Next month, about 1,000 People's Liberation Army soldiers will travel to Kazakhstan to participate in a Shanghai Cooperation Organization exercise, Peace Mission 2010. It will be the largest international military exercise China conducts this year.
What does China get out of it? A Chinese defense ministry spokesman said the exercise was intended "to demonstrate SCO member states' determination and capacity to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism, showcase their mutual trust and pragmatic cooperation, and the shared wish to protect regional peace and stability as well as to boost common development and prosperity."
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has just released its annual report to Congress on what the Chinese military is up to, and here's what it says are the PLA's interests in Central Asia:
China’s primary interests in Central Asia are centered on building regional influence, obtaining natural resources and energy, and countering support for China’s Uighur separatists. Beijing has reached agreements with many Central Asian governments to build the infrastructure necessary to transport resources into western China, such as a pipeline that will stretch from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan into China. Beijing has also conducted bilateral and multilateral exercises with SCO member states to enhance China’s influence within the SCO and to build cohesive regional opposition to Uighur activities. Internal security forces in Xinjiang could be used in Central Asian contingencies, and army aviation and trans-regional mobility operations could be applied to deploy combat power rapidly to the region in a crisis.
Plenty of food for thought here, from the Washington Post's Spy Talk blog, via Intelligence Online:
[A] top Chinese general recently made an offer to Afghan President Hamid [Karzai] to train his army and security services “after NATO’s withdrawal.”
General Ma Xiaotian, deputy head of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army, “recently met Karzai to convince him that China would help him to form his new army and security services after NATO’s withdrawal...”
The obvious conclusion to draw -- if the report is true -- is that China is thinking longer-term than the U.S., and is circling, like a vulture, waiting for the western effort in Afghanistan to die so that it can swoop in. Usually this is thought to be an economic strategy, as in the huge deal the Chinese signed for the copper mine in Afghanistan. That China might be trying to expand its military influence, as well, will set off all sorts of alarm bells. But one analyst thinks that China may actually be trying to learn as much as teach:
John Lee, author of Will China Fail?, told me he's spoken to senior officers of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police about the effort.
"Behind closed doors, both the PLA and PAP are worried about what they perceive to be their lack of ‘field experience’ in combating serious, coordinated insurgencies – they feel that their procedures, operational effectiveness, logistical capacity, etc., are ‘untested’," said Lee, foreign-policy fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.
After tanking by more than 18.2 percent in 2009, the Armenian economy could definitely use some Chinese cash. Hundreds of millions of dollars in life support from international donors have not yet made up for that amputated economic growth.
On the sidelines of the World Expo, where China flaunted its booming economy, Sargsayn signed a cooperation memo with Chinese telecommunication technology giant Huawei Technologies. Sargsyan tried to gauge the interest of Huawei and its rival Zhong Xing Equipment in several projects in Armenia.
International development groups have urged Armenia to diversify its sources of income after revenues from foreign remittances and its once booming construction sector dried up amidst the global financial crisis.
