WION Global Summit: China's Military | Power, Provocations and Propaganda | Session Two

[Music] [Music] [Music] the supreme art of war is to subside the enemy without fighting these are the words of ancient chinese strategist and this seems to be the strategy of modern china's ruler xi jinping from the taiwan straits in the south china sea to the ladakh border and the indian ocean the chinese regime is picking fights on every front it wants to subdue its neighbors without fighting them what's the strategy behind china's growing brinkmanship its power its provocations and its propaganda in this session of the beyond global summit we shall decode china's military and joining me is a distinguished panel of guests each one of them brings to the table their experience in the armed forces and in dealing with the chinese my first guest is someone who has served in the u.s navy a former u.s assistant secretary of defense a former adviser to the reagan bush election committee currently a senior fellow at the center for american progress mr lawrence corp joining us from delaware in the u.s our second guest is a historian an academic and a former army officer he has extensive experience in the intelligence community in 1999 he served as a principal intelligence staff officer for the australian brigade in east timor he was australia's defence attache to thailand and myanmar and is currently a professor in intelligence studies and international security at the australian national university joining us all the way from canberra is mr john blacksland and our third guest has been a part of the indian army for 42 years he's a member of the national security advisory board he has trained a large body of officers in military tactics and strategy he has written extensively on the pla on its modernization and military strategy interestingly his twitter bio reads a military professional with interest on anything related to china lieutenant general s l ner simon joining us from new delhi it's an honor to have all of you with us on beyonce let me begin with you john blacksland a part of the chinese dream is to modernize the military make it world-class by 2050. would you rate the chinese army as among the best in the world if not the best well it's a very good question the thing is it's an untested army and it is definitely modernizing and it is definitely employing some of the latest technology and uh it's doing so adeptly but it is an untested one the last time it actually was involved in a conflict it got a very bloody nose uh apart from the the skirmishes on the uh himalayan front the real fight in the border with vietnam in 1979 saw china really take some serious hits and of course since then they have studied acutely very very closely the lessons of the gulf war in 1991 and of course the war in iraq and that and afghanistan from it including the concept of jointery the idea of the armed services army navy air force special forces all collaborating effectively to bring about the one desired unified effect which is in this case of course china's complete dominance in its domain in its environment in the first island chain in the himalayas and in its trade routes those trade routes of course reaching across the indian ocean around the southern tip of india across the western the bay of bengal uh and across to the the persian gulf uh and that is a very ambitious goal but it's one that they've been very very good at building towards and they're at the stage now without really a world-class force an untested one but a world-class one all the same untested but world-class lawrence cope china spends big on the military but can expensive weapons alone make a lethal force what is your assessment of the pla well there's no doubt about the fact that the chinese military as my colleague has just said on paper is very very formidable they're taking advantage of the latest technologies they're increasing their defense spending by about seven percent a year for for for example uh their budget over the last decade on defense has basically uh doubled and so they're i think hoping that they can achieve their objectives just with a show of force rather than an actual uh you know confrontation and the chinese want to be recognized as a great power they're taking advantage right now of the fact that we're so uh preoccupied with the covert 19 pandemic to try and be more aggressive including on the border with uh with india and and basically their feeling is that we the united states are now going to focus more on our own problems rather than that that their that part of the world the united states is trying to show that that's not the case we have deployed two uh aircraft carriers to the region to send a signal to the chinese that if you do become more aggressive we're not just going to uh to stand by general arsenal in a recent belford study questions the conventional wisdom or should i say the conventional assessment that the chinese military may have an edge over india just because it is believed to be technologically more advanced the study questions that saying that they are not necessarily not only better better experienced but not not necessarily better equipped do you agree with this see not you should not only look at what weapons they have and what technology they have what you need to look at is how they can apply it and how much of it they can apply that is much more important than how much they hold so if you look at that even the same study mentioned that indian armed forces may have some kind of leverage over i mean some kind of advantage over the chinese armed forces in mountain warfare if i remember correctly that's what they mentioned so the entire boundary between india and china is mountainous and high altitude in many places so that brings in a much more different dimension than the kind of equipment that they can actually bring to bear on us so if you put that into into perspective i think we are favorably poised at this point in time to if anything could go if anything goes wrong i only hope it doesn't and the way things are i don't think it's going to happen that way i think the de-escalation is something which is uh on and i think we will go through it right the de-escalation we all hope is on uh john blacksland china of course is spending like most countries prepare their militaries but the chinese leader keeps telling the pla to prepare for war why is that what explains china's aggression even hostility towards some of its its neighbors i think uh the proof is in the pudding and that is uh if i may say they have been very successful at using intimidation by investing heavily in military capabilities and then huffing and puffing and bluffing they have managed so far to extract concessions and where they haven't extracted concessions they have managed to extract at least uh acquiescence neighbouring states uh and from uh potential adversaries but what's very interesting is that that has come at a price because china has very few allies and you could probably count pakistan and north korea amongst them uh but very really very few realistic friends uh it's managed to buy off a few regimes in africa uh and it's got peop countries that are uh running a little bit scared of it but it really hasn't been effective at the soft power uh attractiveness that has been uh something that the united states has been very good at for for many decades now until at least quite recently and if you look for instance just interestingly you know and it's understandable for india to focus on the himalayas but if you stretch across to the south china sea and you see what's happening there rodrigo duterte the president of the philippines reached out four years ago a hand of friendship to china just staffed her just after his and his predecessor had got extracted a a an agreement from the arbitral tribunal ruling that the u.n convention on the law of the sea was uh to stand and that the nine-dash line that china claimed over the south china sea was completely invalid now rodrigo duterte you know in a move that he thought was clever perhaps too clever by half tried to win over chinese goodwill he really bent over backwards to accommodate the chinese desires but then the chinese couldn't help but poke him in the eye and and have since then made life very very difficult for duterte to the point where he's effectively conceded that he's not going to walk away from the us alliance and that he's actually had to turn his back on on president g to a certain extent because president xi and the chinese regime has been so aggressive towards the philippines so this kind of assertiveness is actually it's one it's it's me they've managed to get some extract some concessions grudgingly out of some countries but they've actually got most most of them have gone mute very few of them are actually being very openly declaratory positive about china and then you've got ones like the philippines that were positive about china that now are really are at a loss about how to progress relations with china because they've been so acerbic so difficult to work with lawrence cobb china is usually called the dragon but here we've drawn an analogy with the the big bad wolf so is this the strategy then to deal with this wolf as uh john blacksland has given the example of the philippines uh should countries then learn from the third little pig and make sure that you stand up to the bully yeah there's no doubt about the fact that the chinese have overplayed their hand not only with the philippines who basically at the time was trying to throw the united states forces out of the philippine islands the japanese are starting to rearm they just bought a whole bunch of f-35cs which is the most advanced fighter plane uh in the world from us and the japanese are not happy with them taking over the senkaku uh you know i are trying to take over over that and our uh allies in australia are also joining with us i think under a more traditional u.s president unlike president trump we would be working with all of these allies to present the united front we had the trans-pacific partnership which we could have used economically and then move what we you know president trump got got out of that and he's been focused mainly on economics with china ignoring their their military uh push our uniform military however is taking a different viewpoint particularly the navy and even with the coronavirus problems on the aircraft carriers they put two carriers out there to send a signal to the chinese that you know uh don't try and take advantage of this uh this particular situation so i think assuming that president trump doesn't get re-elected we have a more traditional u.s president we'll be back with all of the countries in the region to send a signal to china don't overplay your hand because if you do it'll be a disaster for you i like how you keep saying a more traditional president that's one way to describe it but general simon uh uh is this what do you would you say is this a mistake for want of a better word that delhi may have made by accommodating china accommodating china is a bad idea you have to you have to call it out when you must uh firstly i i'll add i would like to add on what my my co-panelists said a little while ago china respects strength that there's no doubt about it you show weakness obviously they will they if you they'll take take a whole lot of advantage if you show weakness that is something that is a given having said that i am not sure we have we have not called out china you please look at the prime minister's statement when he made it in late you i don't think we even compromised on any of the talks that we have held so far so i think we have understood very well that standing up to china is the way to deal with it and that is the way we are dealing with it that is something that we need to understand chinese above weakness and uh and and actually respect strength that is something that we need to keep in mind right uh lawrence kob how do you assess the the fact that that the chinese president this chinese president would you say that he is using the military as a tool of foreign policy yeah i i think so because he has you know tried to increase their capabilities at least on paper and it's important to keep in mind that our national defense strategy which was done in 2018 basically says that the main threat to the united states is our strategic competitors and they list china first in other words to stop focusing as much on the so-called global war on terrorism and i think they were able to do that because of the aggressive behavior of xi jinping since he took took over and basically he is trying to bring china back to where it was before it started at least on paper liberalizing uh its domestic and and and far and foreign policies so i i do think that you know basically we recognize that we're going to have to stand up to him and that he should not overplay his hand general simon uh should india then expect more provocations at the border and why just the border the line of actual control is just part of the the challenges that china poses uh china's indian ocean plans make for a worrying pattern the military base in djibouti is being modernized there are reports of china building a submarine base in bangladesh's cox's bazar expanding artificial islands in the maldives also on a drive to militarize the gwadar port in pakistan there are a lot of theaters there are fears of an all-out strategic encirclement what sort of power projection should india then engage in to scale down the chinese presence uh your question is very interesting and the very correct one i would say firstly uh let me finish with the land border then i can go on to other issues uh as i said earlier we don't have an agreed boundary between india and china we know what happened in galwan and pan kung so and in sikkim nakula still the time this boundary is in some form at least understood by both the sides to be some particular line you will have to be you will have to expect such things to happen in future also and we need to be prepared for it and we need to ensure that such provocations do not actually escalate into what happened on 15th of june in galwan valley that is one thing that we need to be very clear we need to have our surveillance up we need to be careful on the line of actual control and we need to ensure that we we expect such such things to happen in future also till the time this lac is marked in some form or the other on the on your question about djibouti gwadar in some form hambantota in some form situate or chuck few this is a thing that has been going on for a while uh indian navy and india have been actually looking into it closely and the so far at least the countries with whom these these kind of arrangements have been happening other than pakistan have ensured or have assured that they will not allow military activities to take place but we need to be careful so indian ocean region the geography gives the advantage to india and they and in the indian ocean indian navy is powerful and it can it can actually extract influence in the indian ocean region we need to keep that capability up we need to create further uh strengths in terms of like for example andaman nicobar islands and on the western seaboard we need to create our capabilities to ensure that chinese naval forces as and when they get into indian ocean region they are taken care of and the influence remains with us so this is something that we are monitoring and i'm sure the powers that be in delhi are actually looking into it and creating the capabilities that are required to take on the chinese navy as and when it comes even now almost 8 to 11 ships are almost there every time in the indian ocean region they are monitored closely and i hope will continue to do so john blackson america maintains a strong presence in the asia-pacific region china's neighbors are on alert especially after what we've seen in recent weeks but so far it seems that each country is there for itself do you think it will take a region-wide security cooperation to stop china yes i think that's probably wrong right and what we're seeing is that's already starting to emerge with the uh the efforts towards a quadrilateral arrangement between uh japan the united states india and australia um and now that's a fairly loose arrangement at the moment but look there's a lot of other countries in between as well and we have we saw bangladesh mentioned before uh where i know the countries of south east asia a couple of them are actually still u.s treaty allies thailand and the philippines others like the singaporeans aren't formally treaty allies but host u.s forces on singaporean soil others work happily with the u.s armed forces and with australia here i'm thinking malaysia and indonesia and vietnam interestingly enough once the you know erstwhile enemy of australia and the united states now looking to be much more closely aligned with the united states and with australia japan and others so we're seeing even dare i say taiwan um you know there's an alignment happening where while most of us don't formally recognize taiwan as a separate state there is a de facto recognition of the significance of taiwan and of making an effort to create some space for the taiwanese economy to thrive and it's a strategic space to be re reinforced um so that the combination it's very interesting australia's foreign policy had we had a defense a foreign policy white paper a couple of years ago and it was all about it stressed the alliance with the united states but it also stressed ties with everybody else particularly with india with japan with indonesia and with other south east asian neighbors because what we're finding is when you when you know there's there's a there's that saying there's strength in unity uh and the the corporate capabilities of these powers is these nations is actually consequential it's considerable and it is without question something that china is not comfortable with they are quite concerned dare i say even afraid of the prospect of these countries all working in harmony to deter further chinese aggression and that's a key point now now one of the things here for a small to middle power like australia we're very much dependent on the goodwill of others and on the order the so-called rules-based global order that the united states has been the great benefactor of the great supporter of much of which really hangs off american initiatives from the 1940s that we're all the beneficiaries of to this day um but the the the concerns are real that that we need to bolster that and we need to also find a way without actually trying to corner and humiliate china out of this equation so it's very easy for us to talk about bolstering our ties but we do actually want to avoid war and this is a really important point so how do we do that well i think it's very important australia's announced a new defense white paper we're bolstering our defense capabilities we're boosting our defense expenditure um and that's really designed to add to the deterrent effect and that's that's one of the reasons why we're looking to collaborate more closely with india japan and the united states sure the question of the quad is very interesting lawrence cobb the quad has been talked about for more than a decade now it goes to the back burner then comes into focus again uh it's as as i understand it it's still just a platform for posturing can it become maybe a nato-like force with a unified military goal there's no doubt about the fact that given uh china's aggressive stance and xi jinping took over that it's driving the united states to work with the countries in the region i don't have to tell you that india and the united states are now much closer militarily than we've been i think forever in history we now call our command over there the indo-pacific command it just used to be the pacific command we have had our ships pay a visit to vietnam uh again this is the first time that you know that has uh that has uh happened so i do think that they have overreached and and they're basically driving and i think your analogy is very good kind of a nato in the pacific against china the way we had nato confront the uh the former former soviet soviet union and i do think if that is well managed it will send the signal to china we have just given very sophisticated air defense equipment to taiwan which got the chinese very upset because this would make it very difficult for them to be able to attack taiwan if they should be foolish enough to try and do that so i do think that you know basically where we are and if we keep going the way we we have been it's going to make it very difficult for china to do anything foolish or to expand their influence beyond you know what it what it legitimately should be generally let's talk about the pla and what role if if at all it plays in the decision making what kind of political clout does the pla have and does it have a say in the national security and foreign affairs of beijing i it definitely does before i come to that let me just have a word on on the asean which we talked about you see the the kind of behavior that we see the aggressive behavior that we see in south china sea though it can be related to covet but i would like to take your mind back to august when they went into vietnam with that young teacher that several i mean that serviceship and then created issues there so the aggressive behavior is something which is which we have been able to see for a period of time and four countries mainly come into my mind philippines vietnam indonesia and malaysia these are the four companies four countries which have been under pressure from china and this is something which is going to create some kind of an issue on the china asean relations and also on the single draft negotiating text that they are actually negotiating now on the code of conduct for south china sea this is something that we need to keep in mind and asean is something which is going to be very important in in all the future interactions of indo-pacific and everything else on the question of pla definitely they do have a say in political decision making and don't forget pla is party's army and not the country's army and xi jinping is also the chairman of the central military commission as he's also the president of the country and definitely it has a role however over a period of time if you look at the representation in the national people congress central committee the alternate committee and also in the politburo you find the numbers of pla representation coming down slowly but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a say even though that happens on the political side on the military side on the decision-making side i think they do have a significant amount of role to play in the decision making uh john blacksland the pla has also seen a major purge since xi jinping took office does the army remain loyal to the political leadership is there a divide given that they're as as general simon said they're serving the interests of a political party and not a nation does it affect their morale i ask you because you've served in the infantry fighting for a party is not the same as fighting for a country no that's right um i bet and we do know that uh the political dimension of the people's liberation army remains a very important dimension um and and that it is very much tied to the communist party of china but we also know that it's quite an opaque organization we actually don't have that much visibility of the of the inner workings of the minds of the senior figures in the pla of the regional commanders and of the various formation and divisional commanders so these are these are questions that we don't really have answers to but obviously there are growing indications of rumors emerging of some dissension and of xi uh presidency not having the grip on on power that that some would that he would like to have um and that he's that the circumstances are perhaps more precarious but getting back to the earlier point we made you know the people's liberation army is an untested force um and if if it's very it's been very interesting from us from afar to be observing what's happened on the line of actual control last month and the indications of pla activity being not very noble and not very brave and not very uh strong-willed and determined and and so there are some indicators there that perhaps the pla doesn't quite have the backbone uh the resolve and the endurance and the the stamina if you like to to take a serious fight but just on the serious fight there's an important qualification i think we need to make is going back to the point about the quad we need to be very realistic about what we can expect from the quad the four countries involved in that have very different orientations and expectations and capabilities india understandably of course and i'm speak preaching to the choir here everybody knows that india's got a massive army much bigger than the australian army or even probably the united states army but it's got major land borders with pakistan and china and other countries but they're the principal ones that they're worried about that require substantial investment in land force capabilities and that's not something australia has much to offer to assist with and the same goes with japan uh conversely at sea um you know the the indian navy and this royal australian navy are now looking to collaborate more effectively than ever we've long collaborated very effectively we're very closely connected with the us navy and we're becoming more connected with the japanese navy so perhaps on the maritime front is where there's more prospect for collaboration between the four countries and that can be done uh relatively in a fairly straightforward manner by activities and exercises that see in the indian ocean and elsewhere right uh we we've all discussed the point about the lack of combat experience but since we're talking about the weaknesses lawrence corp the other issue is corruption a corrupt army they say is its own worst enemy and in the case of the plate is riddled by corruption there have been many cases it's involved in commercial activities with no pro proper oversight and several senior officers are being investigated for malpractice how does it impact uh the the strength of of a military force well basically what's happened is you have if you will kind of a corrupt bargain between the pla and the leadership they keep increasing their military spending you know significantly as i mentioned it's going up and basically it went up and double digits until the economy uh slowed uh slowed down you have the chinese for example they've just signed an agreement with iran to get oil in return for providing them assistance and working with their military you mentioned that they're in djibouti they're actually starting economically to have relations with countries in in our own hemisphere in in in latin america but i do think it's important to keep in mind that we don't want to if on paper their military looks pretty good but we don't want to overestimate it because if you get into a military conflict it really is the morale and the capabilities of the loyalty of the forces and right now with the corruption the people at the top are taking care of themselves and not worrying as much about the other people who are out there on the on the front lines the other issue general simon is the internal challenges for china the xinjiang this tibet inner mongolia they're picking fights with taiwan or at least posturing there there's hong kong uh south china sea east china sea the the border with india has xi jinping spread himself too thin uh i think i think he has done that before that on on the dissension and the pla which was talked about and the party's army and the corruption part please understand two things one is in the last six years through an anti-corruption campaign most of the people who were not actually going allegiance to the party and xi jinping as the as the commander-in-chief and the corps have have generally been replaced over a period of time so that is something that we need to keep in mind second thing is this anti-corruption drive has also driven people to ensure that they don't indulge in something like this there is actually uh they are actually now moving towards at least in the middle ranks and the lower ranks of not taking decisions which could put them into trouble later so this is something which has been i think uh pushed by this anti-corruption drive so having said that sinchian correct you mentioned all the places which are correct and i mentioned earlier also china has opened up too many fronts u.s china relations are probably at the lowest at this point in time since 1972 you have the trade trade trade dispute going with u.s you have the other problems of one belt one road initiative and you find the number of pushbacks that are coming in he has gone and announced the rescheduling of loans for 72 77 countries and south china sea east china sea internal issues i get a feeling that i think is is got more more than his hands full and therefore you have the feeling that china probably has as bitten more than he can chew at this point in time i i go with it i go with that assessment of yours john blacksland uh does does according to you does beijing have the bandwidth to to fight a real war given all the challenges we know china's internal security budget is bigger than its military budget there are too many problems at home yeah well this is the multi-million dollar question of course we don't have a concrete answer to that question but we do know that uh perception is reality to a certain extent and and uh the the chinese authorities have been very effective at portraying invincibility and inevitability uh and that that has cowered the uh many of the states neighboring states that are that have gone very very quiet or acquiescent towards the people's republic of china's aspirations i take for instance in malaysia which has come it's got territorial claims in the south china sea that overlap with china's china has been very very uh aggressive towards malaysia in recent months and and yet recently the malaysian foreign minister apparently has come out saying oh there's nothing to see here folks it's it's a bit like you know the scene from the movie casablanca it's the the the police are not looking they're looking the other way as if by being nice to china that'll go away and they'll everything will be fine but what we do see is that is that the rodrigo duterte's experience in the philippines speaks is i think it's kind of a very important indicator of what the future holds if we if we just continue to make acquiescence and if we make concessions i think what's really interesting is just how effective i think the united states freedom of navigation operations have been in the south china sea these these continue a very important principle of not conceding uh china's claims uh as being as being legitimate it's very important that that continues australia supports that i know other countries the united kingdom is supporting it france has supported canada japan and others have actively supported this as well and that is that is something that uh while while the the the president g i i'm quite confident he's a strong believer in the sun tzu principle of the acme of skill is to defeat your adversary without fighting i also don't think he has the confidence that he can pull it off if he were to cross that that the threshold the kinetic threshold if you like have actually declared war that would be i think catastrophic it would be catastrophic for for china and this is something most people forget china is extremely dependent on international trade it is the most dependent for oil for iron ore for resources for minerals for food uh particularly through the south china sea particularly through the malacca strait uh and particularly across the indian ocean so what's what's really interesting here is that the countries that china has been effectively trying to uh intimidate over the last few years have have come to the point where they realize they actually have quite a lot of agency they have capability to push back without crossing that threshold but without making the concessions china wants short of war and that's something we need to remember lawrence cobb when countries face uh descent internally the go-to card is is the foreign hand do you think the instability in tibet or xinjiang also deepens chinese suspicion of alleged anti-china forces abroad and do these domestic challenges have any impact on their foreign policy well i i think they do and i could add another dimension here that's important to keep in mind don't forget china is a rising nuclear power and the united states is trying to get them into the nuclear talks that we're having with uh with russia china has built a great number of intermediate nuclear forces uh that basically have made it impossible for russia to come back into compliance with the inf treaty we have we have with them but i do think as my colleagues have pointed out that the chinese may be over playing their hand and you see it very recently for example when the british refused to let huawei you know into into the country because economically they need to be able to do this because they are so dependent on the international uh uh trading system so there are a lot of ways that we can deal with this apart from the you know the show of uh of military of military force and i think at some point if the chinese recognize that this is hurting them economically they're not going to be as aggressive militarily right general simon if i could dwell on the point of tibet uh the more delhi has aligned its tibet tibet stance with beijing's position the more china has upped the ante it seems to the extent of calling arunachal pradesh south tibet should india or can india reopen tibet as an outstanding issue now uh we need to go back into history to answer that question uh we know how uh as well as the dalai lama came to india we also know how we entered into an agreement in 54 and in 65 and beyond we have always maintained that the tibetan autonomous region was a part of china that is that is something that was given earlier for some time you would have realized that you know even in the joint communication the one china policy was also mentioned beyond 2010 that police that statement has not been mentioned at all so there is something which is already being in the in the thinking it seems but i'm not sure how the government is taking it the tibet stands as something that is very sensitive and there is one of the red lines of of china so we need to be extremely careful in in dealing with this particular situation i am sure the people in the government are looking into it and i'm sure as the as their wisdom comes up they will take their stance on this as they as they decide to do so you're talking like a diplomat i i have to say john waxland in the in the past two months uh there hasn't been a single day when the chinese state media has not released videos of the army which we call propaganda videos you cannot win a war with videos and yet they seem to have an impact how do you how do you decode china's what you call psy of psychological warfare yes it's a very good question uh psychological warfare is an art that uh western countries india and others practiced in the second world war uh we kind of felt over a long time i think we've abandoned it and i think we're realizing that if the game is back on and that we actually need to engage in it as well if we're if they're going to be serious competitors in this space but i think there's a complementary aspect to what's going on here and that's the the concept of wolf warrior diplomacy which is a very assertive and aggressive form of diplomacy that is threatening cajoling insulting demeaning and basically trying to intimidate and it's aimed mostly in democracies like ours at the common people to basically get them to think and and to influence the kind of public opinion about the stakes and in australia there's a big debate that's been going on about whether or not we should bother to take on china whether or not we should just give in and and and back off and retreat into a shell of course this is this is exactly the psychological operations we were talking about and and and we need to be mindful that this is actually happening and that we need to counter it and that we need to be very much acutely aware of the risks associated with just letting that happen now in australia there's been some authors and and a couple of controversial ones the one fellow called clive hamilton it's been a very brave man writing extensively some have been very very critical of what he's written um basically exposing china's actions particularly with the united front work department with the with with the the various uh institutes the confucius institutes that have operated on university campuses and the uh the the effect of uh using third parties uh influencing senior businessmen public figures uh university figures and others to cajole governments to back down and to make concessions to china so what we're facing is a scale of the challenge that is nothing we have seen since probably the second world war in terms of the complexity and the breadth of uh institutional momentum towards getting us to cave for getting us to cons deed to getting us to allow china to have what it wants and and i think what's happening it's very sobering and there's been a quite a interesting discussion in australia in the last few months particularly the coronavirus crisis has perhaps crystallized this in some people's minds and that is the sense that this is quite grave that the game is quite serious the challenges are great the stakes are high and that we actually need to pull together internationally and within our nations in resisting this united front work department type of activity looking to collegially respectfully but firmly and tactfully resist and constrain constrain inappropriate chinese behaviour lawrence cobb i'm sure uh the american administration is not facing or struggling with the questions that the australians are between donald trump and mike pompeo they're more than a match for china's wolf warriors but uh america is one of the biggest biggest recipients or at the receiving end of chinese propaganda videos all militaries rely on propaganda the chinese it seems more so is it only for the audience outside or is this also directed to their domestic constituency i think there's no doubt about the fact that with china it's directed to their domestic constituency the united states for example we know that the chinese for example have hacked into a lot of our our systems they they just that they try and take advantage of this you know new dimension and warfare in the united states is a more open uh society with you know facebook for example and and twitter and and and everything like that we've had uh and we've been expelling chinese uh newspaper people they've been expelling ours so we also have that going on and i think what's interesting from the chinese point of view if they had not been so aggressive in doing a lot of these things they would have gotten president trump who wanted to get closer to china if you remember his early days uh in office and and basically would have been able to get a lot more from the united states and maybe even of us to cut down our uh military presence in the in in the pacific but they did overplay their hand they used the propaganda and now the president and secretary pompeo in fact giving speeches right now basically criticizing the chinese and our military as i mentioned has made them the main focus of the military buildup which has occurred under trump don't forget since trump has come into office we've added a hundred billion dollars to the budget he inherited from obama and a lot of that is to build up the capabilities to deal with the situation in the uh in the pacific uh they're talking about getting a navy of 355 ships from the 290 that he inherited and those would mainly go to the uh to the pacific general uh coming back to the propaganda video some of the videos that we've seen at least are specimens of bad acting i cannot describe them in any other way like soldiers who wouldn't part with their guns or board a plane without guns and helmets on we call it a video game army in this newsroom what do these videos tell you the videos typically tell me what they are they are trying to fool people please understand even in 2017 during the height of dholam they put out some training videos of artillery firing on the plateau etc if you look at those videos it is not the way any professional military will do any firing even now in the recent time they said that airborne division has been mobilized and they reached a particular place in eight hours time and then they started doing exercises you analyze it you find china eastern airline aircraft people are sitting inside you find that the tanks are being mounted and trained and taken which airborne division moves like this so and they also say that y20 aircraft landed in scardo you look at the painting of the aircraft it's it is not in the pla place air force's painting so for a professional people who analyze these things we see through these these videos and know that these are meant only for a propaganda and psychological value it does have a role in in in conveying this message that the pla is invincible to the local of the domestic audience which you mentioned which is very right they also sell it to the people inside to say that pla is invincible so these videos i think when we see it we need to analyze them properly and then we also need to understand and take it with a very very large pinch of salt and having said that i think one thing i'll i will mention now on the world fourier diplomacy which my co-panelists have spoken about initially when this coveting was on and about say in the beginning of the year you found a number of this world foreign diplomacy statements coming up in the last two three months if you look at it it has gone down i think they are understood that if they pursue with this you will lose a lot of social capital so i think they are also modifying their way of dealing with this so that is also something we need to keep in mind right very interesting i'm being told that we are out of time but i have to thank you all and maybe we should have these conversations to bust the propaganda that we've just discussed uh thank you john blackslin lawrence cobb general simon thank you very much for being with us on the beyond global summit thank you thank you so much [Music] [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: Wion, world news, Wion News, Latest English News, International News, wion global summit, china, china debt policy, china economy, china great wall of debt, china markets, china obor, china current economy, china expansionist policy, china news, chinese military, pla, chinese pla, people liberation army, wion summit, Lawrence Korb, John Blaxland, Lt Gen S L Narasimhan, decoding china with wion

Id: zxAzGs0h3P0

Length: 48min 43sec (2923 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020