Last Friday, the Pentagon released its “Annual Report to Congress, Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2007.” The English-language media have widely reported how a Sunday editorial in People’s Daily by staff writer Xi Laiwang blasted the Pentagon report as “exaggerating, misleading, and one-sidedly playing up the ‘China threat.'” The Sunday editorial is actually a rehash of a dispatch published in the Chinese-language edition of People’s Daily on Saturday with the byline “Xi Laiwang, correspondent to the United Nations.” The original article ran under the title “Is there no exaggeration in the ‘Report on Chinese Military Power’?” In it, Xi notes that at a DOD press conference on May 24th (the day before the release of the annual report) Secretary Gates “made a point of reporting happily” that the report on Chinese military power does not contain any “arm-waving” or “exaggeration of the threat.” Xi continues:
Xi further claims that the Pentagon report characterizes China as a “hostile country with a Cold War style.” Also worth noting is that on the same day that the Pentagon released its report, Xinhua re-published a commentary by Chinese Air Force colonel Dai Xu that had originally appeared in zhongguo guofang bao, a newspaper run by the PLA. Titled “Chinese colonel: the only way to avoid a new military generation gap is for the PLA to spur into action to catch up,” Dai describes military modernization as a “life-and-death race that concerns national development and national destiny.” Dai argues that China cannot afford to lag behind in the “global military transformation,” which, he says, “has entered its final stage of qualitative changes.” He defines the “global military transformation” as “a World War carried out during a time of peace without the smoke of gunpowder.” Dai quotes Li Hongzhang, the Qing dynasty official who represented China in several humiliating diplomatic negotiations, as having observed that “foreigners take heed of power, not reason.” Dai asks, “What does the word ‘power’ refer to? It refers to military power. To be powerful means to have reason on your side; to possess real strength means to have dignity.” That these nationalistic sentiments are shared by many of China’s netizens is suggested by the hundreds of angry postings on Chinese Internet bulletin boards, like this one found at the popular Web portal sina.com:
Bolster our defense capability.
May the day soon dawn when we are truly feared by our enemies.
