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China’s Continuing Transformation

Senior Communist Party of China (CPC) leader Li Changchun met with a 10-member media delegation from six Latin American countries in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on September 2.

China’s international profile rose over the past year, partly because of Beijing’s response to the global economic crisis. Notwithstanding some stresses and potentially troublesome longterm effects inside China, Beijing became a more prominent regional and emerging global player as the international community sought to recover from the crisis. After devoting considerable resources toward sustaining its own economy—including a $600 billion stimulus package and more than $1.4 trillion in new lending by banks in 2009—China assumed a central role in the G-20 and has served as one of the key engines for global recovery, reinforcing perceptions of its increasing economic and diplomatic influence.

China’s growing international confidence and activism has been fueled in part by the success of its own economic recovery to date, and has been partly reflected in greater Chinese cooperation with the United States and other countries in several areas. For example, last year Beijing contributed to the G-20′s pledge to increase IMF resources, deployed naval forces to the international antipiracy operation in the Gulf of Aden, and supported new UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea. Beijing has tempered its cooperation, however, in areas where China views its interests or priorities as different from ours, such as on Iran.

In addition its pursuit of international status and influence, Beijing’s foreign policy—especially its engagement with the developing world—is still heavily driven by the imperative of sustaining growth at home by securing energy supplies and other key commodities and cultivating access to markets and capital abroad. This focus, however, has generated accusations of poor labor and environmental practices abroad and predatory trade practices—and has revealed the limits to the success of its charm offensive around the world. Beijing’s commercial interests also limit its readiness to cooperate with Washington in dealing with such countries as Iran and Sudan.

Behind its external ambitions and increasing international activism, China’s core priority remains ensuring domestic stability. More fundamentally, Chinese leaders are intensely focused on shoring up public support for the Communist Party and its policies. President Hu’s ability to reinvigorate his efforts to balance fast economic growth with more equitable development, and to enhance the Party’s legitimacy, will depend on several variables, especially the sustainability of China’s economic recovery. Succession politics also will begin affect leadership decisionmaking in 2010.

In contrast to recent years, cross-Strait relations are relatively stable and positive, with Beijing and Taipei having made major progress on economic deals and Taiwan’s involvement in some international organizations. Nevertheless, the military imbalance continues to grow further underscoring the potential limits to cross-Strait progress.

People’s Liberation Army Modernization

Preparation for a Taiwan conflict continues to dominate PLA modernization and contingency plans and programs, and is likely to remain the driving factor at least through 2020. However, China’s international interests have expanded, Beijing has contemplated whether and how to expand the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) international role to protect and promote those interests. The leadership increasingly sees nontraditional military missions, such as humanitarian relief and peacekeeping operations, as appropriate to China’s great power status as a way to demonstrate its commitment to the international system. This reflects both a perceived need and an opportunity: the need to protect China’s interests and access to resources and sea lines of communications (SLOCs), and the opportunity to enhance China’s global stature through involvement in activities such as humanitarian relief and peacekeeping operations. The PLA, however, will resist participation in missions that it sees as US-dominated or focused on achieving US objectives.

The PLA’s capabilities and activities in four key areas pose challenges to its neighbors and beyond Taiwan , including China’s military relationships across the developing world; China’s aggressive cyber activities; its development of space and counterspace capabilities; and its expansive definition of its maritime and air space with consequent implications for restricted freedom of navigation for other states. The PLA is already demonstrating greater confidence and activism in such areas as asserting China’s sovereignty claims and in military diplomacy.

Important PLA modernization programs include: ballistic and cruise missile forces capable of hitting foreign military bases and warships in the western Pacific; anti-satellite (ASAT) and electronic warfare weapons to defeat sensors and information systems; development of terrestrial and space-based, long-range intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems to detect, track, and target naval, air, and fixed installations; and continuing improvements to its increasingly capable submarines to place naval surface forces at risk. Many of these programs have begun to mature and improve China’s ability to execute an anti-access and area-denial strategy in the Western Pacific.

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