China's military ambitions.(Asia)

THE ENERGY RELEASED in China, little more than a decade ago, by Deng Xiaoping's "socialism with Chinese characteristics", has exploded with the velocity, force and unpredictability of a galactic accident. There are still backward, poor Chinese provinces, and the progress is chaotic. The Chinese government and Communist Party are finding the prodigy difficult to direct or control. The economic tiger is becoming too big and sharp-clawed for its masters to whip into submission. The workers, too, are restive, often violently so. And, with the collapse of Maoism, for almost the first time in China's long history the powers-that-be cannot call on a shared ideology or belief system to buttress national cohesion.

China's breakneck development thus presents the leadership with strident challenges, as well as great opportunities. The present regime is seeking to strengthen its threatened domestic position by asserting China's claims to greatness. Beijing continues to emphasise the primacy of economic power. Given China's critical dependence on foreign investors, technology, raw materials and markets, this goal involves greater integration with the global market economy and peaceable co-operation with, in particular, the United States, which is China's biggest customer, competitor, and, to the tune of some $400 billion in Treasury bonds, its biggest debtor.

But increasingly explicit is another goal which is likely to bring China into conflict with its neighbours, and with the United States. This is China's flat-out pursuit of military might to make it a global force and the pre-eminent power in Asia. China's military are intensely secretive, following Deng's instruction to "hide our capabilities and bide our time", but China's activism in the international arms bazaar, where its contracts with Russia alone are worth more than $2 billion a year, cannot be entirely hidden. Including off-budget purchases, hidden subsidies, and research and development, its defence budget is now estimated to be $90 billion a year; China admits to only a third of that sum, but concedes that spending goes up each year by double-digit percentages.

China is openly risking a resumed cold war, essentially Beijing versus Washington. This military drive is anything but defensive. Its blue-water naval ambitions are revealed by purchases of Russian guided missile destroyers and the massing of a submarine fleet that includes nuclear-powered vessels equipped with 5000-mile range missiles and independently targeted warheads. By purchase, by construction and by patent theft and corruption, the regime is streamlining, equipping and retraining" the People's Liberation Army, seeking to convert it from a foot-soldiery into a dominant--in the long run domineering--military machine able to fight and win high-tech wars and enable China to call the tune in what its military planners call the "strategic configuration of power".

China's second strategic ambition could, by thoroughly alarming its economic partners and competitors, collide with the first. Since September 11, 2001, China has been quietly concerned to stay out of America's sightlines; yet it has accelerated its military build-up, passed a law menacing Taiwan with attack, and simultaneously leant hard on the European Union to drop a post-Tiananmen arms embargo--actions calculated to get America's attention.

China's military plans are most unlikely to be all realisable under present conditions, but they have deeply alarmed the USA. George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld have all sounded the alarm, warning of a grave danger of direct clashes with Beijing's forces. That danger is heightened not only by China's beating of the nationalist drum over Taiwan, but by China's continued ignorance of the rest of the world. Whatever the presumed or actual risks of confrontation, and however questionable, at least within the next few decades, may be the realisation of China's grand strategic goals, China's foreign and military policies, which in practice are inseparable, are pursuing perilous and not always compatible purposes with arrogant, indeed reckless, intensity.

THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC of China can draw upon the earth's largest population, more than 1.3 billion, for highly educable troops and workers. China is, moreover, not only the world's greatest net importer of energy, raw materials, and goods to be finished, but the greatest single exporter of consumer goods. Yet Beijing's strength is as yet still largely economic. Most of the world is looking at that economic prowess--and the multiplying risks of a protectionist backlash against China's surging exports.