The Economist, 9 June 2012

FOR China’s armed forces, these are troubling times. On June 2nd in Singapore, America’s defence secretary, Leon Panetta, said that 60% of his country’s combat ships would be deployed in Asia by 2020, up from about half now. China’s generals see their country as the target, and worry that other Asian countries are ganging up with America. But politics at home appears an even greater concern.

America’s announcement last November of a “rebalancing” of its foreign policy towards Asia riled hawks in China. The United States, they fumed in newspaper articles, was trying to “contain” China and put a brake on its rising power. Mr Panetta dismissed such accusations. “Our effort to renew and intensify our involvement in Asia is fully compatible—fully compatible—with the development and growth of China,” he said at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual meeting in Singapore of regional defence ministers and security experts. Eyeing recent American moves such as the deployment in April of marines in northern Australia and an agreement with Singapore, also announced on June 2nd, to station littoral combat ships in the city-state, Chinese officials are sceptical.

Mr Panetta’s decision to fly from Singapore to Cam Ranh Bay, a port in Vietnam, did nothing to allay their suspicions. The defence secretary was the most senior American official to visit the port since the Vietnam war, when it was the site of a large American base. The Pentagon wants to use it as a port of call for its navy ships passing through the South China Sea.

The area is fraught with tension between rival claimants to its resource-rich seabed. China is one of them, and resents what it regards as American interference. On June 4th a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman described America’s attempts to boost its military partnerships in Asia as “untimely”. Undeterred, Mr Panetta flew on to Delhi for talks in another Asian country wary of China.

Oddly, however, China’s leaders passed up an opportunity to match the Americans with some military schmoozing of their own. Unlike last year, when China sent its defence minister, Liang Guanglie, to the Shangri-La Dialogue, this year the highest-ranking Chinese delegate was a senior military academic, Lieutenant-General Ren Haiquan. This was a marked scaling back of China’s engagement with the forum, which has become an important venue for informal contact between Asia-Pacific military chiefs (as well as some from Europe) since it was launched in 2002.

John Chipman, the director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based think-tank which organises the event, told participants that Chinese officials informed him in March that “travel schedules and domestic priorities” would make it difficult for China to send its minister this year. Domestic factors are the more plausible explanation. In the month leading up to the Shangri-La Dialogue, General Liang had visited Washington, DC (the first Chinese defence minister to do so in nine years) and attended a meeting of South-East Asian defence ministers in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. But those events were more easily choreographed than the Singapore forum, where last year he was peppered with questions about China’s armed forces.

With the approach this autumn of sweeping leadership changes in China’s civilian and military leadership, it is not surprising that General Liang has turned even more shy than usual (it took the IISS ten years to secure attendance by a Chinese defence minister, even though the office ranks relatively low in China’s military hierarchy compared with other countries). The leadership transition has been unusually troubled since the flight of a senior regional official to an American consulate in February. This led to the detention of the wife of a powerful regional chief, Bo Xilai, on suspicion of murder, and the suspension of Mr Bo himself from the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo.

Whose finger on the trigger?

Party leaders appear to be worried that the Bo scandal and uncertainty surrounding the leadership handover might create political confusion within the armed forces. There has been persistent speculation that Mr Bo enjoyed close ties with military leaders (his late father, Bo Yibo, was a comrade-in-arms of Mao Zedong).

In recent weeks numerous articles have appeared in the official media attacking the notion of placing the armed forces under the control of the state, rather than the party. Some liberal intellectuals believe such a shift of allegiance would help prevent the army from being used by the party to serve its own ends, as it was in the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 (see article). The vehemence of these articles hints at concerns among party leaders that the idea might enjoy some support within the armed forces.

Compounding the leadership’s unease is news reported by foreign media of the discovery of a spy working for America at the heart of the Ministry of State Security, China’s espionage and counter-intelligence service. The alleged mole reportedly worked for a deputy minister. In a possibly related development, tighter restrictions on contact with foreigners have been imposed on academics at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think-tank under the ministry known to insiders as “department eight”. Its researchers are frequent participants at international conferences.

China’s military leadership is unlikely to be too concerned about skipping an international gathering at such a sensitive time. In the words of a former senior official at the Pentagon, who struggled with limited success to prise the Chinese army out of its shell: when they engage with the outside world, they just don’t understand how to do “warm and fuzzy”.

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