HOW CHINA’S MILITARY SEES THE WORLD

TALKING TRUST WITH CHINA’S ARMY

Didi Kirsten Tatlow

IHT Rendezvous, January 15, 2013

China will soon publish a new country map that expands its claims to disputed territories. Japan has announced its first increase in defense spending in 11 years in a move widely perceived as countering China. Recently, fighter planes and other aircraft have been used by both countries as tensions grow over a group of islands in the East China Sea that both claim, called the Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

With suspicion and escalation apparently the order of the day in East and Southeast Asia, and speculation growing if this year will see an armed skirmish between China and Japan, it is crucial to understand how the military of the rising nation sees the world. So a recent post by an American scholar who took part in a forum organized by China's military in Beijing had some fascinating things to say.

A focus of the meeting, called "Security in Asia: New Problems and New Thinking," was trust. Yet with deeply divergent worldviews on display some discussions ended up "modeling" distrust rather than overcoming it, wrote Christopher Ford, one of 60 security and defense specialists, including serving military men, from 21 countries, who gathered in November for the Fourth Xiangshan Forum. The event was organized by the China Association for Military Science, which is part of the Academy of Military Science of the People's Liberation Army, and attendees on the Chinese side included the air force general Liu Chengjun, the state-run China Military Online reported.

(...) [article here]