China

The Arrival of the Asian Century?

By J. Wesley ⋅ May 1, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

I’m putting together two series of posts — one on the Sino-Indian balance of power in Asia and a second on the rise of Chinese military power. During my research, I came across a worthwhile summary of Robert Kaplan’s keynote address at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Kaplan argues that while Americans have been focused on Iraq, Asia has quietly risen into strategic prominence:

“India now has the world’s fourth largest navy; it is about to have the third largest. It will soon take delivery of its first nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine. Meanwhile, China’s navy is growing to be in asymmetric terms a peer competitor of the U.S., the Japanese Navy is now three times, soon to be four times, the size of Britain’s Royal Navy. . .”

“The Chinese are all over the African continent now, Kaplan observed. The U.S.-China competition over Africa is going to be in a strange way similar to the U.S.-Soviet competition over Africa during the Cold War. But the Chinese will not be like the Soviets. The Chinese are building roads, investing in far more subtle ways than the Soviets did. They’re developing area expertise. The Chinese learned from their mistakes in a way the Soviets never did. As an example, the Soviets never developed a strong noncommissioned officer corps in their military, who were mainly a band of ill-trained thugs. The Chinese are spending a lot of money on upgrading the quality of their enlisted ranks, particularly on submarines, knowing that it is the enlisted ranks much more than the officer corps that determine the character of the military. The Chinese will be flexible, formidable competitors in many ways.”

Check back Saturday for my first installment on the strategic competition between India and China and its implications for the U.S. It should be a sexy post — military hardware, terrorism, Pakistani radicals, an African mineral race, and more!