Washington, July 19 (CNA) Stating that subduing Taiwan is a major short-term goal of Beijing's military modernization, a US expert recently predicted that the number of missiles trained on the island may increase to 1,000 or more in ten years.
"The current focus of this modernization is to acquire the space, information, missile, air, naval and ground forces necessary to subdue Taiwan in the near term," said Richard D. Fisher Jr., senior fellow with the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank.
Mainland China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) will then "set the basis for achieving a greater level of power projection or pre-eminence in the greater Asia-Pacific region," he told the House Armed Services Committee.
In a classified report to Congress last year, the Pentagon reportedly estimated that the number of PLA ballistic missiles deployed near Taiwan would reach 650 by 2005.
However, Fisher said he believes that the PLA could have a thousand short-range ballistic missiles and land-attack cruise missiles aimed at Taiwan at least by the end of the decade.
To continue to deter conflict in the Taiwan Strait, Fisher said it is "critical for the United States to sell Taiwan the submarines, missile defense, naval defense and air defense equipment that it has requested."
Another scholar, June Teufel Dreyer, expressed concern that the Clinton administration has been "overly complacent and optimistic" about the implications of mainland China's growing military might for the United States.
She said the administration's China policy is based on the assumption that Washington should not treat Beijing as an enemy, lest it becomes one.
"In fact, China does treat the United States not only as an enemy, but as the enemy," said the professor of political science at the University of Miami.
She cited as evidence the allusion in numerous PLA writings to an unnamed enemy which is technologically superior. "And it really has to be us," Teufel Dreyer said, "no question about it."
Bates Gill, a China expert with the Brookings Institution, cautioned against the politicization of views regarding mainland China's military.
"Our debate on Chinese military power has become overly polarized and simplistic," said Gill, who directs the Brookings Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies.
He said that this is beneficial to Beijing because exaggerations of the mainland's military modernization grant authorities in Beijing "precisely the kind of psychological deterrent they could never hope to achieve on the basis of their actual capabilities."
On the other hand, Gill said, to dismiss Chinese capabilities is also only playing into Chinese hands.
He called for more resources to be allocated to the study of the PLA and for more focus to be put on the software dimension of their modernization program rather than on hardware acquisitions. (By Jay Chen)
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