Has a quiet military coup taken over China’s foreign policy? Is China’s new president, Xi Jinping, leading the militarization of policy or submitting to it? The questions are not frivolous or far-fetched given recent actions and statements emanating from China’s new leader and other influential establishment figures.
Immediately after assuming his positions as head of the Communist Party and the Chinese military, Xi made a series of visits to state of the art military units and installations. He rallied his officers and men to be ready for “real combat” and “fighting and winning wars,” suggesting a sense of not-too-distant conflict. Unlike the more bellicose bombast coming out of North Korea, Chinese rhetoric is less explicit in naming the United States as the intended enemy.
But Major General Zhu Chenghu, who heads China’s National Defense University, was more specific when he once threatened nuclear attacks against “hundreds” of U.S. cities in a possible Taiwan conflict. Like an earlier general who made a similar nuclear threat, he was promoted, not fired. (This week Zhu will visit the Pentagon where he may deliver another tough message—or take the softer line he used at a dinner toast during a 2009 Beijing conference, vigorously insisting that “China and the U.S. are friends.”)
Xi has adopted as his governing theme “The China Dream,” the title of a popular book by another NDU intellectual, Col. Lin Mingfu, who advocates China’s military dominance, not just regionally but globally. Xi’s speeches equate “a strong nation” with “a strong military.” Arms prowess seems to have supplanted economic development as the principal component in China’s vision of “comprehensive national power.”
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