Political and Military Analysis on China

Macroeconomic Policy to the Forefront: The Changing of the Guard


Worries continue to swirl around the Chinese and global economies, but the news from China in the third quarter of 2011 was basically positive: Inflationary pressures eased while growth slowed only slightly. Moreover, surface indicators of the health of China’s financial system remained stable and even improved slightly. These developments took some of the pressure off policy-makers, and opened up new space for policy adjustment and innovation. This has allowed China to make some adjustment around macroeconomic policy, loosening it slightly. However, large shifts in macroeconomic policy—of the sort expected by some in the global investment community—are not likely to occur soon. The overall economic environment is still challenging, and there is increasing evidence of complex interactions among different parts of the financial system, interactions that may not be fully understood. Moreover, today’s policy decisions are intertwined with important personnel changes. In fact, the man most responsible for the improvement in the financial health of China’s banks has just stepped down. The retirement of Liu Mingkang, head of the China Bank Regulatory Commission, may have profound consequences for the Chinese financial system.

advill said:

...but this time around Nations (with nuclear arsenals) can destroy each other, and other countries too in the process. Leaders need to ponder very carefully, & not be reckless for the sake of their nations' future generations.

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Not to mention that with the introduction of cyber-operations, theoretically, a nation could bring another nation to it's knees economically and technologically while at the same time maintaining at least a vaguely plausible denial of responsibility, how is the attacked nation state supposed to respond?

Note that the above problem is very similar to how nation states are supposed to respond to physical attacks by non-state actors (i.e. terrorists).

China's Three Warfares


In 2003, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and the Central Military
Commission (CMC) approved the concept of “Three Warfares” (san zhong zhanfa, 三种战法), a
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) information warfare concept aimed at preconditioning key
areas of competition in its favor. As defined by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in its
2011 Annual Report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s
Republic of China, Three Warfares consists of the following:


• Psychological Warfare seeks to undermine an enemy’s ability to conduct combat
operations through operations aimed at deterring, shocking, and demoralizing enemy
military personnel and supporting civilian populations.
• Media Warfare is aimed at influencing domestic and international public opinion to
build support for China’s military actions and dissuade an adversary from pursuing
actions contrary to China’s interests.
• Legal Warfare uses international and domestic law to claim the legal high ground or
assert Chinese interests. It can be employed to hamstring an adversary’s operational
freedom and shape the operational space. Legal warfare is also intended to build
international support and manage possible political repercussions of China’s military
actions.

escobar said:

Legal Warfare uses international and domestic law to claim the legal high ground or
assert Chinese interests. It can be employed to hamstring an adversary’s operational
freedom and shape the operational space. Legal warfare is also intended to build
international support and manage possible political repercussions of China’s military
actions.

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You know had the last Bush administration read and understood that single bullet I suspect the USA would not have ended up in the mess it was currently in diplomatically.

china_iwar said:

You know had the last Bush administration read and understood that single bullet I suspect the USA would not have ended up in the mess it was currently in diplomatically.

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I would not say it were a total failure as there are some countries(UK,Australia) which agree with the US and go to war against irak.
For the media warfare i think it were a total success at least in the US. The pentagon "propaganda department" has done a great job.

---------- Post added at 03:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:31 PM ----------


A very good one
The Gathering Storm : China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia


This text deals with the crucial question : Can China grow peacefully or not for the future ?
The Mearsheimer’s answer of is clear : NO, China can’t rise peacefully
....

escobar said:

I would not say it were a total failure as there are some countries(UK,Australia) which agree with the US and go to war against irak. For the media warfare i think it were a total success at least in the US. The pentagon "propaganda department" has done a great job.

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Well I question if the decisions by Australia and the UK had more to do with the personal relationships of their leaders with G.W. Bush as opposed to any serious strategic analysis of the so called facts that in hindsight seemed to have been manufactured. Also selling a story domestically is always far easier than building international support, this is because we humans have had thousands of years of social conditioning supporting the concept of us vs. them...and manufacturing external threats to cause a populace to rally around the flag is a very well known process.

china_iwar said:

Well I question if the decisions by Australia and the UK had more to do with the personal relationships of their leaders with G.W. Bush as opposed to any serious strategic analysis of the so called facts that in hindsight seemed to have been manufactured.

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I think their decision had more to do with the "closed alliance" they have with US more than any personal relationships or strategic analysis.

Also selling a story domestically is always far easier than building international support, this is because we humans have had thousands of years of social conditioning supporting the concept of us vs. them...and manufacturing external threats to cause a populace to rally around the flag is a very well known process.

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I agree with that.

NikeX said:

This is an excellent article that provides a peek behind the Chinese front and exposes certain vulnerabilities China must overcome if they are to become a true powerhouse in the 21th century

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There's a lot of BS in that article that grossly distorts a lot of things to give the impression that the PRC is more unstable than it actually is, which only serves the purpose of increasing US aggressiveness.

China-US Trust Building on Nuclear Strategy: A Chinese Perspective


Currently, the US-China mutual trust is eroding due to a series of misperceptions, miscalculations and suspicions between China and the US from different fields. Strategically, some key elements and origins of those mistrust factors need to be discovered and addressed so that the US-China Strategic Mutual Trust on nuclear strategies of both nations can be enhanced. This paper argues that the current relative vulnerable strategic stability between China and the US may deteriorate if it remains a dilemma of interpretation about the motives and intentions of each other – think of China-US nuclear relations today. This is because the consequences of not
trusting in the international nuclear arena can be a security competition in which each side wrongly attributes aggressive intention to actions that are taken for defensive reasons by the other. Currently, Mutual trust between China and the US is the key to the process of cooperation and partnership building that can mitigate and transcend the dynamics of security competition between them.


Should the United States Abandon Taiwan?

escobar said:

I would not say it were a total failure as there are some countries(UK,Australia) which agree with the US and go to war against irak.
For the media warfare i think it were a total success at least in the US. The pentagon "propaganda department" has done a great job.

---------- Post added at 03:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:31 PM ----------


A very good one
The Gathering Storm : China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia

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This text deals with the crucial question : Can China grow peacefully or not for the future ?
The Mearsheimer’s answer of is clear : NO, China can’t rise peacefully
....

Click to expand...

That article does bring up some good points, but parts of it is serious comical, especially the conclusion where it essentially says "China will be hostile to Australia if Australia blockades China's sea lanes". No duh genius.

I do agree with how the rise of China would increase the risks of armed conflict, but that is because armed conflict was not an option for anyone against the US hegemony, though I'm not sure I would call that peace.