US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, on a mission to resuscitate US military relations with China, will not arrive in Beijing for talks with the nation’s top military leaders until Sunday. But at an airfield in Chengdu, Chinese military leaders have already rolled out a welcome for him.
It is the J-20, a radar-evading jet fighter that has the same two angled tailfins that are the trademark of the Pentagon’s own stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor. After years of top-secret development, the jet — China’s first stealth plane — was put through what appear to be preliminary, but also very public, tests this week on the runway of the Aviation Design Institute in Chengdu, a site so open that aircraft enthusiasts often gather there to snap photos of their favorites.
Some analysts say the timing is no coincidence.
“This is their new policy of deterrence,” Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong editor in chief of the Canadian journal Kanwa Defense Weekly, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “They want to show the US, show Mr Gates, their muscle.”
These days, there is more muscle to show. A decade of aggressive modernization of China’s once-creaky military is beginning to bear fruit, and both the Pentagon and China’s Asian neighbors are increasingly taking notice.
By most accounts, China remains a generation or more behind the USin military technology and even further behind in deploying battle-tested versions of its most sophisticated naval and air capabilities. But after years of denials that it has any intention of becoming a peer military power of the US, it is now unveiling capabilities that suggest it intends, sooner or later, to be able to challenge US forces in the Pacific.
Besides the J-20, a midair-refuelable, missile-capable jet designed to fly far beyond Chinese borders, the Chinese are reported to be refitting a Soviet-era Russian aircraft carrier — China’s first such power-projecting ship — for deployment as soon as next year.
Two other 50,000-tonne-plus carriers are being built from scratch in a Shanghai shipyard. The first is said to be scheduled for launching by 2014; several more could come by 2020, Pentagon experts say.
The military’s nuclear deterrent, estimated by experts at no more than 160 warheads, has been redeployed since 2008 onto mobile launchers and advanced submarines that are no longer sitting ducks for attackers. Multiple-warhead missiles are widely presumed to come next. China’s 60-boat submarine fleet, already Asia’s largest, is being refurbished with super-quiet nuclear-powered vessels and a second generation of ballistic-missile-equipped subs.
Moreover, a widely anticipated antiship ballistic missile, called a “carrier-killer” for its potential to strike the big carriers at the heart of the US naval presence in the Pacific, appears to be approaching deployment.
Admiral Robert Willard, head of the US’ Pacific Command, told a Japanese newspaper last month that the weapon had reached “initial operational capability,” an important benchmark. Navy officials said later that the Chinese had a working design, but that it apparently had yet to be tested over water.
On that and other weaponry, China’s clear message nevertheless is that its ability to deter others from territory it owns, or claims to own, is growing fast.
China, of course, has its own rationales for its military buildup. A common theme is that potentially offensive weapons like aircraft carriers, antiship missiles and stealth fighters are needed to enforce claims to Taiwan.
Chinese officials also clearly worry that the US plans to ring China with military alliances to contain Beijing’s ambitions for power and influence. In that view, the Pentagon’s long-term strategy is to cement in central Asia the sorts of partnerships it has built on China’s eastern flank in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
“Some Chinese scholars worry that the US will complete its encirclement of China this way,” said Xu Qinhua, who studies Russia and Central Asia at the People’s University of China and advises government officials on regional issues. “We should worry about this. It’s natural.”
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