Will China Challenge US Military Leadership?
What the study by the Rand Corporation think tank says on the US-China challenge. The article by Giuseppe Gagliano
A study released in June by the Rand Corporation, a US think tank, suggested that China's ambitious military modernization could soon challenge the US global leadership and that the CCP's military expansion in recent years has become a threat to US military operations in Asia and beyond.
This is a conclusion that seems absolutely obvious and evident and in line with the choices of all the administrations of recent years and that of Trump and Biden. But the other observations in this report are not particularly original either.
China has made most of its technological advancement through the theft of intellectual property and the acquisition and merger of foreign companies with advanced technology.
China has a long history of stealing US technology secrets. It is not "competition" between powers as President Joe Biden suggests, but a deliberate and gross violation of US intellectual property rights by the CCP.
The theft of Chinese intellectual property was evident and got worse during the Obama era. Beijing has even incorporated such thefts, including the Thousand Talents program, into its strategies for economic rise and world domination.
Since 2015, only five Chinese arms companies have been listed in SIPRI's annual top 100 rankings.
However, SIPRI said other Chinese companies may have arms sales high enough to rank in the top 100, but they were not included due to insufficient open source data, suggesting that actual Chinese arms sales far exceed the published data.
The five Chinese companies that entered the SIPRI list are China North Industries Group (Norinco), Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) and China South Industries Group (CSGC). Most of these companies have seen an increase in arms sales since 2018, with Norinco reaching $ 17.93 billion in 2020, climbing to seventh place worldwide.
However, these Chinese companies contribute very little to the overall economy of China. Arms sales are mainly domestic and exports are negligible.
For example, even though Norinco holds an important position among the CCP's military enterprises, it does not produce cutting-edge weapons. Instead, Norinco mainly produces standard land-based military equipment.
Similarly, AVIC's annual sales growth was 0.8 percent and 1.6 percent in 2019 and 2020, respectively, indicating slow growth in its production of high-end aeronautical military equipment. The companies' advanced production of military aircraft is unlikely to have reached the production scale desired by the Chinese regime.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/cina-modernizzazione-militare-rand-corporation/ on Sat, 18 Dec 2021 06:44:23 +0000.