Mandated by the Fiscal Year 2000 National Defense Authorization Act, the U.S. Department of Defense released its annual report Military and Security Departments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2015 to Congress on May 8. It is the 15th report of its kind. The confidential version is supposed to provide an essential basis for the U.S. to make official judgments of China’s military strength and intentions. The public version offers an “instant snapshot” for Americans, academics and the international community to understand the overall characteristics of the Chinese armed forces, and it is broadly influential.
On unreliable and sometimes elusive information, however, the public report surmises China’s strategic intentions and exaggerates China’s military strength. It’s quite startling for a state flaunting reason to make such knee-jerk, irrational and low-level misjudgments on strategies. We should take the year’s report as an example to seriously examine the question: Is it a real “misjudgment” or a work of fantasy?
What are the roots of its misjudgments?
Jungle law culture persists. It’s widely believed that the natural state of the world is full of conflict, fear and disruption. Since the natural state is as horrible as being besieged by tigers and wolves, even the worst monarchy is better than letting it be or anarchy. Since all species multiply fast, the struggle for existence is inevitable. Such a philosophy has been deeply rooted in the U.S. culture and functions as the big premise for its decision making. The natural state of the international community is conflict while the law of nature is survival of the fittest. There is a hidden logic behind the report’s speculation on China’s strategic intentions, its deduction on the developing trend of China’s military strength, its tactics to curb and contain China as well as engage and exchange with China. It is seeing China as a formidable rival capable of posing a challenge and therefore staying on high alert.
Cold war mentality dominates. With the Soviet Military Power report annually issued by the Pentagon in the 1980s as its predecessor, the report is merely an old trick in attempt to revive the Cold War mentality and open new conflicts. Since 2004, a group of China experts, from the military, political and diplomatic academies and military intelligence departments, and led by the Department of Defense, have participated in compiling the report. Among them there are former U.S. diplomats to China, an assistant secretary of state in charge of East Asian affairs, officials with the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency and senior researchers. Almost all leading China experts have been signed up. Some are intelligence experts who speak Chinese fluently and are familiar with the ancient Chinese treatise, The Art of War; others have worked in China and traveled widely in cities and the countryside. Quite a number are Cold War warriors, who see destroying rivals as the only goal.
Hegemony continues. The fundamental reason of the outbreak of the Greek War some 2,000 years ago was that Athens’ ever-growing strength had made the Spartans uneasy and made war inevitable. This conclusion evolved into the so-called Thucydides’ Trap for both an established hegemony and a rising power. John Mearsheimer, founder of the Offensive Realism theory, which has prevailed since 2000, has been advocating the “trap” menace, persistently viewing the world as a risky and brutal field of honor. To survive, a state has no choice but to fight another for power. There is no night watchman state in the international system and the ultimate goal of every great power is to seek hegemony. Therefore, he thinks, the United States must try its best to prevent China from seeking regional dominance, because the United States does not want a peer competitor. The result will be an intense Sino-U.S. security competition similar to the confrontation during the Cold War. Starting from the year 2000, the annual report speculating on China’s military strength is a product of the times in an attempt to maintain U.S. global hegemony and strike at rivals.
The United States has purposely chosen to have the report published before the Shangri-La Dialogue for three reasons.
