The Guardian is doing a series on China this week, some of which is quite interesting – the article on Gansu’s solar revolution is quite fascinating to someone (i.e. me) who visited that province 10 years ago and saw nothing but Yak herders, for example. However, in amongst the interesting cultural discussion there is the usual western panic at the prospect of China’s military growth, with an article on its foreign policy declaring breathlessly
China’s military still lags far behind the US, but its official military budget has risen from $14.6bn to $106bn in 12 years – and many believe the true level of spending is far higher.
This kind of statement isn’t limited to the Guardian – newspapers all over Australia, the US and the UK like to point to this 7-fold increase in the military budget and talk about what it signifies. I think it signifies nothing. In fact, the same day this article was written the Guardian put up one of their bravely-named “datablogs” about Chinese GDP, and showed us that 12 years ago it was 390 billion US$, while now it is 6,990 billion US$. So military spending has dropped from 3.7% of GDP to 1.5% of GDP. Cause to worry?
China’s inflation in the early 1990s was running at up to 20% per year, and it’s easy to see that $14.6bn was going to devalue rapidly. In fact, applying the cpi inflation figures to China’s 1990 spending, we see that just to keep up with inflation military spending today would need to be 37 billion US$. So the true increase in spending is not 7-fold at all, but a maximum of 3-fold. In terms of absolute growth it’s a bit scary, but in terms of proportion of GDP China has been de-militarizing rapidly. And a lot of the spending has been catch up anyway.
So let’s compare China’s geo-strategic situation with the USA, which according to wikipedia had a 2011 budget of 1 trillion US$ – 10 times that of China, and 7.7% of its GDP. The USA shares land borders with two democratic, stable states, one of which has some instability on its border. It has no immediate regional rivals bar Cuba, and its nearest geopolitical rivals are an ocean away. There are no hostile military occupations by geopolitical rivals in nations that share a land border with it or its neighbours. By contrast, China:
- Shares a border with Russia (enough said!)
- Shares a border with Kyrgyzstan, which hosts a military base with one of its geopolitical rivals (the USA)
- Shares a (sliver of) border with Afghanistan, a failed state currently occupied by a geopolitical rival
- Shares a border with India, which (I think) has territorial claims on parts of China
- Shares borders with Myanmar and North Korea, both failed or failing autocratic states
- Is separated by a narrow sea lane from its nearest regional rival, Japan, which has a large and dangerous military and a history of aggressive war against China
- Depends for trade on a series of sea-ways (e.g. the straits of Malacca) that are known to be subject to piracy
- Has territorial claims on a nation that its main geopolitical rival is pledged to protect
Plus of course that geo-political rival maintains a significant military force in the Pacific and in neighbouring nations (e.g. Japan and Korea). Yet, China’s defense spending has declined as a percentage of GDP and has increased in absolute terms only three-fold over the past 12 years.
This makes China seem very far from a belligerent power, and if anything the very model of restraint and good neighbourliness. If the USA, France or Britain were subject to the kind of geopolitical situation China faces, would they be funding their military at these rates, or gearing up for a massive expansion? So why do newspapers bother with this simplistic pap about China?
Compromise and Conceit 
March 25, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Why would “Shares borders with Myanmar and North Korea, both failed or failing autocratic states” require additional Chinese military spending? They’re both Chinese allies.
Are you going to argue that being allied with most of Europe requires American military spending to go up? [1]
“Is separated by a narrow sea lane from its nearest regional rival, Japan”
Which is a nation which is constitutionally unable to wage war and actually repeatedly shows every sign of actually obeying that rule
An alternatively way to think of this is “If China were going to increase it’s GDP massively while maintaining a peaceful approach to the world and not practicing internal oppression then it’s military growth should match the trend of Japans post world war 2 as Japan moved to being a massive economy in the 1980s.”
How does China compare to that?
[1] The answer to that is historically “Yes”
March 26, 2012 at 12:54 am
Myanmar and North Korea are, I suspect, allies of convenience to China – the convenience being that they’re on China’s border (thus a threat if not allies). For a few precedents, note that Iraq was an ally of the USA until 1991; Syria is an ally of (or at least good mates with) Turkey but Turkey is currently discussing sending troops into Syria to prevent instability due to refugees; Egypt is an ally of Palestine but has a large troop presence on its border, and is also allies with Israel, but neither country is particuarly confident with that arrangement. Without getting into a fuss about whether or not Palestine is a failed state, it seems pretty obvious that failed states are not the best of allies, and a foreign policy realist needs to keep some kind of military in reserve in case the local bastard loses his grip.
I have every confidence that you’re right about Japan, but I don’t think foreign policy realism really supports the idea of defunding defense forces because your neighbours have a clause in their constitution. Especially if they’re hosting a very large number of soldiers belonging to your geopolitical rival – if its economy collapses and it has to withdraw those troops, are you meant to believe that the constitutional limits are going to remain strongly fixed? Would the USA?
I can’t be bothered with details at half past midnight but this wiki article suggests that Japan has been maintaining defense spending at about 1% of GDP since the 1980s. Without the US presence, it’s not impossible to believe that an extra 0.5% would be added to that – certainly I don’t consider it unreasonable to classify China’s 1.5% as “similar” to what one might expect of Japan if the US military presence were not there. They certainly both compare favourably with most of Europe and the USA.
This Wikipedia article puts China at 2.1-2.2% of GDP, which is comparable to Australia at 1.9%. This gives China’s spending as 119 billion US$ in 2010, so I think it includes some estimate of the “secret” spending the Guardian refers to. So even including this conspiracy theory of secret spending, China has increased its spending to a level comparable with that of other belligerent world powers, like Australia (1.9%). (Also, looking at that list I note that Saudia Arabia is spending nearly 5% of GDP on arms!)
March 26, 2012 at 10:07 am
Former defence analyst here. Total defence spending is a poor measure, because defence forces don’t just do external defence. They are often also for internal control (Tiananmen anyone?), political display (Red Arrows), and employment relief/social bonding (see Indonesian or Swiss armies). Also, the game – if you have a sophisticated military tradition – is not to outspend or out-arm your rivals, but to spend just enough in the right ways to provoke them into spending too much in the wrong ways. Based on the little I know of Chinese military spending, they seem to be on a path of cautious technical upgrades coupled with overall restraint and, given that their major worries are certainly mostly about internal unrest, not much there for the rest of the world to worry about.
March 26, 2012 at 10:26 am
You’re right that today’s ally can be tomorrow’s problem. But the examples you provided (Iraq pre-1991, Syria) don’t show countries saying “You’re my ally and I must increase military spending because of that.” [1] But that’s precisely what you’re arguing here. At the very least you should be able to concede its amusing to both prop up a regime and also increase your military spending so you can fight them later.
For Japan, there is no reason to believe they could militarise faster than China and every reason (given their economy over the last 20 years) that they couldn’t. As for pointing at the US troops there, that means you’re citing the USA as a threat twice. Would you care to point at them a third or fourth time? Why not just say “China’s military spending is driven to counter the USA’s”?
Let’s face it, there is a very small list of countries that China is worried about militarily. The USA and maybe India (especially with regard to naval power in the Indian ocean) and Russia (depending on whether they think the Russians would bother/risk it – they may feel that threat is already contained). In all other cases they don’t think of it as percentage GDP, they’re going to think in military terms (given that’s the one that actually matters when shooting guns). China has a million troops under arms with modern-enough equipment. If anyone wants to fight a land war with China they’ll lose badly. China can only be challenged on in the air or on the seas and they’re taking steps to limit those possibilities.
If I had to bet, I’d say that China isn’t looking to be able to project military force around the world the way the USA (and the USSR) have. They probably only want to have a guarantee that no one can push them around in their part of the world and also have the ability to push others around there. For example, Japan in the South China Sea, Taiwan, South Korea. They’re not going to worry about having a navy in the Atlantic in the foreseeable future.
Of course, if they achieve regional dominance and find their interests in (say) Africa are threatened I wouldn’t guarantee that that policy would remain in place. But that’s 50 years away, and in 50 years it won’t matter how much anyone objects (except maybe India).
[1] The example of that is the USA and pretty much every nation they are allied with. Probably Russia and the rest of the USSR too.
March 26, 2012 at 1:31 pm
Paul, perhaps USA/Pakistan is a better example? Pakistan is a necessary ally of the USA in the war on terror, but I doubt there are many hard-headed realists in Washington who think that they don’t have to keep a careful eye on their ally’s behavior, and occasionally deploy e.g. drones and special forces to e.g. kill their enemy leader as he hides in Pakistan, apparently (possibly) with the knowledge of the ISI. North Korea, particularly, is a dubious ally for China – they could bring a catastrophic war down on China’s head without much warning, and if their system collapses it’s highly likely that the refugee flows will be huge. So short of invading and replacing the leadership there they have to just kind of suck it up. And reunification won’t help, since they would then be sharing yet another land border with a nation hosting US troops. China’s strategic situation is quite a confounding one, at least while the USA insists on projecting force in the reason and even when it doesn’t. Which makes their restrained defense spending all the more remarkable. With such a large population and such a problematic set of neighbours, they could easily be forgiven for arming up a couple of million more landless labourers and gearing up for a multi-front high-risk defense strategy. But they haven’t done anything like that.
My previous comment was invoking the USA purely as evidence that Japan might change its constitutional restrictions – from a Chinese perspective, surely the Japanese commitment to peace can’t seem absolute when they’re hosting soldiers from a belligerent super-power? And they have discussed changing the constitutional limit on collective self-defense explicitly so they can help the USA in its military adventures (Iraq, I think it was). So from a Chinese view the Japanese might seem like a very good global citizen, but they also aren’t guaranteed to stay that way. I personally think they will stay that way, but if I was tasked with determining defense policy with Japan as my neighbour, I probably wouldn’t bet the house on it. Similarly, in Australia almost everyone is 100% sure that Indonesia is not going to turn nasty in the foreseeable or even the distant future, and yet our defense policy is tied to being able to stop an invasion “from the north.”
I agree, and I think Peter T does too. But this is exactly the thing: a country that has reduced its defense spending as a share of GDP, and has shown no signs of expansionist military plans beyond securing buffers on its own borders, is being depicted in the newspaper as a sinister power because its spending has increased “from 14 billion to 100 billion.” It’s shallow reporting at best, heinously stupid at worst. As Peter T says, they’re concerned with internal unrest and self-defense.
I found another piece in the Guardian on the weekend that gives a more realistic assessment of China’s internal politics and political goals, and bemoans western ignorance about what’s happening there. The western media have had 10 years to get to grips with what’s going on in China, and you’d think they might have started thinking a little more clearly around about the 2008 Olympics, when they all paid a visit. And yet …
March 26, 2012 at 9:46 pm
France and Germany have accepted that they can’t use force except in very limited circumstances, and then only in coalition unless against trivial opponents, and now basically just keep a contingency reserve. the UK is heading that way with the last round of cuts. The US still has delusions of grandeur. Even though Iraq showed that the army is stretched to the limit containing a medium insurgency. The US will fool around with the pretence that air power alone can gain politico-military ends for a while yet, since the realists know that they can’t afford even another medium ground war.
The Chinese want to ensure the US does not bring its illusions their way (and maybe keep them spending on useless stuff instead of investing in infratstructure), and also limit the potential for US action against their friends/subordinates. They seem to playing a good hand so far.
March 27, 2012 at 2:46 am
A very succinct and accurate summation of the true geo-political/military situation which faces China. This type of insipid political analysis is exactly the sort of commentary I expect from the Guardian, whose political analysts consistently display a lack of understanding of defence issues.
March 27, 2012 at 7:07 am
” reunification won’t help, since they would then be sharing yet another land border with a nation hosting US troops”
The US troops are in South Korea because of North Korea! Re-unification would be an advantage to the Chinese because:
1. It would allow them to push for (and quite possibly get) US troop withdrawal from the Korean peninsular
2. It would cripple the South Korea economy for a decade or two as they paid the re-unification bill
The disadvantages are:
1. It means they share a land border with a democratic state instead of a dictatorship that they (may) think they can control
2. It would probably be a loss of prestige – though this one becomes less and less important as China moves away from being a Communist state and into being a corporatist one.
”So from a Chinese view the Japanese might seem like a very good global citizen”
Or more likely, they look like the guys responsible for the Rape of Nanking. I think you might be underestimating the level of unthinking bias that China has. Even if you assume the leadership have totally gotten over Nanking then the leadership would still know they are constrained by what the populace would accept.
Australian policy is a little easier to explain away. If anyone to the North ever asks “Do you mean me?” we just respond “We have this policy because the other option is defending against an army comprised of penguins and the All Blacks.”
“The US still has delusions of grandeur. Even though Iraq showed that the army is stretched to the limit containing a medium insurgency”
I don’t quite accept this. I suspect that America has worked out that even a medium insurgency is at its limit of what it can contain, but I suspect they also know they can reduce any (non-nuclear armed) nation on Earth to the Stone Age if they are willing to put up with:
1. The fact they can’t seize any land/resources from it
2. International and (more importantly) domestic outcry over the immense suffering that would come from such a thing
This is just a reflection of the fact they can still bomb the crap out of anyone they want, but it turns out that it’s not actually that useful a strategy by itself. If combined with something (incredibly appalling) like wide spread WWII firebombing then conceivably you could crush any opponent but it means abandoning every civilised ideal we’ve developed since WWII. So it’s useless in any circumstance other than total war and total war could probably only be provoked by nations that have nuclear weapons, which means MAD is the policy that applies…
But I suspect what I’m saying is just the crazy cases of the scenarios that Peter T is discussing. And to judge by his advice on what the purpose of defence spending is (to push the other guys to spend badly) it’s probable that my scenarios lie in the area that China wants the USA to focus on.
I still think that Faustus’s description of China’s threats is fallacious.
March 27, 2012 at 7:52 am
Brian, to be fair it’s not just the guardian, lots of newspapers have been presenting this guff over the last year.
I am phoning this in from the shinkansen to fukushima, so nuance is a challenge. Some other points…
1. I think peter t’s comments contain more sense than most media coverage of china’s military growth
2. Paul, south korea was a pro US dictatorship until the mid 80s. China’s strategic situation is complex!
3. You were arguing china doesn’t see japan as a threat, now you are arguing they might! (Don’t make quote you on a smartphone!)
4. Anither strategic worry for china: 2 of its neighbours are nuclear armed, with a history of conflict. That surely necessitates some careful and potentially expensive military contingency plans!
March 27, 2012 at 10:37 am
Sorry, I meant to say that there is no logical reason to view Japan in that way but that there are potentially emotional reasons that they will do so anyway.
The reason to not be concerned about Japan is: Even if Japan were to amend it’s constitution and start ramping up for the next Rape of Nanking there is every reason to believe that China could ramp up it’s military much much faster. The reasons for this are both economic and political. Economically, Japan is a complex modern economy with lots of government spending constraints (i.e. social welfare, floating exchange rates, large government debt) while China is a rapidly growing economy with the ability to summon spare capacity seemingly from thin air, for example they couple stop producing iPads and start producing guns. Chinas also doesn’t face the government constraints that Japan does (ah, the joys of central planning and party dictatorship).
On the topic of how defence spending is related to government debt, Mark Steyn is fond of pointing out that sometime in the next decade a simple projection [1] shows that the interest on USA government debt held by China will actually be sufficiently large to pay for the entire Chinese military spending [2].
That actually demonstrates a stong argument in favour of your case that Chinese military growth is not disproportionate.
[1] which I’ll bet ignores any increase in Chinese miltary spending
[2] I suspect that if we factor in modest Chinese miltary growth and the trend of US debt growth then this prediction remains possible.
March 27, 2012 at 5:36 pm
I suspect that, if China is involved in a military confrontation in the next two decades, it won’t be with India, the US or Japan. It will be to “protect” Chinese citizens in Mongolia, the Russian far east, or possibly north Myanmar. Citizens who have moved there to escape ecological pressures. More along the lines of the Boer War than anything post 1939.