-term American responses, while de-emphasizing efforts to build comprehensive strategic approaches able to better manage a rising and powerful China. Unfounded fear of China’s new gear fosters U.S. defeatism, and encourages potential regional partners to hedge their bets.
But stoking Western hysteria is not good for China, either. Perceptions of Western timidity feeds China’s already aggressive and often arrogant approach to geopolitical challenges, raising the risk of a catastrophic miscalculation.
The challenge for the West is to respect these public shows of martial force while keeping our wits about us. Fear may be an easy motivator that gets media eyeballs and unlocks Congressional appropriations, but it far is too dangerous to rely upon as a strategy.
To bend Winston Churchill’s old adage, the world has nothing to fear from China’s big parade but fear itself.
China even held "previews" to build excitement at the eventual unboxing of new tech.ASSOCIATED PRESS
Take Content-Free Unboxings With A Grain Of Salt:
China’s National Day Parade offered a smoggy smorgasbord of new tanks, missile systems, electronic warfare gear and deterrence tools—all helpfully labeled for the benefit of Western observers. Again and again, the parade hammered home the message that China’s military, with the backing of China’s manufacturing and emergent high-tech research capabilities, is a professional force that few can match.
That’s fine. American media audiences have an insatiable apatite for the mystery of “unboxing” new things, and certainly China has made enormous strides since the backward excesses of the Cultural Revolution.
But Western observers don’t need to help burnish China’s reputation. In the absence of detailed information at these high-profile “unboxings” of new Chinese weaponry, America’s public-sector China-watchers can only report what they see in stage-managed “reveals.” But, far too often, observers presume the revealed equipment is effective on the battlefield. In the absence of that contextual information on performance—which is difficult to come by—the default assumption is that each new system is perfectly ready to threaten. Again, it is a habit that endows China’s military-industrial complex with far too much unearned competence.
Take shipbuilding. China may be quite good at naval shipbuilding. But aside from raw shipbuilding capacity–which barely beats shipbuilding superpower South Korea–China’s naval vessels suffer several of the same design oversights that bedevil American naval ships. But the way the story is told is very different. For China observers, a design change on a Chinese destroyer is more likely to be interpreted as fearsome new development, while a similar design change on a U.S. ship is probably set to be criticized as a design oversight.
Even the expressions of China’s raw industrial capability, while daunting, are not necessarily so fearsome when presented with a little extra context. Certainly, it sounds frightening to note, as one observer did, that, as of mid-May, China has launched sixty Type 056 Corvettes and twenty Type 052D Destroyers in seven years.
That’s scary.
But we forget that America has already demonstrated that capability. Between 1975 and 1980, the United States commissioned thirty Spruance class Destroyers. America still has that capacity; the shipyard that built them, now owned by Huntington Ingalls, exists today, building Coast Guard Cutters, Destroyers and Amphibious Assault Vessels. And what about China’s sixty 1,500-ton Type 056 Corvettes? Well, they are puny vessels that the U.S. Navy doesn’t even build anymore. But the U.S. could. In fact, the U.S. Coast Guard is building almost sixty 350-ton Fast Response Cutters in one of Bollinger’s Louisiana shipyards—commissioning thirty-five of the vessels in about seven years. Both the design and operational tempo could be scaled up to something matching the Type 056.
In shaping narratives, context is quite important. The commissioning of the first of China’s seven Type 071 Yuzhao class landing platform docks (LPDs) occurred in 2007, and the others have either entered service or are preparing to be commissioned in the next year. The new Chinese LPDs have been hailed as great successes, introducing China to blue water amphibious operations. In the same time period though, America has quietly commissioned ten far more capable San Antonio class (LPD 17) class amphibious transports. And while the LPD 17 was a terrible shipbuilding story at the start, Huntington Ingalls’ ultimate success with the project has been under-appreciated.
When Western observers present Chinese gear, alone and without context, there are few checks on the public’s imagination. Currently, China is receiving accolades for launching their first flat-deck Type 075 amphibious helicopter carrier. That’s great—it was built quickly. (Though recent alarming reports that the ship went from keel to launch in about six months overlook Chinese reports that construction of the vessel was reportedly underway in early 2017, which would generally match the three-year U.S. pacing for laying the keel and launching flat-decks of similar size.) But, yard efficiency aside, these big platforms are relatively simple to build–even France could lay the keel and launch their Mistral class helicopter carriers in little more than a year. Even though these types of vessels have been in service all over the world and China has been talking about a flat-deck helicopter carrier (which was previously called the Type 081) for years now, China’s helicopter carriers were delayed and delayed again. At some point, might all that exhaustive pre-planning have become interpreted as, in essence, a delay? Or evidence of a design problem? Similar performance in the United States would be roundly criticized.
Even the autonomous HSU-001 submersibles that were revealed at the parade yesterday would have benefited from a discussion of American capabilities. Defense giant Boeing has been operating larger prototypes for years now, chalking up over 2,500 hours on Echo Voyager, a 51 foot long autonomous submarine with a range of 6,500 nautical miles and an endurance measured in months. Boeing’s self-funded investment paid off, and the U.S. Navy ordered four of these Extra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicles earlier this year. And that’s not all. The U.S. Navy is racing ahead with additional contracts for many other autonomous undersea vehicles.
Alarmist observers are always quick to say that they are merely trying to raise awareness to the coming challenge from China. That, in itself, is a noble goal. But, without context, fear-driven hyperbole or overblown efforts to leverage the public’s apatite for mystery is backfiring for everyone but the alarmists.
It would be wise to heed the warnings from the Pentagon’s latest Annual Report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China that detail China’s efforts to conduct influence operations and to engage in public opinion warfare. This–in helping raise awareness of media manipulation– might be where American agencies and entities involved in the observation and assessment of China can do more to raise public awareness. They can also do much more to shape the public dissemination of an informed narrative that warns of the challenges ahead without reliance upon overt appeals to fear.
China wants the U.S. public to fear the Chinese military. The last thing China wants is for international observers to put aside their fears and begin realizing that China’s big military and industrial complex and its “Made In China” aspirations are just an imperfect cover for creeping authoritarianism and a Communist bureaucracy that is afraid of its own people.
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