Apparently China has released a military white paper which defines their military goals over the next fifty years. They did so at the Bush Administration's insistence so China's geo-political strategies and policies could be more accurately judged.

A few things from the report: first, China spends $34 billion on defence. Australia spends $17 billion while the US tops the world with approximately $650 billion. IIRC Russia is the world's second biggest spender on defence with somewhere around $80 billion.

This is why I get annoyed when people talk of Australia as a middle power. Australia has the fifteenth largest economy on the planet, in terms of hard power it spends to about a quarter of current Chinese output and China gets mentioned in geo-political great power terms. Additionally Australia's military is a modern networked one, whereas China's is not - not yet anyway.

From the article:

The paper said China's military improvements are part of the country's overall modernization and economic expansion. The effort will continue apace, it added, seeking to "lay a solid foundation" by 2010, make "major progress" by 2020 and "reach the strategic goal of building informationized armed forces and being capable of winning informationized wars by the mid-21st century."

China has been shedding the manpower components of its armed forces and replacing them with the tail components such as highly specialised technicians. It has also been updating its antiquated forty year old air and naval assets with modern systems.

China's white paper apparently is concerned about US-Japanese containment of China as Japan has been slowly changing its military posture over the last two decades with changing North Asian prosperity and political stability and instability. China has long had its eye on Taiwan anyway, and fears that Taiwan will be drawn into the US-Japanese containment arc.

For the best write up on the China-Taiwan issue I have seen, read adam's article: The Amputated Chicken which he wrote after living in China. From the article:

The Communist Party has tied Taiwan very closely to the national myth; there's little room for redrafting. Today's Chinese state is coherent and booming - it's not the fragmented disorder of the Republic. Hanging on so tightly to Taiwan makes it hard to accommodate any alternative approach without implicitly accepting self-determination, or its sibling, democracy. But once the principle is established, the entire narrative begins to unravel.

It is interesting to see China adopt the approach of drafting White Papers to lay out a consistent path that the state can stick to. Democracies have used public white papers for the same purpose. Unfortunately Australia's last defence white paper was in 2000, prior to September 11th, Bali, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Australia defence procurement has become more ad-hoc recently as purchases have required more purchases, for instance the Abrams begat the C17 and not in a clearly planned method either, though the RAAF had wanted a heavy airlift platform for a while. Another issue facing Australia is that many of its systems, especially in the air force, are facing block obsolescence, where the whole lot is obsolete at the same time.

Australia is bringing something like seventeen new systems and platforms online in the current decade, which is a huge transformation for a military and will set up, as well as limit, how the Australian military projects itself and its capabilities for probably the next twenty five years.

Consequently procurement should be highly focused and match the strategic and projection needs of the ADF very closely as poor procurement will have massive ramifications in the future, in both cost and lost capability, if it is done badly.

A new Australian Defence White paper would provide the under-pinning for this procurement but the Australian government does not want to revisit Australian defence and has not produced a white paper in six years. The United States produces one every four years, and now it seems, even Communist countries are releasing them publicly.

Australia needs an updated Defence White Paper. I argued we needed one in 2005 , we needed one in 2006 and we will need one in 2007. The Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade agrees .

More Reading on China

• China
• White Papers
• ADF
• Kevin Rudd
• The Amputated Chicken
• Dreadful, Positively Painful
• Trading Uranium for Chinese Technology
• Grand Censorship Goals in China
• To Contain Or Not To Contain
• A Democratic Chinese Constitution, Or Surfing To The Moon
• Foreign Policy in the Korean Peninsula
• Chinese Military White Paper
• The Chinese Development-State