The Washington Post (Bradley Graham, “Some Question Report On Chinese Space Arms,” August 14, 2004, A14) details a bit of research by my friends Gregory Kulacki and David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists that should be highly embarassing…
Slightly off topic today, but a friend alerted me to a New York Times Magazine feature that used the idiotic xenophobia of my hometown — Pekin, IL — to illustrate the pervasive impact of globalization: China used to be far…
Under the misleading headline “Beijing Hits Taiwan With War of Words”, the Los Angeles Times reports that a PLA General, Lt. Gen. Liu Yuan, told a state-run newspaper that a pre-emptive strike by Taiwan on the Three Gorges Dam “will…
“China is believed to be conducting research and development on a direct-ascent ASAT system that could be fielded in the 2005-2010 timeframe.” Well that sounds very serious, but is it true? The statement, which comes from the 2003 edition of…
The 2004 edition of the Department of Defense’s Annual Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China has been released and, well, it is pretty disappointing. The most important sections (according to DOD) are actually shorter than…
In his Senate testimony, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Lawless indicated that a substantial portion of the 2004 Annual Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China will be dedicated to the threat posed by Chinese…
I notice that some fellow traveler found her way to my site with the following search string: “ken timmerman make quotes up” Timmerman recently drew my ire for a series of incredible assertions regarding the DF-31 and the CZ-2C Smart…
Today is (yet another) dissertation day, which means more puzzling inconsistencies in the work of eminent political scientist John Wilson Lewis. In “China’s Ballistic Missile Programs” (International Security 17:2, Autumn 1992, 30), he claims the original design plans for China’s…
Yet again, the strange alliance of incompetence between the Defense Department and the press creates wildly exaggerated estimates of Chinese defense spending. AFP reports that “China is more than doubling its budgeted defense spending this year as part of an…
China successfully sent two new satellites, Experiment Satellite I (Shiyan 1) and Nano-satellite I (Nuoxing 1), into space early Monday with a Long March II C carrier rocket, according to the People’s Daily. People’s Daily hailed the launch as a…
