China on the military move Update Taiwan’s president talks independence

Over the past few years, China has poured much of its annual double-digit economic growth. This year, that trend will continue:

BEIJING — China announced Sunday that it will sharply increase military spending this year, budgeting a rise of nearly 18 percent, and a senior U.S. official immediately called for clarity on the planned hike.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said at a news conference at the end of his first visit to Beijing in his new post that the Bush administration is dissatisfied with China’s unwillingness to share such information. “We think it’s important in our dialogue that we understand what China’s plans and intentions are,” he said.

The government’s military budget announcement and Negroponte’s swift appeal for more transparency highlighted a particularly uneasy point in what has become a broad, close and increasingly important U.S.-China relationship.

Negroponte has been assigned the lead role in managing that relationship, a mission he emphasized by calling on Chinese officials so soon after his Feb. 13 swearing in. Apparently by coincidence, the Chinese government chose the same moment to announce that its declared military expenditures for 2007 will amount to $44.94 billion, an increase of 17.8 percent.

According to Pentagon estimates, that declared total represents about a third of actual military spending if equipment purchases are taken into account. But even that would amount to only a fraction of the U.S. military budget, which rose to about $623 billion for fiscal 2008.

Our defense budget is larger for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is that we’re actually at war. We also conduct the leading edge military R&D, which is an expensive endeavor. Our military should have grown larger immediately after 9-11. It’s appalling that we’re only now increasing the size of our forces to deal with the fights that we’re in. It’s intriguing that China is building up its military forces so fast, and that it is hiding much of its military spending while it is doing so. It’s all about Taiwan of course, but relatedly China also wants to become a blue water, global reach power on a level with the US. It’s nearly astronomical military spending increases, year after year, while we’re at war with the same size force we had five years ago, will help it get there and get there quickly. China won’t use that power in the same way that we do, unfortunately. If Sudan is a guide, China would use its military power in the service bringing Taiwan to heel, of besting Japan’s and South Korea’s and Russia’s regional power, and abroad only in the service of procuring oil and other natural resource supplies. There will be no wars of liberation conducted by the People’s Liberation Army.

China also gets the international propaganda game quite well. Even while it is boosting its military spending, it is publicly sacrificing economic growth to satisfy the green agenda. That’ll win the PRC some points with the transnational progressive left, which is predisposed to support anyone against the US generally, even if China is one of the world’s largest polluters and its Three Gorges Dam could be one of the most environmentally reckless projects ever conceived.

Asia generally is a region to keep an eye on. China is swifly building its military and will become a serious power. The North Korea crisis has entered a new, somewhat strange phase. Japan is stepping up to be a responsible international power, but its politicians have to stop historical revisionism and behave themselves. Thailand is battling a growing Islamic insurgency that will test its cohesiveness and may become a beachhead for international jihadis to launch attacks throughout Asia. The region’s states need to be united against that threat, but the likelihood of broad unity seems slim.

Update: Related–

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian has again raised the controversial topic of independence – this time as China’s parliament opened its annual sessions in Beijing. VOA’s Heda Bayron reports from Hong Kong, Mr. Chen’s comments drew immediate and expected condemnation from Beijing.

President Chen told a Taiwan pro-independence group, Formosan Association for Public Affairs, Sunday evening that the island, in his words, “should be independent”.

“Taiwan is a sovereign independent country outside of the People’s Republic of China and to pursue independence is the common and long-held ideal of the Taiwan people,” he said.

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