Confronting the Dragon Part 3: The World is Losing Patience.

You know, China...
The world has been very patient with you.

The world has long seen that a free and modern China, fully developed and engaging with the rest of the world, would be a valuable member of the world community. But when the World Community started to form, you were nowhere close to being ready for that. As the Twentieth Century dawned, you were "the Empire of the Great Qing," one of the last feudal monarchies in the world, still lacking any national identity other than the name of your ruling dynasty. While Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, inspired by America, tried to get you caught up with the world, the world waited patiently, because China is valuable to us.
As you finally forged a national identity for the first time in your history, and built it on a foundation of ethnocentrism, enshrining a narcissistic superiority complex within your very name, the world waited patiently because arrogant and juvenile though she may have been, we valued China.
A decade later, you were a fragmented mess, torn apart by your own petty warlords (alphahistory, "Warlord Era") while still blaming your fragmentation on "Western Invaders." While you tried unsuccessfully to pull yourself together and instead embroiled yourself in a pathetic civil war between Sun's Party and a Communist Rebellion led by an uneducated, ill-travelled spoiled merchant's son named Mao Zedong, the world waited patiently, because China is valuable to us.
The world even intervened to spare you from the Empire of Japan (a long-standing rival with plenty of valid reasons to hate you) when that empire took advantage of your division and gave you the long-overdue repayment for Kublai Khan's 1274 invasion of Japan (Szczepanski, Thoughtco). And once the Japanese Empire was repelled and defeated in 1945, what did you do? You went back to petty internal fighting. Meanwhile, the world waited patiently, because backward though she may have been, China was still valuable to us.
Your Republic, built in 1911 by the brilliant visionary Sun Yat-Sen, was demolished in 1949 by Mao, a man described by his contemporaries as "not particularly clever" and "in no ways limited by etiquette (Sun et al. The 14th Dalai Lama, 67). This same "not particularly clever" man went on, not even four full years after the defeat of the Empire, to describe the same nation who had stood fast in your defense against your Japanese rivals as an "aggressive Imperialist" in 1948 (Mao, Selected Quotations, 23), and accuse all the nations who fought alongside you against Fascism of "gang[ing]up against the Chinese People in every possible way" (Mao, 137). And the world waited patiently, because we believed China would one day become valuable to us once again.
As Mao went on to devolve China into an autocratic dystopian mess where famine and paranoia were the rules of the day, killing between 45 million (Somin, Washington Post) and 65 million (Edwards, Heritage Foundation) Chinese along the way, while claiming to be "Liberators (Sun et al. 41, 44, 45, 50, 52 etc)." Meanwhile, the world waited patiently, because China still held the potential to be valuable to us.
As Deng Xiaoping began to make China a part of the world's market, the world began to think their patience was finally paying off. Finally, China, with it's 20% of the world's population, was going along with the rest of the world, catching up to the modern era of the Post-Enlightenment World. Of course, like any toddler learning to walk, you stumbled a few times (and fell on your face once in June of 1989 at a place called Tiananmen Square) trying to grasp this "Free World" concept, but the world thought your remaining acts of medievalism were the last moments of a phase you would soon outgrow. Therefore, we didn't confront you as sternly as we could have regarding your bullying of Taiwan, or your absolutely paranoid internet censorship, or especially your nine dash line. Instead, we waited patiently.
It's not that the world lacked the power to do anything about it, it's that we lacked the power to do it gently. We were a bit worried that if you got smacked too hard when you first emerged from your shell, that you'd close back up and the world would have to wait another century or two for you to catch up. That's why so many countries, from Australia (Varrall, The News Lens) to the United Kingdom (Wangchuk, Tibetan Journal) have tried hard to indulge you, even going so far as to let you play your damnable censorship games outside your own borders. As petty as your tantrums were, the world felt certain that through exposure to the world, you would outgrow this phase, while if we slapped you down you might cower back inside your geographically convenient shell as you did in the Qin and Qing Dynasties and it would be a regime-change or two before you were finally ready to join the world. And so, just as we had done for nearly a century, we waited patiently, because China still held 20% of the world's population within her borders, and that was valuable to us.
But you mistook the world's restraint for weakness. You developed an attitude that the world was not confronting you because you were too powerful, too indispensable, and that the world was helpless before you and more helpless without you. And you weren't afraid to show it either (Ford, New Paradigms). From this superiority complex on display at the 4th Xiangshan summit to a pamphlet published for the 2016 G20 Summit that pompously declared on the first page of the introduction "the world's prosperity and stability cannot be ensured without China. That China has become a major country is now a matter no longer in doubt. China has come close to the center of the world stage. (Wu, Major-Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics and the Belt and Road Initiative, i)."
Not only did your arrogance manifest itself in your words, but in your tyrannical actions. Hyrdraulic despotism became your watchword, damming and polluting rivers to deny water (Weston, The News Lens) to your neighbors so you could then charge exorbitant prices to sell water back to them, seizing the oceans where more than 40% of the food supply of the Philippines is caught (Greer, The Diplomat)and then saying you'll "allow" the Philippines to keep obtaining their food as long as they do not insult you (in other words, declaring that you have the right to consign 100 million people to death by starvation if your petty feelings get hurt), and seizing the sea lane through which nearly every drop of Japan's oil flows, intending to make them helpless before a nation that has not bothered hiding their hostility toward them (West, The Globalist).
And then to top it all off, all of the waiting has apparently been in vain because with the CCP paving the road for Xi to become the permanent ruler (Gao, The Diplomat [1])of a Party less and less subject to the rule of the laws they pass (Gao, The Diplomat [2]), it's plain that despite all of our patient indulgence of your pettiness, China is backsliding to strongmanship anyway!

Well China...
The world is getting very tired of waiting!

For more than a century, the world has granted you a level of leniency we would not show to any other country because we've wanted to see China alongside the leading power centers of the world, a Free world, built on the ideals of "Liberty and Justice for Every Man" that Sun Zhongshan took back to China with him when he visited the United States; the values he spoke of when he toppled the Manchurian Child-Emperor Puyi. Despite all of Mao and Xi's rhetoric about the nations of the world conspiring against China under the "eeeeeeeeevil Imperialist machinations of the U.S," the world has actually been doing quite the opposite. They were hoping to make China (that's The Republic of China, not the PRC) one of the "Four Policemen (Kelly, The Four Policemen, 61)," the four nations which were supposed to be the pillars upon which global security rested after WW2, until you rejected Zhongshan's legacy in favor of Mao's lunacy. See, there has never been a "Western anti-China Struggle." You just completely blew it and got yourself on the wrong end of the Western Anti-COMMUNIST struggle, which is part of the entire world's anti-totalitarian struggle, the same struggle which began in WW2 when the very same Western Powers you're demonizing rushed to your side to help you repel Hirohito's Empire. How ironic that yesterday's hostage has become today's gunman!
But the point is fast approaching when the hope of having China take part in such a world is outweighed by a reality in which China more closely resembles Hirohito's Empire than it ever resembled the countries that resisted the Axis. You're valuable, China, but not indispensable: nor are you invincible, and nations great and small are joining hands to finally rid themselves of the barbarism you have fallen to. Let the irony be plain: you have spent so many decades lashing out against the entire world and shrieking about the nations of the world conspiring against China, that you have finally created the very coalition the CCP has been using as a bogeyman since the 1940's.
And China, it's time to face facts: you haven't got a snowball's prayer in Hell.

Help, Comrade! It's Not Like Tiananmen; These Guys Shoot Back!

At one military exercise in the summer of 2012, a strategic PLA unit, stressed out by the hard work of handling warheads in an underground bunker complex, actually had to take time out of a 15-day wartime simulation for movie nights and karaoke parties. In fact, by day nine of the exercise, a “cultural performance troupe” (common PLA euphemism for song-and-dance girls) had to be brought into the otherwise sealed facility to entertain the homesick soldiers.

The above passage is from an article Ian Easton wrote for The Diplomat, and I would recommend stopping and clicking on that link before reading any further in this article. I cannot think of a more perfect commentary on the outdated methods (and mindset) of the Chinese Army, unless maybe it's this one, wherein a retired PLA General boasts about how easy it would be to capture Taiwan, citing things like the amount of applause received at CCP sessions over a unanimous vote on an anti-Taiwan measure, or how excited he and his men were when they torpedoed derelict fishing boats in naval exercises 20 years ago as evidence of the PLA's "indomitable fighting power." Essentially, what China has is about 3 million overgrown JROTC cadets whose "training" consists of a mix of Marxist Lectures and war movies. They are eager to show how tough and dangerous they think they are, but when it comes to facing an enemy that shoots back, they haven't got the foggiest concept, and seem to think wars are won by whoever's battle cry is the loudest. Living in Beijing I can personally attest to the fact that seeing PLA "soldiers (if you want to call them that when they look like they're barely old enough to shave and I'm not even sure they'd meet the height requirements to be allowed on the rides at Disney World)" on guard duty or foot patrol in their spit-and-polished dress greens is an everyday occurrence. Seeing one in BDU's (or whatever China calls them) indicating any actual activity, is a different matter entirely. Oh, and approaching one of them to ask a question is always a hilarious experience because their faces turn pale at the very sight of a foreigner. Among expats with any military experience, they're called the P4: "People's Pretty Parade-ground Princesses."
Admittedly, Easton makes a good point by saying that like much the Japanese Imperial Navy of the '30's, cockiness combined with lack of experience in war makes it more likely that they'll start one (which makes them dangerous), but I haven't found very many studies, even among Chinese jingoists, that try to say they could win one. Both Washington (Chase, Engstrom, Tai, Gunness, Harold, Puska & Berkowitz, China's Incomplete Military Transformation) and Beijing-Controlled Media in Hong-Kong (Chan, South China Morning Post [1]) are aware that beneath all the Sturm and Drang, China is still able to, at most, make victory more costly for America in blood (which may explain why America has been looking for allies to split the bill). Even China's hypernationalist tabloid the "Global Times" admitted "Data shows [the US's] dominant power."
Even by "Winnie the Pooh's" most flag-wavingly optimistic assessments, the PLA is not going to be modern until 2035 (Lim, Straits Times), and not world class until 2050. Mind you, that's a statement that they will be what 2017 considers "modern," in 2035. Of course before one can look to the PLA's future, their past bears examination.

The PLA's Record: 1 Win By Proxy, 6 Losses, 2 Draws.

Bottom line, the PLA has never, and I mean ever, had a decisive victory without the aid of the nation they are now trying to challenge. The closest thing they can claim was Korea, where a force of 300,000 fresh and newly-outfitted Chinese youths, less than an hour away from the comforts of home and with supply lines just as short (and with the full element of surprise on their side), were thrown against a haphazardly deployed, war-weary and half-starved American force of barely half their manpower with minimal homeland support, and the best they were able to obtain was a stalemate. Before that though, their first fight was the Chinese Civil War.
The PLA's first battle (if you want to call it a battle) was the 1927 Autumn Harvest Uprising in which 90% of their force (peasants at the time) were wiped out by the Nationalist Revolutionary Army, known then as the Chinese Army, and today as the Taiwanese Army (Szczepanski, Thoughtco.com [2]), and after hiding out in the countryside were forced seven years later to retreat through terrain so harsh that 90% of the replacements they recruited in the intervening seven years died as well. Mao emerged as the leader of this rabble basically by virtue of being the only semi-capable orator still drawing breath. It has become enshrined in Chinese Communist Doctrine as the "Long March." Then, after spending most of WW2 hiding from the Japanese, the end of the war found them huddled in Yanan, Manchuria (miles from Shaanxi, where Generalissimo Chiang had been doing the real fighting), and Chiang wasted no time in moving into position to deal what would have been a crushing defeat once and for all. As Arthur Waldron, Professor of International Relations at University of Pennslyvania, writes in his essay China Without Tears, "these forces were tough as well-tempered steel, incomparably stronger than anything the Communists had. Furthermore they had powerful artillery that far outmatched the lightly armed Communist guerrilla forces. Chiang also had an air force (Cowley, What If?, 385)." With Chiang's advance force within eyesight of the last PLA stronghold, irony came to China's door as it so often does. It was American pressure from General George C. Marshall, naively hoping to secure a peace treaty between the warring Chinese factions and avoid having Chiang's hands drenched in any more blood, that led Chiang to stop when the annihilation of the PLA was in sight (380). Of course, Mao's thanks to the Americans who saved him once from Hirohito and then again from Chiang, was to build the PRC's entire foreign policy off of labelling the US as China's greatest enemy, but the fact remains that were it not for American aid, the PLA would have ended the same way it began: with a whimper under the boot of the real Chinese Army.
The PLA was not even able to take the tiny island of Taiwan despite two confrontations in the Formosa Strait, one in 1954 (Pike, Global Security [1]) and another in 1959 (Pike, [2]). Eager to regain lost "face" after that (and taking their cues from their invasion of Korea more than a decade before), they invaded India by surprise in 1962 (India Today, "India-China War of 1962"), and much like Korea they attacked with a force far larger than the defenders. Much like Korea, the war ended with a standoff between 10,000 Indian troops and 80,000 Chinese. They had a complete debacle of a campaign in Vietnam in 1979, where their greatest "victories" were against civilians on their retreat to China (Russell, Warhistoryonline). It can be presumed that the experience they gained in attacking unarmed civilians here was instrumental in preparing them for Tiananmen Square ten years later.
But finally, the biggest reason China is ill-prepared for the confrontation they are provoking is one of simple geography.

The Coalition They Feared Never Existed... Until They Created It

The PLA, which is not fully prepared to fight a major war on one front, is surrounded and stretched too thin (Chang, The National Interest).
In the Northwest, China faces insurgents in Xinjiang, and they are stretching themselves further by committing themselves to Pakistan and Afghanistan (as I have recently commented on). In the Southwest, they face insurgents in Tibet as well as the threat of action by the Indian Military (whose ties with the Tibetans would enable a joint Indian/Tibetan fighting force to fight both front and rear actions). In the Northeast, China has deployed 300,000 troops to the Korean Peninsula. The fact that these troops, which were dispatched in response to the Korean Crisis last Summer, only started moving in January says a lot about the PLA's logistical problems but I've already covered that. In the East, they face the rising dangers of the Japanese military, which I've already commented on briefly and will go into more details about in an upcoming entry. In the Southeast, Taiwan not only serves as a jumping off point for U.S. or Japanese forces but they also have missiles capable of striking Beijing now, as I noted here. And in the South, there is a whole world of trouble as ASEAN, Australia, and the U.S. Navy all prepare to retaliate against Xi's aggression. In the North there is Russia, who the world seems to think will come to China's aid but as I'll show in a later entry (I've got to stop saying that), that's not likely because the reality is they have more to lose from China's rise then any other major power. Basically, China's list of allies is North Korea, Pakistan, and theoretically Iran but I don't see the IRGC projecting force any farther than maybe counterattacks against India's western border, and even that assumes they can get along with Pakistan long enough to do that.

Xi, look... it's over.

You lost.

Now you're standing on the brink of earning China her biggest smackdown since the Mongols wiped out the Southern Song Dynasty. And contrary to all your vitriol about "U.S. Plotting," the U.S. is actually the only one who has sustained you this far, the only one who gave you any respect after WW2, and on more than one occasion the only one who has saved the CCP from the jaws of utter defeat. But this time, we won't be riding in on a white horse to save your hide, we're going to be leading the charge against you.
The world doesn't want to devastate you, China. America doesn't want to devastate you. We never have. And we've never wanted anyone else to. We've stopped others from doing it more than once, even while you spat in our face.
But you're pushing it. Your toes are hanging over the edge of a precipice, and the rocks at the bottom are sharp. You ought to know because you put them there.

Back down, Xi.

Or be put down.

Works Cited

BOOKS

Chase, Michael; Engstrom, Jeffrey; Tai Ming Cheung; Gunness; Kristen; Harold, Scott Warren; Puska, Susan & Berkowitz, Samuel K. "China’s Incomplete Military Transformation: Assessing the Weaknesses of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)." Santa Monica. RAND Corporation. 2015.
ISBN: 978-0-8330-8830-7

Cowley, Robert. What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. New York. G.P. Putnam Sons. 2001
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Mao Zedong. Selected Quotations. Beijing: Foreign Language University Press. 1972.
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Sun Hongnian, Zhang Yongpan & Li Sheng. The 14th Dalai Lama. Beijing. China Intercontinental Press. 2013.
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Wu Jianmin. "Major-Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics and the Belt and Road Initiative." Beijing. China International Publishing Group. 2016.
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