The hidden dragon

The Pentagon has released a study of Chinese military capabilities. In a preview, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Singapore audience last month that China8217;s arms build-up was an 8216;8216;area of concern.8217;8217; It should be. But we shouldn8217;t get overly fixated on such traditional indices of military power as ships and bombs 8212; not even atomic bombs. Chinese strategists, in the best tradition of Sun Tzu, are working on craftier schemes to topple the American hegemon.

In 1998, an official People8217;s Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare, written by two senior Army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the US national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.

Unrestricted Warfare recognises that it is practically impossible to challenge the US on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than 200 billion to develop. 8216;8216;The way to extricate oneself from this predicament,8217;8217; the authors write, 8216;8216;is to develop a different approach.8217;8217;

Their different approaches include financial warfare subverting banking systems and stock markets, drug warfare attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs, psychological and media warfare manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will, international-law warfare blocking enemy actions using multinational organisations, resource warfare seizing control of vital natural resources, even ecological warfare creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters.

Qiao and Wang write approvingly of al Qaeda, Colombian druglords and computer hackers who operate outside the 8216;8216;bandwidths understood by the American military.8217;8217; They envision a scenario in which a 8216;8216;network attack against the enemy8217;8217; 8212; clearly a red-white-and-blue enemy 8212; would be carried out 8216;8216;so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralysed,8217;8217; leading to 8216;8216;social panic, street riots and a political crisis.8217;8217; Only then would conventional military force be deployed 8216;8216;until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty.8217;8217;

This isn8217;t just loose talk. There are signs of this strategy being implemented. The anti-Japanese riots that swept China in April? That would be psychological warfare against a major Asian rival. The stage-managed protests in 1999, after the US accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, fall into the same category. The bid by China8217;s State-owned CNOOC Ltd. to acquire Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China8217;s spy apparatus to infiltrate US high-tech firms and defence contractors? Technological warfare. China siding against the US in the UN Security Council over the invasion of Iraq? International-law warfare. Zhu8217;s threat to nuke the US? Media warfare. And so on.

Once you know what to look for, the pieces fall into place with disturbing ease. Of course, most of these events have alternative, more benign explanations: Maybe Zhu is an eccentric old coot who8217;s seen Dr Strangelove a few too many times. The deliberate ambiguity makes it hard to craft a response to 8216;8216;unrestricted warfare8217;8217;.

If Beijing sticks to building nuclear weapons, we know how to deal with that 8212; use the deterrence doctrine that worked against the Soviets. But how do we respond to what may or may not be indirect aggression by a major trading partner? Battling terrorist groups such as al Qaeda seems like a cinch by comparison. This is not a challenge the Pentagon is set up to address, but it8217;s an urgent issue for the years ahead.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
LAT-WP