It takes more than buying a junked surplus Soviet hull to float a working aircraft carrier. It’s true that China hopes someday to float a modern blue-water navy, but they certainly don’t have that capability today or tomorrow. And the existance of a Chinese aircraft carrier wouldn’t make much difference in any forseeable US-Chinese naval conflict. Either that conflict will take place within range of Chinese land-based aircraft, in which case the contribution of the carrier will be miniscule, or it will take place outside that range, in which case that single lonely carrier will be a sitting duck.
You can’t buy a modern navy with money, it takes years just to train the guys who will train the guys who will train the guys who will staff that navy.
That’s not to say that the US navy could operate with impunity along China’s coast, there are mines, torpedo boats, land based anti-ship missiles, land-based aircraft, land based anti-aircraft to counter our naval aircraft and on and on to worry about. Maybe in a couple of decades the Chinese can amass enough of a navy to allow them to achieve local naval and air superiority for long enough to allow them to make a landing on Taiwan. But that isn’t happening today and it’s not happening tomorrow.
Power isn’t about the ability to win wars anymore. Power is about global influence. Right now, the United States is losing some of its relative influence over the rest of the world, and China is gaining more influence. It’s not hard to predict that in the near future China will have more global influence than America, and we can only hope that everyone still gets along when a new, different schoolyard bully starts calling the shots.
Government regulations would probably prevent such an idea, even from a front company. Smaller American companies, less so.
Then there’s the fact that the less associated you are with the Chinese government, the more you make business decisions based on an actual profit motive. I don’t think there’s a Chinese corporation that is not transparently owned by the Chinese government that would want to buy an American firm just to close their American plants down, even for the IP.
Well…your friends probably could have been more tactful and instead of calling you stupid should have said "you don’t understand how modern nations project military power, you don’t understand why raw manpower does equate to projectable militar power’ etc. The Chinese have a larger military than the US does…but they have almost no way to project that military power beyond their own borders. In addition, while they certainly have a quantity advantage the US’s quality advantage more than compensates for it in a conventional confrontation. As Lemur866 put it, it all hinges on your war aims. What exactly are we proposing here? A US invasion of China? Ridiculous…would never happen. A Chinese invasion of the US? Equally ridiculous. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan? They wouldn’t have a hope in hell of succeeding at that (which is why there still IS an independent Taiwan after all these years).
This would be one of those ‘cut off your nose to spite your face’ kind of things. Sure, China COULD do this…but then it would ruin THEIR economy (as well as probably everyone elses) as well. It would probably hurt them worse than us in fact as no one would then buy their goods or services. Sure, if it were a prelude to war they wouldn’t care…except that we wouldn’t then either. I don’t think its within China’s capability to ‘destroy the American econnomy’, regardless…though they could certainly hurt us badly. At the cost of wrecking their own economy in the process.
Certainly they do…they ARE a major power after all. Perhaps it has escaped your notice however that the US doesn’t exactly lack this resource either (NSA, CIA, etc)…
They could spend every bit of their anual GDP for decades and they wouldn’t catch up to the US’s current capabilities…not unless the US suddenly halted spending money on our own military. I’ve seen estimates for China’s annual military budge ranging from something like $70 billion (in US dollars) up to around $95 billion. Even if you double that (‘officially’ China spends something like roughly $20 billion, at least as of 2004) they aren’t even in the ball game with the US’s annual budget ($585 billion)…and our current capabilities are light years ahead of their’s.
Check out this pie chart (about half way down the page) and look at the total percentage world wide toward defense…look at the US, then look at China. Notice a difference?
Out of curiosity, do you have a cite about the US Navy being so baffled by this uber new nucler sub technology that they are using google earth to find them? I’m just curious as to the source of that.
Depends on how you define the conflict. If its an invasion by the US of main land China with the intent to occupy China, then I’d have to say we’d lose that one…badly. Just about anything else outside of China’s borders they would most likely lose, depending on what goals both sides had. You mentioned an invasion of Taiwan…China would lose if they tried a forced entry assault on Taiwan, even if the US didn’t take part (IMHO, and as long as we are talking about staying convention with no nukes). Same with a Chinese invasion of South Korea or Japan. China just doesn’t have the ability to project enough military force into those regions. A US/South Korean invasion of North Korea with China helping the North would probably result in a blood bath…but China might just come out on top in that kind of conflict (if the North didn’t fold up like an empty beer can). What I’m getting at is you’d really need to define your projected conflict to have a feel for who might ‘win’ or ‘lose’…and at least do a bare bones out line of what you think the two nations goals would be.
Of course, this imagines that current trends will linearly continue. If China’s economy continues to grow at 9% and the US at 3%, eventually China will be 1,000,000 times richer than the US. Except that’s not reasonable to expect.
And define “near future”. To me, “near future” means, in the next 20 years. You honestly expect China to be richer and more influential than the US in 20 years? Even in terms of total GDP, rather than GDP per capita?
Plus, remember that not every US president for the next 20 years will be as incompetant as George Bush.
And China has huge unresolved problems that make another 20 years of uninterupted 9% growth look pretty unlikely. Sure, we’re all going to have to get used to the idea that China is going to occupy a relatively ever-larger role on the world scene, but this doesn’t imply decline for the United States.
Remember back in the 80s how everyone was moaning that if current trends continued, Japan was going to own the United States? China’s current rapid growth is simply due to the fact that they are transforming from a totalitarian socialist dictatorship into a normal country. Once they reach normal country status they have no reason to expect their current rapid growth to continue, any more than Finland or Italy expects 9% growth.
The U.S. economy dwarfs all others. The U.S. military dwarfs all others. That’s the bottom line. Sure, China has more men, but that’s not a big deal these days, as soldiers don’t line up on battlefields and try to overwhelm each other any more. Iraq had more soldiers than the U.S. did, and we all know how the invasion went.
If U.S. and Chinese forces clashed somewhere (let’s say they wound up on the opposite side of some regional conflict somewhere), the U.S. would absolutely flatten the Chinese forces. If the Chinese were foolish enough to put up their air force against the U.S. air force, they’d probably lose planes by a 10-1 ratio or so. If they put their Navy up against the U.S. Navy, there would be a lot of Chinese ships on the ocean floor.
There is no one power on the planet that can come close to winning a major military conflict against the U.S. The big risk to U.S. interests is the ‘death of a thousand cuts’, where small conflicts crop up all over the place, terrorist attacks increase, economic warfare is waged, etc. It won’t look like a world war, but rather a low-scale continual wearing down of the American people and economy.
But that’s very unlikely. If you think the Chinese have leverage over the U.S. because they hold debt, imagine how much leverage the U.S. has, since the U.S is an economic collossus. When the U.S. economy sneezes, the world catches cold. Look at what’s happening to the overseas market right now because of the U.S. credit crunch. An economic collapse of the United States would trigger a worldwide depression. No one wants that, except for the nutbar terrorists.
I don’t understand why the Chinese are investing in aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, and the like. China has no natural enemies-with the possible exception of Russia. Japan is a fading power-their population is declining. India is a possible rival, but has no need to pick a conflict with China. And, despite the friction between the USA and China, our disputes mainly center on trade issues. The only possibility (as I see it): the Chinese take a VERY long view-they see russia in decline. China needs the resources of Siberia-is it conceivable that she may (one day) decide to just march in and TAKE Siberia?
Siberia probably harbors billions of barrels of oil, unlimited timber supplies, gold, managanese, iron ore…I am quite sure that China views those respurces hungrily. So the real question is: will Putin be able to revive Russia as a superpower?
I’d say thtas his plan.
I would agree with you as far as Putin’s evil plan. However I don’t think that China would faceoff with Russia but rather turn them inside out through other means.
Well, your friends are wrong. Oh, I have no doubt we could defeat the Chinese military (if we left aside those pesky nuclear weapons China has), and probably take the major cities. Then what? Look at how stretched we are trying to hold onto Iraq…China would be 100 (or maybe 1000) times worse. If that was the point your friends were making then you can tell they they are full of shit.
The days of world wars that involve occupying and holding vast amounts of land are over, just as the days of trench warfare are over. That’s not what conflict will look like in the 21st century. We aren’t going to see massed battles of Chinese vs American troops.
The name of the game now is projection of power and global leverage. The Chinese are building their military because they want to create an Asian sphere of influence and be the big dogs on the street. They want to be the ones who can float a carrier group into a conflicted region and influence events in their favor. They want to be the one other countries depend on for arms and protection. They want to control the sea lanes, be able to blockade non-cooperative countries, and negotiate from a position of strength. They want to be able to make a demand in the U.N. and have the clout to have it mean something.
Being a superpower means sheltering other nations under your wing, and getting favorable treatment as a result. It means being able to carry out hard diplomacy. For example, the U.S. is in a position to dictate policy to Israel, because Israel is dependent on the U.S. to keep its economy going and to provide arms to defend itself. Wouldn’t China like to be the ‘big brother’ to Iran, or North Korea, or Libya, or any one of a dozen other countries, and be able to use threats of the withdrawal of support to force them to act in a way that benefits Chinese interests?
That’s what this is all about. It’s why Russia wants to be a superpower again as well. Unfortunately for us, it’s not very likely that a Chinese or Russian superpower will be as benign as the U.S. is. So there’s a showdown coming, but it will be played out over a long period on many fronts.
Well, the Chinese are busy signing economic deals with rickety tinpot dictatorships. And if you’re going to invest heavily in those places, then you need the ability to project force to make sure your pet investment doesn’t go belly up because your tinpot dictator collapsed. That seems to me to give the Chinese plenty of incentive to beef up their military.
Plus, most countries just like having big weapons.
I’m with Sam Stone on the changing face of war. It might sound rather sci-fi, but I envision a future where the American military has no desire or capacity to hold ground.
If I was utterly ruthless, I would wage a war on China’s infrastructure. After you gain air superiority, the next targets are power plants, communications, all the bridges, refineries, dams, and mine every harbor. I dont think you would even need to attack the PLA
There would be no enemy to fight against since there would be no opposing ground troops. Controlling the civilian population would be a full time job for the PLA. Every major city would turn into a Katrinaville-New Orleans. No power, no communications, no running water, no food distribution.