IF THEY WERE WHITE EVERYONE WOULD GET THE JOKE:

Who's Afraid of the Chinese? (Amitai Etzioni, June 6, 2011, National Interest)

Many of China’s latest military acquisitions are either upgraded knock-offs of old Soviet equipment or purchased from the former USSR—hardly state-of-the-art technologies. Others are unlikely to achieve full operational capability for years to come, including the headline-grabbing Chinese stealth fighter, the J-20. And perhaps the greatest perceived Chinese military threat, anti-aircraft—a.k.a. “carrier-killer”—ballistic missiles, have yet to be publicly tested over water against a maneuvering target.

China’s yet-to-be-deployed first aircraft carrier was purchased from Ukraine in the ‘90s. (The U.S. has eleven.) China’s newest attack jet, the J-15, is an updated version of a Soviet one China dissected to learn its secrets. It carries less fuel than a U.S. model and, as a take-off method, requires flying off a ski-jump-style runway. When Russia refused to sell China nuclear submarines, China attempted to build its own and they turned out to be noisier than those built by the Soviets thirty years ago.

Whatever advancements China has made in its military, it is simply no match for the U.S. and will not be for decades. According to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, the U.S. spent six times more than China on its military in 2010. While the Chinese have built up their nuclear stockpile to a couple hundred, the U.S. will have 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, even after the reductions required by the new START treaty. As Kenneth Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution noted: “There is no serious military man in China or in the United States who thinks that China has any prayer of dominating the U.S. militarily in the coming three or four decades."

And all this assumes there will be a reason for the U.S. and China to come to blows. However, it’s far from clear that China has aggressive intentions, and even less so beyond its own region. Actually, China has plenty more to worry about at home than abroad. China’s military spending competes with its efforts to address its widening income inequality, environmental degradation, aging population, ethnic tensions, high levels of corruption—all threatening to burst Beijing’s bubble. China may be the world’s second-largest economy in overall terms, but in per capita terms, it’s on par with Algeria and El Salvador.

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