investment into china will start to fall in the coming months
There are more than a few, moreover,
who are sceptical of the combat qualities of this new cohort of PLA officers — products of China’s one-child policy, which spawned a generation derisively referred to as “Little Emperors”.
PLA newspapers are replete with stories of new recruits using boarding-school tricks like spitting out red ink to avoid training.
“I’d hide under my blanket and cry every night,” former cadet Sun Youpeng, who
joined the PLA after graduating from university at the age of 22, told Minnie Chan of the South China Morning Post in 2014.
Liu Mingfu, a scholar at China’s National Defence University,
estimated in a 2012 report that 70% of the PLA’s troops were only sons — a number rising to 80% among combat troops. In a country with a growing cohort of aged people,
with ancient cultural norms against sending only sons to war, the consequences could be significant, Liu noted.
Paul Dibbs, an Australian defence expert, points out the country’s state-of-the-art Type 95 submarines will only be as stealthy as the 1980s Soviet titanium-hulled Akula-class.
China’s Dong Feng 21D anti-ship ballistic missile has yet to hit a target moving at realistic speeds. Large parts of the Air Force and Navy are still made up of obsolescent types.
“Let our field armies touch the buttocks of a tiger,” China’s Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping reportedly said as he ordered the military to action in 1984, hoping to blood his troops and demonstrate “our military is still good enough”. The truth, however, was that Deng’s own economic reforms had brought about a crisis in the PLA. Xiaoming Zhang’s magisterial history of the China-Vietnam war notes that fewer soldiers joined the army during that decade than at any previous time — and were less than willing to die.
In some cases, the crisis of morale bred low farce: elements of the 67th Army, on their way out of Laoshan, demanded $ 1,500 from their 47th Army replacements for all intelligence on enemy positions and firepower. In another case, an armoured unit which did not receive care packages despatched its tanks to surround an infantry division headquarters and demand its share.
On the disaster that followed this hubris, the historian
Thucydides wrote: “Sicily would fear us most if we never went there at all.” This, he explained, was because “that which is farthest off, and the reputation of which can least be tested, is the object of admiration”.
For China’s strategic community, these ought be words to ponder: in war, unlike films, the end of the story is impossible to script.'''
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