US Defense Secretary Gates just left Beijing after a meeting with President Hu Jintao to strengthen military ties between the two countries. During his visit, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) surprisingly tested its new J-20 stealth fighter jet, designed to compete with America’s F-22 Raptor (but according to most analyses, it doesn’t come close). Hu insisted that it was nothing more than a coincidence that the test flight happened during Gates visit (even though it was originally scheduled for later this week).
Predictably, headlines on the English-language versions of Chinese propaganda organs shouted that the meeting represented a huge positive development in relations. However, I noticed that the Chinese-language websites of People’s Daily and Xinhua only had one tiny article buried at the bottom the site. Could this be because fenqing (愤青，young Chinese nationalists) would be upset to see negotiations with the US military? I couldn’t figure it out.
By far the most interesting development in this story is the strong suspicion American officials have that the civilian leadership in Beijing had no idea that the military was going to test the jet during Gates’ visit. If that’s true, this mean that Beijing is in fact far less stable than the American media would have us believe. This could have terrible consequences for US-China relations, since Washington must take the much more conservative military faction in Beijing into consideration.
It also raises some interesting questions about recent events: could recent skirmishes in the South andEast China Seas have taken place without civilian approval? Could the overeager military crackdown in Xinjiang in 2009 have been on the PLA’s insistence? And most importantly—could Beijing’s new friendly ties with its neighbors, especially in Central and Southeast Asia, be at risk should the PLA gain more political ground?
I’m generally not one to be overly pessimistic about China’s growth, but this week’s events don’t bode well for US-Chinese relations.
