U.S. and China are up against each other in what could be the new Cold War. This is despite their rather functional economic relations. The latest chapter in these two superpowers’ struggle for global hegemony involves the Pentagon’s report that warns about China’s military rise.
The report, currently causing considerable diplomatic friction between Washington and Beijing, warns that “the pace and scope of China’s military transformation has increased during recent years with the purchase of foreign weapons and increased spending on new technologies and reforms in the Armed Forces. Among them are the anti-missiles that Beijing has already successfully tested and the new submarine base that was built on the island of Hainan in the South China Sea.”
In addition, the Pentagon suspects that the ‘red dragon’ is acquiring an arsenal of short and medium range missiles on its side of the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan remains separated from China since the end of the Civil War (1945-49) but whose sovereignty is claimed by Beijing.
The Pentagon report warns that the Chinese armed forces continue to develop its military, nuclear technology, and war capability in cyberspace which are changing military balances in the region and have implications beyond Asia-Pacific.
Different departments of the U.S. administration have recently claimed that they suffered ‘cyber attacks’ from the eastern colossus which, apparently, were aimed to extract information from US government computers.
Although China’s military progress has enabled the Asian giant to increase its participation in international peacekeeping missions and anti-piracy naval forces, Washington also believes that it can “project its power to ensure access to natural resources and strengthen their claims in territorial disputes.”
China has recently approved its defense budget with an increase of 14.9 percent for military spending. However, there is a perceived lack of transparency in budgets and the US thinks that China might be allocating three times more than what is on record. China’s army is the biggest in the world with 2.3 million soldiers.
China calls all these allegations by the US as “flagrant distortion of reality.” The country, in turn, accused the Pentagon for continuing to play with the fallacy of Chinese military threat and meddling in China’s internal affairs. The country urged the US to “abandon the mentality of the past Cold War.”
Via Yahoo! News
