A Great Leap Forward in Weapons is taking place in China as we speak with all the trappings of its original disastrous 1950s granddaddy. While every other China pundit seems happy to jump on the Chinese military bandwagon and gush how the PLA is tipping the balance in Asia with its ever increasing array of kit, there seems to be only limited critical thinking about how this may be playing out in a more familiar context according to well known CCP tendencies.
Back in 2010, I first wrote about this new Great Leap Forward in Weapons phenomenon and then published it on this Blog in Feb 2011. You can read the original here. Today, the signs are so glaringly obvious to be undeniable, and it is certain that a testing military confrontation for the PLA will see the wheels of this oversized juggernaut come flying off leaving all the brand new equipment high-and-dry and the Chinese public thinking, “what happened?”
So where is the evidence?
Firstly, let’s be clear, the PLA is not a modern, Chinese multi-national company at the cutting edge of technology and development. It is one of the most insular and secretive organizations on the planet and is riddled with corruption and twisted party politics that stifle true innovation. Anyone who has experienced the inner workings of a Chinese multi-national company will know that their internal mechanisms are hobbled by an opaque array of unfathomable relationships and nuances that are only understood by the few and favour a small group of elites. This is nothing new and hardly surprising; this is the way business has been conducted in China for millennia. Managers and directors are prone to explaining these “behind the curtain” practices as, “Chinese characteristics,” which is a disingenuous euphemism for, traditional, top-down, paternalistic, cronyism in tandem with mainstream, accepted corruption. With such characteristics rife in so-called public companies, which are subject to modern, international accountancy and human resource procedures, there is scant chance that the granddaddy of nepotism, the PLA has been able to escape these debilitating age-old habits.
Admittedly, I’m not offering up any concrete evidence to conclusively prove that the PLA is riddled with all the worst characteristics of guanxi but we can look at similar large-scale sectors and projects in China to see how they have faired. Based on this we should ask the critical question, is it rational to assume that PLA has risen above these problems or is in fact fatally ravaged by them behind closed doors.
Exhibit #1 - The Three Gorges Dam
Described as one of the biggest construction and relocation projects on the planet this gargantuan project could only have been achieved in China and is completely at home alongside other epic projects like the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. In order to complete such a monumental task you need a huge, cheap labour force and a dizzying degree of social compliance from the local population. Needless to say, most people in China, and especially those who lost their homes, were never told of the doomsday scenarios that many international experts predicted about building such a colossal dam. However, Mao had dreamt that it was possible and the CCP deemed that it was to become the crown jewel in the national psyche.
Despite vociferous warnings about the folly of the project from any number of independent, international organizations the project went ahead and all doubters were silenced as either unpatriotic or anti-Chinese. Today the Three Gorges Dam stands testament as the mother of all bad ideas. Rather than preventing flooding and taming the mighty Yangtze, towns downstream suffer its curse even more, either via extreme drought or flood. The electricity output has never met its targets and environmentalists are finally gaining traction in light of the utter devastation the dam has caused. Especially in light of the huge landslides the dam causes upstream, which the planners seemed to have completely over looked. In May 2011, no less than Prime minister Wen Jiabao, “admitted it [the dam] had caused severe problems to the environment, shipping, agricultural irrigation and water supplies.” (Global Times)
Therefore the lessons of the Three Gorges Dam are two-fold,
1) It could only be built in China, a country that has the ability to bulldoze any obstacles, whether human or nature.
And…
2) It could only be built in China, a country that could still blunder ahead with a bad idea despite such obvious failings
The Three Gorges Dam has proven to be about as useful at solving the problems of those who dwell in the Yangzi Basin as the Great Wall was at keeping out barbarians from the north.
So, why did the dam still go ahead?
Well, because it embodies the very heart of a new, rising China; a China that can overcome any obstacle or hardship to achieve its goal. In the end, the vast majority of Chinese can happily overlook that the dam is an unmitigated disaster. What’s important is that it shows what China can achieve; it is the largest and greatest dam in the world. The fact that it has never and probably will never do what it was touted to do is inconsequential. In China, building something and building something that works are mutually exclusive factors that do not need to relate to each other. Building something is a matter of fact that can be objectively stated. Whether it works or not is a matter of degree that is subjective. In a world where this attitude makes sense, China, any number of crazy possibilities can and do occur.
Exhibit #2 - High Speed Rail
High Speed Rail was supposed to be the project where China “got it all right” and proved to the doubters that it could lead the way with its own indigenously developed high-tech system with world-class quality control. Having pilfered the technology from the Germans and Japanese, the Beijing Shanghai line was to be an all-China project of unprecedented scope and size. Behind the scenes, bubbles of disquiet would occasionally rise to the surface such as, “the line had been built to hastily and the bases were going to subside”. However, these voices were quickly silenced once again as unpatriotic or anti-Chinese.
The opening day got off with much pomp and ceremony, with the train bedazzling international journalists and top party officials, but it has been downhill since then. In its first two weeks the rail line rarely worked and has had constant power outages. Conveniently the Party faithful blamed these outages on “teething problems” that were caused by a freak thunderstorm. Admittedly, every big project across the world has teething problems, but what we’re looking at here is something far more systematic than just tiny problems that need to be ironed out. The disastrous first few weeks of the high-speed rail network point to endemic corruption that even the nation’s highest, most prized projects could not escape. As the old saying goes, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig”. The Party can whitewash over the failures and blame the public for being overly critical and demanding, but in reality the high-speed rail had everything to prove and came up wanting, stinking off burnt wires, dodgy workmanship and the all too familiar smell of corruption. Rumours are now rife that, “builders ignored safety standards in the quest to build faster trains in record time”.[1] Once again, “the shining new emblem of China’s modernization looks more like an example of many of the country’s interlinking problems: top-level corruption, concerns about construction quality and a lack of public input into the planning.[2]
One has to ask, if the CCP can’t get it right with these two national projects that embody the national spirit where can they get it right – in the PLA? Some may believe or hope that it can, but in fact an epic folly of self-deception is taking place within the Chinese Military, just like the Great Leap Forward, the Three Gorges Dam and high-speed rail. The PLA is now subject to enormous pressure, just like the above mentioned projects and it is just not realistic to think that it will be able to escape the same fate.
Here are the key red flags to look out for,
- Huge projects that far exceed anything that has ever been achieved before - CHECK
- Emphasis on surpassing competitors - CHECK
- Attaching goals to the national interest - CHECK
- Achieving goals in record-breaking times - CHECK
- Leap-frogging development time frames and obstacles - CHECK
- No public input - CHECK
- Managed from the top down by untouchable career politicians - CHECK
All of these factors were present in the original Great Leap Forward, The Three Gorges Dam and high-speed rail and new PLA pet projects like Varyag, the J-20 and the ASBM ooze with them.
In the next post I will detail more how the PLA is predictably following the same calamitous path.
Have just started reading 'Mao's Great Famine' by Frank Dikötter, so this idea is only going to grow and grow
ReplyDelete