Washington, April 20 (CNA) Although Communist China and Taiwan could inflict a large amount of damage on each other in a military conflict, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where a mainland invasion of the island could facilitate Beijing's goal of eventual reunification, said James H. Nolt, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute here.
Nolt wrote in a recent analysis on US-PRC-Taiwan military relations that although China has disputes with most of its neighbors, it has not resorted to force to resolve them since its border war with Vietnam in 1979, except for a brief clash with Vietnam over the Parcel Islands in 1988. The most persistent remaining problem is Beijing's threat to use force against Taiwan if it declares independence.
But "Beijing's threats against Taiwan are hollow, because China lacks the military capability to inflict damage on Taiwan without suffering immense damage to its own economy and coastal regions," said Nolt. For example, Taiwan's air force, though much smaller than mainland China's, has been completely re-equiped with modern aircraft, outnumbering Beijing's few modern Russian-built fighters by more than six to one.
Besides, mainland China is now more dependent on foreign trade than it was during the Taiwan Straits crises of the 1950s and its economy would consequently suffer much more in the event of an armed conflict. Taiwan is also more powerful relative to mainland China than it was in the 1950s. "The Taiwanese could defend themselves adequately even without US intervention," added the senior fellow.
Despite frequent alarms about the supposed China threat, it is not an emerging superpower. Although it has experienced rapid economic growth, China has been in relative decline militarily since the 1970s, said Nolt.
Its high economic growth rate is now slowing, and its pattern of growth has actually undermined its ability to become an autonomous military power able to manufacture its own weapons systems and sustain a war effort without support from abroad. "China does not, and will not in the foreseeable future, pose the kind of military threat to the US that the Soviet Bloc did," he pointed out.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger also said in a speech on Tuesday in Pasadena that China "is not in any position for the next 30 years to be a mortal threat to the United States.....So for the next 20 years we need to think, 'Do we want to put them down?'"
Many policymakers have voiced concern that an influx of US dual-use technology into mainland China could facilitate its military modernization. However, Nolt noted, in industries such as aerospace, the trend has been for foreign involvement to relegate mainland Chinese producers to merely subcontracting low-tech components rather than manufacturing entire systems.
Beijing's incapacity to design and manufacture the most modern weapons has forced it to rely, like most developing countries, on arms imports. Communist China's limited acquisition of modern foreign weapons, mostly from Russian, is a tiny fraction of what would be needed to replace its aging arsenal. (By Nelson Chung)
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