Two months into Doklam standoff, assessing China’s strength. By Praveen Swami
Loose-cannon special
forces officer Leng Feng emerges from his seaside retreat, to the applause of a
grateful nation, when a cartel of arms dealers and mercenaries begin to lay
waste an impoverished African country. Fighting to save aid workers and
innocent civilians, he fights his way past the enemy with underwater kung-fu,
evades an armed drone and destroys battle tanks. The plot of China’s
highest-grossing blockbuster, Wolf Warrior II, seems familiar, because it is:
this is Rambo with Chinese characteristics.
Few in the audience
today would recall Li Cunbao’s 1982 novel, Gaoshan xia de huahuan (‘Wreaths of
flowers at the foot of the mountains’), which tells the story of the soldiers
who fought China’s last real war. The brave company commander at the centre of
the story leaves his wife and baby a frock, used uniforms, and a debt of $ 380
— 10 times his pay. Even fewer would have
seen Tamen zheng nianqing (‘In their prime’), banned in 1986, a gritty anti-war
film on soldiers holed up in a limestone cave, and their desperate battle to
survive. The 12,192 soldiers
killed in the China-Vietnam war, mainly the sons of poor peasant families, have
no place in official Chinese history. The war revealed stark problems in
China’s military, though, many of which continue to haunt the People’s
Liberation Army.
For weeks now, China
has been threatening India with terrible retribution for what it claims is
trespass into its lair on the Doklam plateau. There are more than a few in
India genuinely worried by the aggression — part of a pattern of intimidation
that has forced Japan to scramble its fighters more often than at the height of
the Cold War, and sent Vietnam into the arms of arch-enemy United States. Like
so much to do with military power, China’s great strength is part steel and
part illusion. The dragon may indeed breathe fire - but it has enough teeth and
claws missing to not want to fight.
When Beijing began to
wake to modern warfare in the wake of the 1984-85 conflict, the PLA was a
lumbering peasant army: its main tank was the 1950s-design T-55, the bloated
3.5 million-strong military lacked modern vehicles and arms, and the Air Force and
Navy were barely capable of coastal defence.
The growth of the
military budget - which, it bears mention, has consistently hovered around 2%
of Gross Domestic Product, the global norm - has helped drag the PLA into the
20th century, but only just... read more:
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