Japan as Number 3

Do you remember the fright headlines and books of the 1990s predicting that Japan was going to supplant America as the world's most powerful economy? The iconic title was Japan as Number One. (It's not selling very well these days.)

Well, it's now official: China has supplanted Japan as the world's second economy, which means that Japan became Number 3 before it ever made Number 1. It should make us cautious about projecting the present into the future. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

An air-superiority fighter for China?

These images appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, showing what looks very much like a worthy rival to the F-22 air-superiority fighter, recently chopped back in favor of the smaller, cheaper F-35.

The United States hasn't had to fight a serious enemy air force since the Vietnam War, and the last time an American fighter pilot anywhere shot down an enemy aircraft was during the Yugoslav fracas of 1999. Worthy of note: that "kill," by Lt Col Michael Geczy, was made by an F-15, an air-superiority fighter like the F-22. When you need such a plane, nothing else will do. Smaller, cheaper warplanes are all very well, but they can't stand up to a muscular airplane killer, and that seems to be what China is attempting to build. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Would you like fries with that?

This enchanting photo appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. What we see here is one of 105 drive-through McDonald's fast-food restaurants now open for business in China, with 100 more planned for each of the next three years.

It's all part of China's discovery of the joys of the automotive culture. The country has built 30,000 miles of expressways in the past ten years. Chinese households and businesses bought 13.6 million vehicles in 2009, substantially more than the 10.4 sold in the U.S. (which, to be sure, was the smallest deluge of autos and light trucks in 27 years). China is now the world's largest automotive market, though it will take a while before the number of cars on China's roads approaches those in the United States.

All of which is grist for the doomsayers who predict that China is about to replace the U.S. as the world's dominant economy. Yet the odd thing about this supposed transition is that, when America took off in the 1950s, it was creating something never seen in the world before. China by contrast is more or less replicating what happened here half a century ago. Does that mean that nothing new will ever happen again, and that the whole world is about to be Americanized? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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Grab 'em by the nose and kick 'em in the ass

Whenever I run out of books to read, I turn back to Mr. Sawyer's interesting but very difficult The Tao of Deception. Last night I broke up laughing when I spotted this advice, quoted from the One Hundred Unorthodox Strategies:

"When engaging an enemy, frighten them in the front and overwhelm them in the rear...."

Which put me in mind of General George Patton's speech to the troops in May 1944, just before the D-Day landing in France. His words, which are usually misquoted in the more pungent form above, went like this:

"We're going to hold onto [the enemy] by the nose, and we're going to kick him in the ass."

Do you suppose Patton was reading the Chinese military classics at the time? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

America as No. 2

Here's a great essay in Asia Sentinel about the seemingly inexorable rise of China as a superpower, equal to or the superior of the United States:

Two important questions for the second decade of the 21st Century are whether China can be satisfied even by becoming a coequal of the United States; and whether the latter would be amenable to accepting China as its coequal? A very important, but a tacit, aspect related to the latter question is that the United States should also be ready for the scenario of China becoming number one among the hierarchy of nations within a decade or so.

The economic superpower is almost certain to become a military superpower as well, though perhaps not following the models we are familiar with: Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the United States in the 1990s. China will dice and slice, building its space- and electronic-warfare capabilities as a counterweight to the U.S. military; turning the small and eventually the large nations of Asia into pliable states on the model of Finland, whose testicles were owned by the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War; and gradually expanding the sphere of its dominance:.

What is interesting to note is that, as China continues its awesome economic rise, it seems to have initiated the process of expanding the list of its core interests. In the past, only Taiwan and Tibet were included in that list. Lately, however, it has also added the South China Sea as a core issue. Considering the fact that the PRC has shown no inclination to negotiate on the "old" core issues, it is expected to do the same regarding the South China Sea. There is a major difference between its old and its new core issues.

On its old core interests (Taiwan and Tibet) no other country is claiming sovereignty over them (even though one can argue that Taiwan claims to be a sovereign nation and its sovereignty is recognized by numerous countries, but their numbers are steadily dwindling). However, in the case of the South China Sea, the interests of other states of East Asia come into conflict with that of China.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Another bloody century

This is a remarkably fine book, in which the Anglo-American war scholar Colin Gray takes an educated guess at what future warfare will be like. 'It is a rule in strategy,' he writes in one of his piquant declarations, 'one derived empirically from the evidence of two and a half millenia, that anything of great strategic importance to one belligerent, for that reason has to be worth attacking by others.' He happens to be speaking of space, and in particular the American communications satellites in earth orbit, but as China's recent hacking of American business sites has demonstrated, the warning is equally true of cyberspace. We depend on the internet more than most: ergo, the internet is a particularly inviting target for China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda, und so weiter. Eminently worth a read. Click here to find it on Amazon. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

China also is interested in you

Yesterday I quoted the aphorism about war being interested in you, even if you weren't interested in war. This morning the NYT has a piece about cyberwarfare, which China has busily been waging against Google, other American corporations, and probably the US Defense Department and your personal email account. Concludes Thom Shanker of a simulated attack: 'The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability.'

Sounds a lot like the Taliban, doesn't it? Not to mention the Viet Cong, the Chindits, the Irish Republican Army, the Arab Legion, the Boers, Quantrill's Raiders, Commandante Theresa of the Peninsular Wars, the Minutemen, Roger's Rangers.... Irregulars have been baffling regulars ever since warfare was defined as the exclusive business of the nation-state, at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Cyberwarfare is just another front in this endless contest of the weak against the strong.

Colin Gray wrote a brilliant and overlooked book on the subject of how war was going to play out in the 21st century: Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (Phoenix Press). I'm reading it now. I can't believe it wasn't required reading in War in the Modern World. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On not being evil

It's never wise to underestimate the cynicism of politicians and businessmen, but two cheers at least to Google, which has threatened to pull out of China unless the People's Republic (what a name!) backs down on its attempts to control internet search. It's pretty clear where the people stand in this dispute, as indicated by the flowers being placed on the Google logo.

The PRC seems to operate on a two-tier system, whereby the masses are heavily restricted and an elite are allowed to go around the restrictions, for example by using proxies and virtual networks. Silencing Google may have the odd result of making it even more influential among the minority with the skill and determination to 'scale the wall'--fanqiang--in reference to censorship's popular name as the Great Firewall of China. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford