Posts Tagged china

Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy

Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By George Friedman
Founder and Chairman

North Korea’s state-run media reported Sunday that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ordered the country’s top security officials to take “substantial and high-profile important state measures,” which has been widely interpreted to mean that North Korea is planning its third nuclear test. Kim said the orders were retaliation for the U.S.-led push to tighten U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang following North Korea’s missile test in October. A few days before Kim’s statement emerged, the North Koreans said future tests would target the United States, which North Korea regards as its key adversary along with Washington’s tool, South Korea.

North Korea has been using the threat of tests and the tests themselves as weapons against its neighbors and the United States for years. On the surface, threatening to test weapons does not appear particularly sensible. If the test fails, you look weak. If it succeeds, you look dangerous without actually having a deliverable weapon. And the closer you come to having a weapon, the more likely someone is to attack you so you don’t succeed in actually getting one. Developing a weapon in absolute secret would seem to make more sense. When the weapon is ready, you display it, and you have something solid to threaten enemies with. Read the rest of this entry »

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China Threatens War With Japan

From Business Insider:

A Friday press release out of China confirms the incident began when Beijing was flying a Shaanxi Y-8 on a “routine Thursday patrol” over the “oil and gas fields in the East China Sea.”

…on Thursday Japan spotted aircraft in its Air Defense Identification Zone (above the islands) that it believed to be Chinese J-7 interceptors, along with some J-10 fighters whose combat abilities rival that of Western jets. Japan responded with two F-15s scrambled from Naha, Okinawa — just a couple hundred miles away. There are minor variations from either side about who sent what first, but all agree the aircraft met above the islands.

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Former Tiananmen Square Protester Supports Gun Rights

Who would know best about tyranny than someone who has lived under Chinese communism.

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Did China Ripoff C-17 Design?

From Danger Room:

The images, acquired by the GeoEye 1 and IKONOS spacecraft — both belonging to commercial satellite operator GeoEye headquartered in Washington, D.C. — corroborate the general layout of the Xian Aircraft Corporation Y-20, the existence of which has been confirmed by Beijing. They also underscore the emerging consensus among Western experts that the Y-20, while outwardly impressive, could lack the performance of even much older American, Russian and European transports.

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Chinese Carrier Launches and Recovers First Aircraft

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U.S. Foreign Policy: Room to Regroup

U.S. Foreign Policy: Room to Regroup is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By George Friedman

President Barack Obama has won re-election. However, in addition to all of the constraints on him that I discussed last week, he won the election with almost half the people voting against him. His win in the Electoral College was substantial — and that’s the win that really matters — but the popular vote determines how he governs, and he will govern with one more constraint added to the others. The question is whether this weakens him or provides an opportunity. That is not determined by his policies but by the strategic situation, which, in my view, gives the United States some much-needed breathing room.

The Structure of the International System

At the moment, the international system is built on three pillars: the United States, Europe and China. Europe, if it were united, would be very roughly the same size as the United States in terms of economy, population and potential military power. China is about a third the size of the other two economically, but it has been the growth engine of the world, making it more significant than size would indicate.  Read the rest of this entry »

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The Rise of China

From Wikistrat:

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Former U.S. Consulate Guard Pleads Guilty to Attempting to Communicate National Defense Information to China

Former U.S. Consulate Guard Pleads Guilty to Attempting to Communicate National Defense Information to China

Aug. 30, 2012

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Consequences of the Fall of the Syrian Regime

From STRATFOR:

By George Friedman

We have entered the endgame in Syria. That doesn’t mean that we have reached the end by any means, but it does mean that the precondition has been met for the fall of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. We have argued that so long as the military and security apparatus remain intact and effective, the regime could endure. Although they continue to function, neither appears intact any longer; their control of key areas such as Damascus and Aleppo is in doubt, and the reliability of their personnel, given defections, is no longer certain. We had thought that there was a reasonable chance of the al Assad regime surviving completely. That is no longer the case. At a certain point — in our view, after the defection of a Syrian pilot June 21 and then the defection of the Tlass clan — key members of the regime began to recalculate the probability of survival and their interests. The regime has not unraveled, but it is unraveling.

The speculation over al Assad’s whereabouts and heavy fighting in Damascus is simply part of the regime’s problems. Rumors, whether true or not, create uncertainty that the regime cannot afford right now. The outcome is unclear. On the one hand, a new regime might emerge that could exercise control. On the other hand, Syria could collapse into a Lebanon situation in which it disintegrates into regions held by various factions, with no effective central government. Read the rest of this entry »

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PLA Attends West Point Competition

A team made up of soldiers from China’s People’s Liberation Army attended the annual Sandhurst Military Skills Competition.

This information comes to us from the China Defense Blog.

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The State of the World: Assessing China’s Strategy

This report is republished from STRATFOR:

By George Friedman

Simply put, China has three core strategic interests.

Paramount among them is the maintenance of domestic security. Historically, when China involves itself in global trade, as it did in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the coastal region prospers, while the interior of China — which begins about 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the coast and runs about 1,600 kilometers to the west — languishes. Roughly 80 percent of all Chinese citizens currently have household incomes lower than the average household income in Bolivia. Most of China’s poor are located west of the richer coastal region. This disparity of wealth time and again has exposed tensions between the interests of the coast and those of the interior. After a failed rising in Shanghai in 1927, Mao Zedong exploited these tensions by undertaking the Long March into the interior, raising a peasant army and ultimately conquering the coastal region. He shut China off from the international trading system, leaving China more united and equal, but extremely poor.

The current government has sought a more wealth-friendly means of achieving stability: buying popular loyalty with mass employment. Plans for industrial expansion are implemented with little thought to markets or margins; instead, maximum employment is the driving goal. Private savings are harnessed to finance the industrial effort, leaving little domestic capital to purchase the output. China must export accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

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What is China Building in the Desert?

From: Danger Room

The internet lost its collective mind earlier this week, when a Reddit user stumbled across “what appears to be a monumental military/science experiment going on in a Chinese desert, visible on Google Earth.” But the strange and massive box of jagged lines wasn’t the only odd structure carved into the ground — and this week’s swarm of Google-spotters weren’t the first ones to take an interest in the region.

As former CIA analyst Allen Thomson notes, turning on the DigitalGlobe coverage layer in Google Earth shows all the various times the imaging satellite has been asked to inspect that part of the desert. (Here’s a screenshot, above.) “Starting in 2004, somebody has ordered many, many satellite pictures of it,” Thomson tells Danger Room. “Can’t have been cheap.”
more

 

You can start your exploration here: 40.481752,93.490219

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Pentagon’s New China Plan

From The Washington Times:

The plan calls for preparing the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to defeat China’s “anti-access, area denial weapons,” including anti-satellite weapons, cyberweapons, submarines, stealth aircraft and long-range missiles that can hit aircraft carriers at sea.

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Chinese Fighters Cross “Middle Line” With Taiwan

From Financial Times:

Two Chinese fighter jets crossed an unofficial dividing line in the Taiwan Strait late last month in pursuit of a US spy aircraft, according to defence sources in Taipei and Beijing.

Confirmation of the close encounter comes as the US and China are trying to cool tensions in the South China Sea and safeguard a recent improvement in bilateral military relations.

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“Defective” Chips could have caused U.S. military shut down by secret ‘back door’

“Sources have confirmed that the U.S. Department of Defense over recent months purchased 59,000 microchips to use in Navy equipment that control everything from missiles to transponders.

But all of the chips turned out to be cheap knock-offs from China, and they ultimately were not installed, according to sources.

Besides being subject to failure, the chips also were designed with a “back door” which would have allowed the chip, and the device it controlled, to be shut down remotely at any time, sources report.

Had the flaw not been detected, the chips could have shut down U.S. warships, aircraft, advanced weapons systems and encoded transponders that distinguish friendly aircraft from hostile attackers.”

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=321477#ixzz1S0AZSZT8

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