The other way to look at China's military build-up(highlight in bold).
Rumsfeld ventures into the Middle Kingdomhttp://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/17/opinion/edsham.phpInternational Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's two-day stop in Beijing this week is the first time he has set foot in China since coming to office. The visit is symbolically important and may also help to breach some of the growing perceptual chasms in U.S.-China strategic relations.
The first gulf that needs to be filled is Rumsfeld's own naïveté: In Singapore in June, he questioned China's military budgets, arms purchases and deployments given, he said, that it wasn't threatened. Apparently it never occurred to him that China's military modernization is premised, in part, on the buildup of U.S. forces and defense arrangements in the region.
Looking out from Beijing, China sees five U.S. security alliances with nations on its East Asian periphery; a growing naval presence in Southeast Asia (particularly Singapore); a dramatic build-up of naval, air and nuclear forces in Guam and the Pacific; a strengthened U.S. military relationship with India; and U.S. forces in several Central Asian republics on China's northwestern frontiers and in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Then there's Taiwan. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has forged a range of military assistance and intelligence-sharing arrangements banned by previous administrations, to say nothing of the largest-ever arms sales package. Atop a series of critical - even alarmist - Pentagon reports on China's military, the explicit addition of Taiwan as a "security concern" to the U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty was a further affront.
Given such differences in perceptions, it is very useful for Rumsfeld to directly engage his counterparts in broad dialogue on regional security and the nature of military modernization in China, which is indeed proceeding in a sustained, even accelerating, fashion. To be sure, his hosts need to be much more transparent about the scope of their military modernization and deployments, but in gauging their responses, Rumsfeld should ask himself several questions:
Why is it is not natural for a continental nation like China to possess the full range of military capabilities? Why shouldn't the Chinese navy be expected to possess the capability to patrol at least several hundred nautical miles out around its periphery and even to protect sea lanes beyond Asia in order to ensure maritime trade and energy shipping? Why is it unnatural for the air force to possess the capability to loiter its fighters over the East or South China Seas, or to shadow foreign reconnaissance aircraft that try to spy on its territory?
Why is it unnatural for China to develop a second-strike nuclear capability or its own military satellites or antisatellite weapons, or to buy weapons and defense technologies abroad that it cannot produce domestically? And why is it unnatural for China to prepare for a range of military contingencies to prevent what it considers to be part of its sovereign territory (Taiwan) from proclaiming independence?
Though this may be anathema for many U.S. pundits and politicians, if Rumsfeld were China's defense secretary would he not seek such capabilities? China will inevitably possess a modern military - the only real questions are when and to what ends will it be put? In some areas we are already witnessing "modern" near state-of-the-art capabilities (new generations of guided and ballistic missiles, fighters, destroyers, submarines, tanks, electronic warfare).
In many other categories, China's military-industrial complex is making incremental advances that, over time, will close the technological gaps. Yet, in other areas, the People's Liberation Army continues to lag considerably behind modern capabilities (command, control and power projection).
As China's military modernizes, it must be monitored carefully, but it must also be engaged in dialogue. This is the value in Rumsfeld's visit.
(David Shambaugh is the director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University and the author of ''Modernizing China's Military: Progress, Problems and Prospects.'')
