The rulers of China took over Hong Kong at midnight on June 30, 1997. The 99-year lease of Hong Kong had ended. The audience in Hong Kong's Convention Center heard Charles, the Prince of Wales and China's President Jiang Zemin followed by lowering the British flag and raising the new Hong Kong flag plus China's own flag. Macao, a Portuguese settlement for several hundred years and about an hour by jet foil from Hong Kong will be turned over to China in 1999, but without the solemn show the British put on as its modest number of troops left to be replaced by the People's Liberation Army. This solemn occasion was the first time in all history that Great Britain had handed over an entire city with some 8 million people to a country ruled by Communists.

In ABC's coverage of this event, scenes from Tiananmen Square were shown with the huge picture of Mao Tsetung appearing on the television screens of an estimated two billion people around the world. Communists and capitalists have billed the Hong Kong Special Administrative District (SAR) as "one country, two systems." This description is an exaggeration; "it's one country, no system." Hong Kong's new chief executive, Tung Cheehwa, has surrounded himself with a kitchen cabinet. In the current environment of corruption, his appointed cronies seem more interested in cutting deals with the power elite in Beijing than demanding democracy with free elections. In the post-handover euphoria, China observers have neglected what China has done to suppress dissent as it did on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square. One should not forget that some of the same officials ordering a military crackdown in 1989 are still very mush in control. Only Deng has gone to whatever reward atheism provides. Jiang Zemin and Li Peng are still quite visible. Willem van Kemenade has some interesting comments in his new book, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Inc..

If things go Jiang Zemin's way... China will continue to enjoy high economic growth and will become more modern and prosperous, but politically it will most probably remain as conservative, secretive, and repressive as ever... The will of the central authorities has thus far prevailed, its most effective instrument being the power to appoint and dismiss governors, party secretaries, and regional army commanders, but if central control over the over the Government, party, military and public security apparatus suffer a similar regionalization, China will become increasingly feudalized even as it becomes more modern.....If the extractive power of the state [tax collection] continues to go downhill, it will only be a question of years, at most ten, before political rupture follows economic collapse and the country finally disintegrates.

In his review of this book, Orville Schell offers a few comments in The New York Times of June 29, 1997.

"Willem van Kemenade, a Dutch journalist who covers Asia for the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad, praises the dynamism of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, but expresses astonishment at the limitation of his political vision, saying 'Deng's ignorance and crass ideological blindness to Western democracy is amazing indeed. 'What has been the effect of this disjuncture? In a historical blink of the eye, the Chinese people have evolved from being 'Mao-worshipping blue ants to nihilistic ultra-individualistic, money-worshipping hedonists.'"

To understand the tensions of a Communist society as China surely is, one must always keep in mind the hierarchy of rulers. Under the imperial bureaucracy, the general rule was that an official could never be posted to his native region. However, under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) minority leaders, especially in the regions in adjacent to China proper, were for the first time allowed to become officials within their native areas. Thus, today, we find a strong and powerful stratum of minority officials with a vested interest in continued CCP rule. In fact, many of the local and regional minority leaders should be characterized as 'hardliners' or even 'maoists.' These labels may not have much ideological substance, but they do illustrate the existence of an ethnically-based elite that is both strong and loyal. The rulers in Beijing know this and encourage the Han Chinese to migrate to newly occupied territory very much like Caesar's Roman legions in Europe 2000 years ago. In contemporary China, the Turkic-speaking and Muslim minority in Sinkiang are ruled by Han Chinese as the Buddhist Tibetans are also ruled by the Han Chinese.

Minxin Pei has written an article in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs. Minxin is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Here's part of his article.

The Chinese political system Deng Xiaoping inherited in 1978 resembled a Hobbesian world. No norms governed elite politics. Its key governmental institutions, especially the legal system and the bureaucracy, had been seriously damaged by the economic and political turmoil of the Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the 196676 Cultural Revolution. There were institutions of political participation; under Mao, mass political campaigns and mob violence had been the main forms of participation. Deng was faced with rebuilding China's wrecked political system and reforming its backward economy at the same time... The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), especially its elite, was badly bruised by Mao's dictatorial rule... Another significant reform implemented under 'Deng's rule was the mandatory retirement of party and government officials. Although China's term limits has attracted little attention abroad, they have probably had the most far-reaching effect of any reform on the composition and outlook of the ruling elite. Beginning in 1982, the retirement age of ministers, provincial party secretaries, and governors was set at 65 and their deputies at 60.

Far from moving the Communist Party toward democracy, term limits only prevent local leaders from perpetuating their power. China's provinces are thought to be controlled from Beijing, but splittist trends are already at work in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangdong, the Yangste River Valley, and Fujian, all regional economic powers of their own. If these trends continue, Beijing may have to launch a military effort to recover Taiwan. President Jiang did not waste any time in telling a Chinese audience in Beijing the day after the Hong Kong handover that Taiwan was next on the acquisition list after recovery of Macao. With available evidence, China simply does not have armed forces sufficient to recover Taiwan by force. China's army, however, and some small units of the navy appeared on television on June 30, 1997 will have to recover this wayward province without sufficient modern arms. What arms China does have are all but obsolete.

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has an estimated 3.1 million men under arms. This number will be reduced by 500,000 over the next three years, according to a 1997 vote of representatives in the 15th Peoples' Congress. The main Chinese tank is based on the Soviet design of the T55 built first in the 1950s. The Chinese air force has about 5,000 aircraft, but some 90 percent of these jets are obsolete. The Chinese navy is under-armed and poorly produced by engineers who were victims of the Cultural Revolution. At sea, the largest production surface warship, the Luda Class destroyer, was derived directly from a Soviet destroyer design completed in the late 1940s. China simply does not have the skills essential to design, produce and operate military jets; the 50 or so Sukhoi27 jets are the cream of the Chinese crop, but they were all purchased from Russia. In 1992, China contracted with Russia for the delivery of four KiloClass diesel-powered submarines. So far as is known, China has not either designed or acquired in-flight refueling systems. Nor does the Chinese navy have any aircraft carriers. Furthermore, and this is critical, China has missed the digital revolution in weapons technology. With reverse engineering, an analog system is comparatively simple to duplicate so long as the essential technologies are available. However, digital fire control systems may not be copied without the source code used by the computer to direct fire. To duplicate the essential technology, China would need programmers, and few if any were trained during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.

In 1991, China saw the awesome display of American power in the Persian Gulf War. The Chinese General Staff has gloomily concluded that it would take at least ten years for China to catch up with the United States in weapons technology. China's greatest effort in command and control has been evident in the field of automated air defense systems. C 3 I stands for command, control, communications and intelligence as the factors that need to be present in such a system. A footnote in Jane's Radar and Electronic Warfare Systems 19941995 states that "Very little seems to be happening on any [new] air defense networking China, and the air defense network in place suffers from major weaknesses such as an outmoded command, control, and communications system."

The central question in war or peace in any situation is the estimate each side makes of its chances of success. In Military Capacity and the Threat of War, the editor offers a sobering comment.

In the case of China, the central government may have little if any appreciation of the state's actual military capacity. That would hardly be a surprise: military leaders would prefer rosy to frightening reports. Certainly, this was true in the Soviet case: hubris born of ignorance fueled the adventures in Afghanistan and then Chechnya. To the extent that China has a similar system to that developed by Russia, it would seem likely that fantasy will be the order of the day. Fantasy means, for example, that the absence of modern command and control will not be taken into account by decision-makers in Beijing. Under these circumstances... it is more likely that crisis will degenerate into war -- a war in which China would suffer devastating humiliation.

A scenario involving an attempt to regain Taiwan after settling in and digesting Hong Kong is a distinct possibility. Were a setback of China's grand design to occur, the political leadership in Beijing would have little hesitancy to use its nuclear weapons capacity. Soviet scientists were knowledgeable enough to help Beijing develop nuclear weapons with technology stolen from the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the last few years, sentiment in Taiwan towards either reunification with mainland China or asserting its independence from China have been debated endlessly. Occasionally, China has gone too far and provoked anti-reunification or pro-independence sentiment. In 1995, for example, Taiwan President Lee Tenghui asked the United States for a visa allowing him to visit Cornell where he was to be given an honorary doctorate. The Chinese vigorously objected, but the State Department granted the visa after some pressure from the Clinton Administration. Lee's trip went off without much fuss until he returned. The China General Staff ordered two war games that heated up the political climate on Taiwan. Then Lee announced he would run for reelection to a second term as president. He won with 54 percent of the vote. Without China's saber rattling, Lee would still have won, but with fewer votes. However, during the 1995 missile tests, the Clinton Administration had sent two carrier task forces to cool off the overheated rulers in Beijing.

Aside from Taiwan, China has other minority problems. Tibet, for example, was occupied by China beginning in 1951. Tibet was an independent state at the time of the Chinese invasion. China's annexation of Tibet violated Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter which expressly prohibits the acquisition of territory by force or the threat of force. Tibetans are also entitled to self-determination under Article 1 (2) of the Charter. During their occupation of Tibet, Chinese engaged in genocide, a crime under the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Since the invasion that began in 1949, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have perished as a result of the Chinese occupation, victims of war, prison camps, torture, and famine. More than 6,000 Buddhist monasteries, temples, and historical monuments have been systematically plundered and destroyed by Han Chinese. Recently, the Dalai Lama has toured the United States and has spoken out on China's denial of autonomy for Tibet and self-determination. Chinese have kidnapped the Panchen Lama, the Dalai Lama's successor and have held this child under house arrest for the last two years. The Dalai Lama himself is so popular, Beijing has made it a crime even to display his picture in Tibet.

Jiang maintained a fast pace spreading Communist ideological nonsense and defending China's occupation of Tibet. It was analogous, he said, to the Emancipation of the slaves by Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Lincoln, however, did not indiscriminately kill the slaves thus emancipated. In Tibet, China has killed Buddhist monks -- an estimated 1 million of them since 1951. Not only this, but Chinese occupiers razed some 6000 Tibetan monasteries during the same period (19511997). While he was touring Philadelphia, Jiang expressed anger at some 200 noisy demonstrators. He asked they be removed so Jiang would not see them. The Mayor of Philadelphia said, "We tried to explain to the Chinese as patiently as possible that we couldn't force the demonstrators off public streets." Jiang even denied China had denied religious freedom, but China still persecutes Christians. The other side then had its chance to reply to this touring dictator.

On the occasion of President Jiang Zemin's visit to the United States in October, 1997, Hollywood wrote the script. President Clinton was not amused. Much earlier, he had de-linked the issue of human rights from China's status as an investment opportunity for American and European companies. China had consistently violated rights of minorities such as the Tibetan Buddhists To counter Chinese propaganda, Hollywood released Seven Years in Tibet, Front-line, a public television program, Red Corner, another film and Kundun, still another film produced by Disney. These releases enraged the Chinese. Human rights groups along Jiang's publicized route in the United States demonstrated peacefully in defense of Tibet's right to autonomy and China's denial of that right. Ever since 1951, China has systematically destroyed Tibet's ancient culture by killing its monks and destroying its monasteries.

The International Covenant on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ratified by China, prohibited discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin and prohibited a State from denying minorities the right to enjoy their own culture, religion and language. China nonetheless continues to discriminate Tibetans in employment, education, housing, language and reproductive rights. Tibetans accused of "counterrevolutionary" conduct are sentenced to serve time in jail. Often they are tortured while incarcerated. Torture and inhuman treatment are outlawed by the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel or Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a convention ratified by China.

The Summit meeting between President Clinton and President Jiang Zemin was an abysmal failure on human rights. The only beneficiaries were the Boeing Corporation -- a $3 billion sale of commercial jets to China -- and Westinghouse and other nuclear power plant companies in the United Staters. With respect to events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Jiang almost casually said "the Chinese made the correct decision to restore stability." Clinton replied by saying "I believe that what happened and the aftermath and continuing reluctance to tolerate political dissent has kept China from politically developing the level of support in the rest of the world that would have developed." Clinton's words, according to The New York Times, were "a stark admission of failure, unusual in summit annals." In the meantime, torture and other degrading treatment continues in Chinese jails. In fact, the World Bank has funded forced labor camps in Sinkiang. This occurred in 1995. An inquiry after this funding surfaced found that "the government agency that implements the Tarim Basin project was also responsible for administering some prisons and adjacent farms for the [Chinese] Central Ministry of Justice." Despite this finding, the World Bank concluded there was "no evidence to establish outside charges." See Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations by Catherine Caufield (1996).

A second area, Sinkiang, is another trouble spot for China. Situated in Northwest China, it is the largest province in the country. It is called the Sinkiang (Xinjiang) Uighur Autonomous Region, occupying one sixth of all China. The Tarim Basin in this area is thought to contain vast deposits of oil; some authorities claim that at least one third of all China's oil is present in difficult-to-drill reservoirs. China. acted quickly in signing a development agreement for the Uten oil field in Kazakhstan rather that spend scarce capital in exploration for desperately needed oil to fuel its expansion.By 1997, China simply could not look to Russia for oil. The relationship between China and Russia was terminated in the 1960, when Soviet advisors withdrew from China after a nasty ideological dispute. The base of Chinese technology was still the legacy left by Soviet advisors. They were far behind the West in deep drilling, secondary recovery and exploration Russia used oil well drilling and pipeline construction that is now obsolete. The Chinese military establishment needs far more than China produces from its early oil fields, Daqing and Shengli. Currently, China produces about 2.9 million barrels of oil per day. See Oil in Asia published in 1997 by the Oxford University Press. Still China must have oil just as Hitler's Panzers had to have gasoline to fuel its war-making capacity. Some authorities suggest that the People's Republic Army (PLA) has cut back a great deal because the military cannot rely on enough oil.

The Han Chinese encouraged to settle in this autonomous region have priority in housing and employment ahead of Uighurs. This group represents about 40 percent of the province's population. The Uighur population refers to Sinkiang as Turkestan, claiming that the Chinese have occupied their land. Needless to say, Beijing has had a different attitude toward minorities. The dominant notion was and has been not to integrate ethnic minorities and neighboring peoples, but rather to control them. To this end, Beijing has made it worthwhile for the Han Chinese to migrate to, for example, Sinkiang and Tibet. Thus, control of the outlying regions and peoples was intended just as much a defense measure as a strategy for imperial conquest.

China does have a problem with its minorities. Many of the smaller minorities -- the Mongols, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Tajiks -- have a neighboring country they regard as their homeland. The Uighurs are an exception. They are a nation without a country. Beijing saw a way around its minority populations. In April, 1996 the presidents of five neighboring countries of Central Asia -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan -- signed an agreement in which some previously uncertain boundaries were made permanent on agreed lines.. Three of the newly-independent states took it on themselves to oppose secession of any kind and its political twin, separatism. The five presidents had met in Shanghai, so the agreement was called the Shanghai Communique. Contemporaneously, the Chinese media launched a fierce new anti-separatist campaign. China's policy in Sinkiang is at a crossroad. The Communist leaders seem convinced that only a policy of harsh and permanent repression can guarantee Chinese rule there. If it relaxes its hard-line stand there, secessionist agitation and religious dissent will almost certainly spin out of control. Continued harsh repression could polarize both sides and endanger stability. The Shanghai Communique would be nothing more than a historical artifact. With respect to Russia, there has been an illegal immigration from China. And, as one Russian official said: "If the Chinese influx continues, we will have a situation like that under Genghis Khan. If we don't take effective action quickly, in twenty years' time it will no longer be clear what is China and what is Russia."

The Russian government calls this "the peaceful loss of territory to China." Two Russian newspapers report that there are between 2 and 5 million Chinese living illegally in Russia.A few prominent sinologists in Russia predict a Chinese annexation of millions of hectares of land. Russians in the threatened area near Vladivostok see annexation as a cause of war. Some Russian sinologists note that China claims part of Siberia as an inalienable right.

The stakes for China are high. In 1995, the PRC became a net importer of oil. It desperately needs oil to fuel its rapidly expanding economy and its military. Oil reserves for all of Sinkiang are estimated at 2.4 billion barrels. Most of this oil is in the Tarim Basin and within striking distance for Uighur raids from within Kazakhstan. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has been designed for military police actions like a Uighur raid from Kazakhstan. The PLA has about three million men under arms and some 5,000 tanks sold to China by Russia. These tanks are obsolete for this and another reason. The tank itself is obsolete as a weapon since antitank devices are too effective and getting too costly. The authors of The Future of War: Power, Technology & American World Dominance in the 21st Century, George and Meredith Friedman, make a persuasive case for this proposition.

The tank first appeared on the battlefield during World War I. It was a clumsy machine because of its weight and its armor plus guns of increasing power. By World War II, the tank had grown heavier and used thicker armor plus heavier calibre weapons. Military minds were working in parallel on antitank weapons during this period. By 1993, the spiral of technology had produced a tank that weighed 100 tons and relatively inexpensive weapons that could destroy the it. Labeled as the "brilliant antitank munition" (BAT), it will identify any tank whose engine is running. The Army has decided to upgrade the BAT with millimeter wave radar, which will identify targets whose engines are turned off. The antitank technology has so far outrun the technology behind the tank itself. This is particularly significant when the use of cruise missiles situated more than 1,000 miles from the target. The Tomahawk, for example, proved itself in the Persian Gulf War; everyone watching CNN saw a Tomahawk missile search for and find an opening in a Baghdad building with deadly precision. Its guidance system had been programmed from photographs of the terrain path the Tomahawk followed. That was six years ago, and the Pentagon has not been sleeping. The M1 tank currently costs about $3 million, but any one of three antitank weapons could destroy the M1 using a search and destroy missile that costs between $7,000 and $200,000. Other weapons platforms all suffer from more or less the same built-in defect. The battleship, for example, is obsolete because it doesn't have more than 12 to 16 miles range for its shells. With a battleship that close to land or another task force, it becomes highly vulnerable. World War II battleships cost an estimated $1.2 billion.

The Navy carrier task force has increasingly been criticized as being too vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. The Aegis defense system now mounted on twenty-seven Aegis-class cruisers was designed to protect carriers from precision-guided missiles. However, the Sunburn, produced by Russia cruises at 1,700 miles per hour out to a maximum range of 55 miles. It travels at an altitude of sixty feet and then attacks the ship at twenty feet, having reached its target in under two minutes from launch. The U.S. Navy considered the Sunburn so effective, it tried to buy one in 1995. The Chinese reported an anti-ship missile even more lethal than the Sunburn and with a range of eighty miles. One may be justifiably skeptical; the Chinese do not have the indigenous manpower capable of designing and producing the missile described. This excursion into contemporary weapons affects the geo-strategic position of Taiwan. By 1997, Taiwan should have -- and perhaps has -- targeted its missiles on China's command, control, communications and intelligence sites as well as Zhongnanhai, the Chinese Kremlin and the housing in which the Chinese nomenclature live in Beijing. Doing this would be treated as a defensive step in the event mainland China resorted to force to reunify Taiwan with the mainland.

In 1990, Chinese military officials visited Moscow with a view to reestablishing cooperation between the armed forces of both countries. Their timing was poor. The former Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 leaving Russia admitting that its arms industries suffered a severe blow when the USSR collapsed. Neither domestic requirements nor a shaky economy support the massive military industrial base inherited from the Soviet Union. The manufacture and export of weapons, equipment, and technology can ease the plight of Russia's arms industries , but there is a political constraint. China must have a demonstrated ability to pay, and, even more important, is the growing friction over Russia's Asian borders. The Shanghai Communique of 1996 did not even touch on the "passive surrender of territory" to China now underway in Eastern Siberia. Some 2 to 5 million Chinese have illegally settled in this part of Russia.

Although military priorities can and do change, China's pattern of acquisitions seems logically consistent with its national military strategy and its long-recognized military technology weaknesses. The military acquisition pattern seems to focus on two specific missions: increasing air power capabilities and enhancing China's ability to project and sustain combat forces capable of defending its maritime claims. One of these claims is Taiwan. Another is the Spratly Islands which are under water most of the time and could not support a runway for military jets even when visible. At this point, China has no long-range bomber in its inventory, so targets inland will be assigned to missiles. Using official published figures from China's annual budgets, a very risky business, suggests China has no plans for an AWACS system. The military can and does conceal actual expenditures. Accordingly, the generals may have more weapons than presently in evidence. China may use the Su27 as an air superiority military jet, but it has no plans for a plane capable of close support of ground forces, nor does China have any plans for an antitank aircraft like the American A10, a highly effective jet. However effective the A10 might be, it had to be close to its target to launch a missile.

Boeing recently tested a standoff missile, the AGM130. After a demonstration, a Boeing official stated that : "The ability of the AGM130 to fly to its target under INS/CPS control eases the workload on the crew....the US Air Force now has significantly improved operational flexibility to attack high-visibility enemy targets from safe distances." And Tokyo has announced it will join the United States in developing a lightweight ship-launched missile named LEAP. Its system would detect an enemy missile using geo-stationary satellite information, compute its flight path and initiate interception with a combination of high-altitude and low-altitude missiles. These weapons systems were picked out randomly from Defense News on the Internet.

It seems quite clear that the demands placed on the command, control , communications and intelligence capabilities that are required to integrate air, land, and naval forces are enormous today. With the continuing advances in information technology, these military burdens are growing exponentially. The upshot is that the United States has such a jump on China in its ability to conduct modern warfare that America's preponderance in East Asia will increase, not diminish, in the years ahead. A great deal of useful information on this subject may be found in The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security by Andrew Nathan and Robert Ross. China's cumbersome armed forces have traditionally oriented toward the defense of home territory and policing dissident minorities. Its air force has been called "the most highly perfected obsolete aircraft in the world."

Benjamin Schwartz, Executive Editor of World Policy Journal, reviewed The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress for The New York Times of July 6, 1997.

"'Hardliners'," he wrote, "see a China mounting a challenge to America's position in East Asia. Nathan and Ross, on the other hand, see a defensively-minded state, vulnerable to internal unrest, obsessed with maintaining its territorial integrity and burdened by a military that is technology and organizationally far behind not only the United States, but Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea as well. ...More important, Nathan and Ross emphasize factors other than hardware that constrain China's military influence, pointing to the to the current 'revolution in technology. The demands placed on the command, control, communication, and intelligence capabilities that are required to integrate air, land, and naval forces are enormous today and, with the continual advances in information technology, are growing exponentially. The upshot is that the United States has such a jump on China in its ability to conduct modern warfare that America's military preponderance in East Asia will increase, not diminish, in the coming years.

Amongst other advances in information technology battlefield surveillance will almost certainly lead all others. So-called smart weapons need to be programmed to reach a precise target defined in advance by surveillance's from satellites or low orbit cameras. The Tomahawk, for example, must be programmed to reach its target. The use of this weapon in the Persian Gulf War showed just how accurate the Tomahawk was, and in 1990, it was still in a primitive stage of development. The KH11 is in reality an orbiting camera and so is the system incorporated into the Lacrosse. Both are highly classified, but they do exist and both were used in the Persian Gulf War. Authoritative sources suggest that the KH11 can produce images with a 3 inch resolution. A military commander can see them as real time images using digital data transmission. This particular combination of surveillance cameras has been highly classified. However, Chinese leadership cannot take comfort in the knowledge that advanced technology battlefield sensors, target acquisition systems, and command and control systems are available on the open market to add to the complexity of the military environment surrounding China. China has tried at least three times to buy modern avionics, first from the United States (terminated in 1989 after the events of Tiananmen Square), the from Israel and Russia. The Israeli program was cut back because China was unable to manufacture the technology provided. Apparently, China has no indigenous talent capable of integrating Russian avionics with a future Chinese national military air command and control system. Were its civilian leaders to use force against Taiwan, they would be seriously embarrassed. The military leaders might not even have described the shortcomings of the PLA.to the political leaders.

All contents © 1998 William M. Brinton