Indian Defence Review

DF-5

“As for the revolution in soldiery, the competition between the military forces is moving to outer space here…. This is historically inevitable, and this development cannot be reversed. The PLAAF must formulate a modern day idea of security area, area of interests and exploration of space. We must develop space troops which would meet the demands of development of our country and demands of the space age. Superiority in outer space can give a country the control over military zones on the land and at sea in addition to the expected strategic superiority. Superiority is simply necessary to defend the nation and state. After all, only a strong power can defend peace.”

—Xu Qiliang, PLAAF Commander1

In January 2007, China carried out an ASAT test. Exactly three years later, in January 2010 it surprised the world by intercepting an incoming missile in an exo-atmospheric test. Earlier, China had launched a manned space mission exactly as planned on October 15, 2003. More recently, China has officially announced that it has modified a MRBM for anti-shipping role thereby demonstrating her capability to accurately manoeuvre the MRBM in its terminal stage to hit a moving target the size of a large aircraft carrier. China’s space exploration and moon missions continue apace.

Since the launching of her first satellite in 1970 the PRC has launched over a hundred satellites and has some 20-30 of them in orbit at any one time and will soon complete a regional network of navigation satellites comprising three geo-synchronous and twenty-two medium earth orbit satellites. In January 2011, China launched her own version of the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) on its first flight while Robert Gates the then US Secretary of Defence was on a visit to China.2 Considering that China was a late entrant on the aviation scene and was also at the receiving end of technology denial regimes for a long time these achievements are even more remarkable. China’s interest in South China Sea goes back to 1947. She claims the well-known ‘U’ shaped broken line shown on the Chinese maps as Chinese territory; this area of the sea has recently been designated as a ‘district’ of China. Hence China also claims all rights to exploit undersea mineral resources in the extended exclusive economic zone effectively demanding control of the entire South China Sea. China also wants the US and the world at large to acknowledge ‘the South China Sea’ as a ‘core issue.’

This Chinese behaviour should, however, not surprise us. In 1959, Nehru had remarked, “India had to face a powerful country bent on spreading out to what they consider their old frontiers and possibly beyond. The Chinese have always, in their past history, had the notion that any territory which they once occupied in the past necessarily belonged to them subsequently.”3 Making absurd claims on territories and then stating that it was ready to resolve the issue through peaceful negotiation should by now be a well-known Chinese tactic. Simply stated, China is an expansionist power and is now determined to use her Comprehensive National Power (CNP) to announce to the world that it has arrived.

China’s overall national strategy has not changed from the time the Communists won the Civil War and Mao Zedong proclaimed the birth of the PRC on October 1, 1949. He said, ‘China had stood up’, clearly telling the world not to mess with it. The aim obviously was and is to strengthen China so that it never again suffers the humiliation of the previous century. Mao’s decision to enter the Korean war in support of North Korea, her invasion of Tibet in 1950 and efforts to reunify Taiwan are all part of that strategy. Although Mao called nuclear weapons ‘paper tigers’ he nevertheless pursued a robust nuclear development programme in the 1950s and built and tested the atomic bomb on October 16, 1964. Those working on missiles and nuclear weapons were spared the excesses of the Cultural Revolution.

By October 1967 the PRC had tested a hydrogen bomb and soon developed the necessary delivery means. Since the early 1990s, PRC’s impressive economic progress has given the Chinese leadership the necessary resources to modernise her armed forces and space capabilities but it has also made her increasingly more dependent on energy imports. Free and uninterrupted access to and use of undersea resources in South China Sea are, therefore, an essential part of that strategy.

China has also attempted to build a loose coalition of states that are generally antagonistic to America and has very nearly succeeded in keeping India boxed in South Asia and hence her consistent support to Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and other such powers. The Communist leadership, however, is also acutely aware of China’s domestic problems and conscious of the critical need to reduce regional economic inequalities and ensure stability. To achieve this it counts on the ‘nationalism’ of the Chinese population knowing full well that without sustained economic prosperity this objective cannot be achieved as the people would not blindly follow the dictates of the CCP. But invoking nationalism and past humiliation at the hands of foreign powers can work only up to a point.

As a result, the Chinese leadership tries to ward off threats to national security by continuously maintaining and cultivating an image of a strong yet peaceful developing country that is only interested in improving the lot of her people. China’s goal of becoming a peer competitor to the US requires reducing American interference in Asia without actually resorting to use of force. Centralised and seamless control over all national activity, the relatively long and uninterrupted tenures of national leaders and collective decision making as in the CMC help the leadership to pursue long-term strategic plans. China’s air and space strategy thus neatly fits into her overall strategy.

PLAAF Growth

The PRC signed a Friendship Treaty with the erstwhile Soviet Union on February 14, 1950, entered into a very beneficial military cooperative relationship with the former Soviet Union and begun building a variety of arms of Soviet design in very large numbers. China’s experience of the three-year-long Korean war gave added impetus to its quest for modern arms, especially aircraft, tanks, artillery and missiles and also the urgent need to develop its own nuclear weapons to face the threat of nuclear blackmail. Mao’s famous words, “Even if 300 million Chinese die in a nuclear attack, 300 million more will remain and start a new glorious revolution” can be interpreted as China’s answer to future nuclear blackmail.

Mao’s policies of social engineering, experiments such as ‘The Great Leap Forward’ (1958-61) resulted in a major setback to China’s future plans. His insistence on self-reliance, his strong belief in the superiority of man over machine and the policy of increased agricultural output and steel production in rural homes devastated large tracts of the hinterland and caused widespread famines as millions of uneducated farmers diverted their energies from agriculture to produce low-quality steel in rural households. The 10-year-long Cultural Revolution (1966-76)4 saw thousands of ‘intellectuals’ such as university professors and students, engineers and educated citizens being forced into farming rural lands by Mao’s radical Red Brigades effectively putting an end to any meaningful research and development.

Until the early 1980s the PLAAF was in a bad shape. It had some 5000 aircraft but most of these were either obsolescent or suffered from poor serviceability such that the average pilot could not get the necessary minimum training. There was widespread instructor shortage and the PLAAF’s flight safety record was also poor. One of the main reasons for this state of affairs was her leadership’s insistence on self-reliance when China simply did not have the technology to produce modern aircraft and weapons at home.

The story of PLA modernisation, however, really began with the end of the Mao era. With the demise in quick succession of both Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976, Deng Xiaoping came to the helm after a relatively brief power struggle. Once the ‘Gang of Four’ was taken care of, Deng could move with his revitalised and revised plan of ‘four modernisations’ without too much opposition from the other members of the Party. The Deng mantra was that for socialism to succeed China had to first improve its economy so that it could lift the living standards of its people and generate the necessary surpluses to fund its modernisation plans. He was prepared to adopt capitalism with ‘Chinese characteristics’. He famously said, “The colour of the cat was immaterial so long as it caught mice.” The new ‘four modernisations’ programme included agriculture, industry, S&T and military. While in the initial period of China’s opening up, the military was indeed given a lower priority with the defence budgets seeing major reductions for a decade that did not mean a total neglect of the armed forces.

By 1985, Deng Xiaoping, the paramount Leader had discounted the threat of a major war, nuclear war or world war but had stressed the possibility of a high intensity, short duration local border war. From the 1990s onwards the defence budgets began to rise and soon thereafter maintained a double digit growth rate up to the present times. As a result, the PLA benefited from large scale arms imports and a steady growth of indigenous defence industry. The PRC leadership also benefited from the advice of the then US Under Secretary of Defence William Perry and focused on building a strategic industrial base.

There, however, were many hurdles to this rapid progress; the most important being the internal debate on self-reliance versus direct imports. The PRC leadership was divided on self-reliance but was united on the final objective of military reforms. China’s goal was to not only modernise its armed forces but more importantly to build its indigenous strategic industrial base so that it could ultimately become a leading exporter of modern weapons and equipment because without such a capability it could not be counted among major powers. Its leadership also showed maturity and wisdom in the selection of weapons to be bought from foreign vendors and those to be manufactured at home. The gradual if slow evolution of China’s military doctrine also played a significant role in this process.

The 1991 Gulf war came as a ‘rude wake-up call’ to the PRC/PLA leadership although the PRC President Yang Shangkun appeared to belittle the relevance of American military might to his country: “The model (of the Gulf war) is not universal. It cannot be applied in a country like China, which has a lot of mountains, forests, valleys and rivers. Another characteristic of this war is that the multinational forces faced a very weak enemy.”5

In fact, the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies have fought all wars of the past two decades against militarily weak powers. Even so, the changing nature of modern warfare and the advances in the application of air and aerospace power were not lost on the Chinese. Being almost as large as the US, the PRC enjoys strategic depth and its leadership knows that their country cannot be occupied or defeated. Deng was equally conscious of the importance of modern air power. “The army and the navy both need air cover. Otherwise, the enemy air force will run rampant.”6 Here again the overall tenor appears to be defensive but this was to change soon. In a 1997 conference of senior military commanders the then President of the Academy of Military Sciences said, “The very assembly and deployment of ‘coalition forces’ constituted the ‘first firing’ and justified pre-emptive military action.”7 The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing economic problems of that country were very cleverly used by China to employ a large number of Russian engineers and technology experts and to purchase relatively modern weapons such as the Su-27 air superiority fighters, Sovremenny class destroyers and improved Kilo Class submarines.

Click to buy

First the lessons of the 1991 Gulf war and later the 1999 Kosovo conflict, the 2001 Afghanistan and 2003 Iraq war where air power and space technologies played a vital role have only reinforced PRC thinking on the efficacy of modern air power. Not only was the PLA changing its military doctrine and strategy, its national leadership was now compelled to admit that without a comprehensive overhaul of the equipment of its armed forces China could not assure national security. Thus began in earnest, in 1992 the process of PLA modernisation which continues till date.