Products manufactured by the military

Thousands of factories and sweatshops run directly by the Chinese military manufacture everything from toys to underwear to steel pipes, and export them to the free world to earn the foreign exchange needed for China's military modernization program. Researchers at the AFL-CIO have identified ten of what they call PLA (People's Liberation Army) sponsored business groups in the United States, each of which typically has several subsidiary companies. A number of these companies are distributors and import-export concerns. In 1996, the FBI linked two of these companies Norinco (a Chinese ordinance company that supplies the PLA with most of its weapons and has ten subsidiary companies in the U.S.) and Poly Technologies (which is run by the PLA's General Staff Department), to a scheme to smuggle some thousand AK-47 assault rifles into the United States.

According to THE COX REPORT OF THE HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY AND MILITARY COMMERCIAL CONCERNS WITH THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (1999), Chinese military and intelligence have, through such companies in the United States, stolen American nuclear secrets to build long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. Also stolen was a large variety of sophisticated technology, including high performance computers, satellite technology, aircraft guidance technology for F-15, F-126 and F-117 stealth bombers, and design information on America's most advanced thermonuclear weapons.

The overriding reason why we should not buy goods manufactured by the PLA is that no regime today poses a greater threat to world peace than Communist China. In discussions on the subject of global security today, the names of such countries as Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Afghanistan are invariably raised. Realistically speaking, these countries, though capable of terrorist acts, lack the size, population, military capability and economic power to start a major war, let alone the next world war. This is the capacity, however, that China is rapidly beginning to acquire, and evident in the double digit increases in its defense budget year after year. This threat to world peace is far greater now than when China was at its most ideologically belligerent under Mao. Whatever the revolutionary rhetoric of Maoist China, it lacked the money and the technology to translate its intentions into effective action. But all that has changed. This change has come about exclusively through China's newfound economic power, based on its sales of manufactured products to the West.

It is clear that China is undertaking an aggressive expansionist policy in Asia and the Pacific. The danger of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is ever-present, and one that will certainly drag in American intervention, if America is not to forsake it's preeminence in the Pacific. Though the Taiwan question appears only occasionally in the Western press, in China itself officialdom and the media play up the issue on an incessant and clamorous basis. Newspapers regularly feature letters and petitions by Chinese soldiers (often signed and even written in blood) calling for an invasion of Taiwan. Some of the letters carry declarations by soldiers of their readiness to impregnate Taiwanese women after the invasion, in order to restore the racial purity of the island. This is probably a reference to the fact that a proportion of Taiwan's population is of mixed Japanese/Chinese, or aboriginal descent.

In South East Asia, China has caused renewed fears of its expansionism. For instance, it has laid claims and even occupied parts of the strategic Spratley Island chain sitting astride vital shipping lanes to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The Philippines have the strongest claim to the islands by virtue of proximity (it is about 200 miles from the Spratleys) while China, more than 800 miles north has claimed the entire island chain, and built a base on the aptly named Mischief Reef. The Chinese have already seized and occupied another chain of islands further north, the Paracels, from Vietnam, and have occupied parts of Vietnam's northern border territory. Even today, Vietnam continues to suffer Chinese military incursions and is hence forced to practically beggar itself to maintain an army that is the fourth largest in the world.

Countries like Laos, Cambodia, and especially Burma have already been drawn into the Chinese sphere of influence. Burma's brutal military regime is a particularly close ally of China and has allowed the Chinese Navy free run of port facilities on its offshore islands and to build an electronic tracking and surveillance station in the Indian Ocean.

This development has been a major shock to India's defense community. It certainly contributed to the statement issued by India's defense minister some years ago that China, not Pakistan, was the major threat to India's security. This comes over and above China's arms supply to, and training of, insurgent movements in North Eastern India, and occasional military incursions across the border.

India's ongoing conflict with Pakistan is well known, and with both countries now armed with nuclear weapons, a problem for world peace is evident. It is not widely known, however, that even before India exploded her first nuclear device in October 1974, China had assigned twelve nuclear scientists, ancillary staff and considerable funding to assist Pakistan in developing a nuclear weapon. Only in 1996, after press revelations, did the CIA admit that China was providing major nuclear aid to Pakistan. A Washington Post report revealed that China had sold its highly mobile, modern, nuclear-capable missile, the M-11, to Pakistan, which then sounded some alarm bells in Washington. But in spite of American protests, short-lived sanctions and repeated pledges from Beijing to halt the transfer of missiles, not only the M-11, but also even more advanced weaponry and technology continue to be transferred by China to Pakistan.

A 1996 CIA report stated "China is the most significant supplier of Weapons of Mass Destruction related goods and technology to foreign countries." The American Office of Naval Intelligence maintains that the flow of materials and technology from China to Iran is "one of the most active "Weapons of Mass Destruction" programs in the third world&" Chinese arms companies are also deeply engaged in Iraq. On February 22, 2001, President Bush announced that the U.S. knew that China was involved in developing electronics and radar systems in Iraq to be used against American and British warplanes.
More well known perhaps is China's secret assistance to North Korea for its nuclear program and the creation of its three-stage intermediate range ballistic missile which matched "rivet for rivet" China's CSS-2 missile. When on August 31, 1998, this missile roared over Japan's northernmost island on it first test flight, Japan awoke to find that its security assumptions had suddenly and radically changed. Just a year before it would have been political suicide for a Japanese politician to make even a passing suggestion that Japan should go nuclear. Now such discussions are not only being held openly, but a government study is in place to prepare for such an eventuality. Everyone in Japan was well aware that a poverty-stricken third-world country like North Korea was not capable of making such a sophisticated device by itself, and it did not take much time for the unwelcome conclusion to sink in that the missile test was actually a statement by proxy from Beijing: that China was now the big power in East Asia, and that Japan's position as the effective platform for U.S. power projection in the region, would not be accepted without a challenge. The current Prime Minister, the popular Junichiro Koizumi, has called for a revision in the Japanese constitution of the article declaring Japan's renunciation of war.

The author of this pamphlet would like to make it clear that he is not an advocate of American military presence in Asia, or anywhere else for that matter. After the break up of the Soviet Union, there was a brief but hopeful period when a peaceful future for the world seemed to be a genuinely possiblity. Reductions in American military presence were evident everywhere around the globe. In the Philippines, some of the largest American naval and air force bases in the world were closed down and the defense treaty between the Philippines and the USA amicably ended. It was a welcome moment for world peace. But China's aggressive stance in the Pacific has once again required the Philippines to sign a new defense pact with the USA.

According to defense analysts the rationale these days for the development of the Missile Defense System, has moved on from countering missile threats from "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, or challenging Russia. Instead, according to The NEW YORK TIMES (March 19, 2001), "Russia is a power in decline and is viewed mainly as a menace to itself. In Washington, however, China is increasingly seen as a growing regional power that will compete with the United States for dominance of the Western Pacific." Furthermore, according to The New York Times, the Russians have more than enough long-range missiles to overwhelm any Missile Defense System of the foreseeable future. Also Russia is to some extent neutralized by the ABM treaty.

It now appears that the threat of Chinese missiles is the new rationale for the Missile Defense System. Furthermore this is not only driven by considerations of China's short and medium range missiles targeting Japan, Taiwan and American forces in the Pacific but also, as George Bush noted (in an address on national defense at the Citadel, Charleston, S.C), China's long range ICBMs which are capable of incinerating Los Angeles as a Chinese general had reminded America, after some tension over Taiwan in 1996.

On December 14, 2000, in a call for major increases in defense spending, General Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, warned America that "China was aggressively modernizing" its conventional and nuclear forces. "I am firmly convinced that we need to focus all elements of U.S. power and diplomacy on ensuring that China does not become the 21st century version of the Soviet bear."

On May 16, 2001, The NEW YORK TIMES carried a front page report on a confidential Pentagon strategy review, prepared by Andrew Marshall, 79, regarded by many as the most original thinker in the defense establishment, and one of the few and the first to see the weakness of the Soviet Empire, and accurately predict its demise. One purpose of this latest review appears to be to shift American defense focus away from Europe, the main arena of the old U.S U.S.S.R superpower rivalry, to East Asia where Marshall believes China is not only aggressively seeking to expand its empire, but also where in the future Chinese satellite-guided missiles could devastate American aircraft carriers.

China's tremendous new increase in military power and capability stems directly from its new economy, which to an overwhelming degree is based on the export of consumer goods to the West. When we buy any product Made in China we are directly contributing to the growth of Communist China's military power and the realization of China's (clearly and often declared) territorial ambitions in Asia and the Pacific.

> Next: Three direct reasons not to buy Made in China : Part 3