Xi decade reshapes China’s military and the region

BE IJING: During Xi Jinping’s decade-long rule, China has built the world’s largest navy, revamped the globe’s biggest standing army, and amassed a nuclear and ballistic arsenal to trouble any foe.

With China’s neighbours now rushing to keep pace, Xi’s next five-year term is likely to see a quickening Asia-pacific arms race.

From South Korea developing a blue-water navy to Australia buying nuclear-powered submarines, weapons shopping has surged across the region.

According to figures from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Asia-pacific defence spending passed $1 trillion last year alone.

China, the Philippines and Vietnam have roughly doubled spending in the last decade. South Korea, India and Pakistan are not far behind.

Even Japan is proposing record defence budgets and inching towards ending its long-standing “no first strike” policy, citing an “increasingly severe” security environment.

“All the key players in the Indo-pacific region are responding to China’s military modernisation, basically as fast as they can,” said Malcolm Davis, a former Australian defence official now with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

For years, the People’s Liberation Army was seen as ill-equipped and ineffective - disparaged by one historian as “the world’s largest military museum.”

It was kited out with ageing Soviet-derived weaponry, riddled with corruption and was a predominantly infantry force with a less-thanstellar record in foreign campaigns.

The PLA’S participation in the Korean War cost almost 200,000 Chinese lives.

A 1979 invasion of Vietnam cost tens of thousands more and has been mostly airbrushed from official histories.

When Xi became commander-in-chief of the PLA in 2013, some reforms were already under way.

They began in the 1990s, when Jiang Zemin was shocked and awed into action by US military prowess during the Gulf War and the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis.

But “it wasn’t really until Xi Jinping came in that that effort started translating to capability”, strategic consultant Alexander Neill said.

The PLA had then just launched its first aircrat carrier, the Liaoning - a refurbished Ukrainian ship - and the J-15 multi-role fighter aircrat, based on a Sukhoi prototype.

Beijing’s military budget has now increased for 27 consecutive years, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.