China is exploiting Western commercial technology, conducting aggressive cyberespionage and buying more anti-ship missiles as part of a steady military buildup, the Pentagon said on Friday.
Beijing aims to take advantage of “mostly US” defense-related technologies in the private sector in a concerted effort to modernize the country’s armed forces and extend China’s reach in the Asia-Pacific region, the Pentagon wrote in a report to the US Congress.
The annual assessment of China’s military resembled previous reports, but adopted more diplomatic language, possibly to avoid aggravating delicate relations with Beijing, analysts said.
“I am struck by the decidedly mellow tone,” Christopher Johnson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said.
Chinese officials are sure to privately welcome the report’s wording, after having been irritated by a strategy document issued by US President Barack Obama in January that portrayed China as a military rival.
“This is much friendlier” than the January strategy paper, Johnson said.
The report said Beijing had a goal of leveraging “legally and illegally acquired dual-use and military-related technologies to its advantage.”
“Interactions with Western aviation manufacturing firms may also inadvertently benefit China’s defense aviation industry,” the Pentagon said.
Echoing recent warnings from intelligence officials, the Pentagon also blamed China for “many” of the world’s cyber intrusions over the past year that target US government and commercial networks, including companies “that directly support US defense programs.”
The report warned that “Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage” and predicted that those spying efforts would continue.
China’s investments in cyber warfare were cause for “concern,” said David Helvey, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and Asia Pacific security affairs.
Beijing was clearly “looking at ways to use cyber for offensive operations,” Helvey told reporters.
The US military has long worried that China could potentially limit the reach of US naval ships in the western Pacific with new weapons, and the Pentagon report underlined those concerns.
China “is also acquiring and fielding greater numbers of conventional medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) to increase the range at which it can conduct precision strikes against land targets and naval ships, including aircraft carriers, operating far from China’s shores beyond the first island chain,” the report said.
Beijing is pouring money into advanced air defenses, submarines, anti-satellite weapons and anti-ship missiles that could all be used to deny an adversary access to strategic areas, such as the South China Sea, it said.
US strategists — and some defense contractors — often refer to the threat posed by China’s so-called “carrier-killer” missiles, but Helvey said the anti-ship weapons currently have “limited operational capability.”
China’s military budget officially reached US$106 billion this year, an 11.2 percent increase.
However, the US report said China’s defense budget does not include major expenditures such as improvements to nuclear forces or purchases of foreign-made weapons. Real defense spending amounts to US$120 to US$180 billion, the report said.
However, US military spending still dwarfs Chinese investments, with the Pentagon’s proposed budget for next year at more than US$600 billion.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS