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"What does not break me, makes me stronger"
Unearthed in quake: Flaws in Chinese military capability
By Jake Hooker
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
BEIJING: They were 19-year-old farm boys in cloth shoes and rucksacks, soldiers of the People's Liberation Army, responding to a national emergency.
They marched into the mountains, with shovels tied to their backs. They cleared rocks the size of houses from blocked roads, with ropes and brute force. They crawled over piles of bricks and concrete, listening for human sounds.
"In order to save people buried under rubble, many soldiers' hands were cut and bloodied, and they kept their hands moving," Hu Changming, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said at news conference in May. His remark was intended as a form of praise.
China deployed roughly the same number of soldiers after the May earthquake in southwestern Sichuan Province as the United States has stationed in Iraq. Approximately 130,000 troops from the army, navy, air force and Second Artillery scrambled to the mountains of Sichuan, China's broadest deployment of its armed forces since it fought a border war with Vietnam in 1979.
It was indeed a gritty, hands-on effort, unfolding under the clear view of the public and the media, and it offered analysts the best chance since the nation's rising economy starting pumping tens of billions of dollars into the military to assess the Chinese military's performance in a crisis. The army got good marks for public relations domestically, but left some veteran PLA-watchers underwhelmed.
James Mulvenon, an expert on the Chinese military, said the earthquake showed the army's best and worst sides: It mobilized quickly, but the troops were unprepared to save lives in the first 72 hours, when thousands were buried under toppled masonry and every minute mattered.
"You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands," said Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. "It was not a stellar example of a modern military."
In an online forum of the state-run People's Daily, Zhang Zhaozhong, a leading defense analyst, said specialized units such as the 38th Army Corps of Engineers, the engineering division of the Second Artillery and the Marine Corps understood how to rescue survivors from beneath collapsed buildings. But he added that the vast majority of deployed forces, ordinary combat troops, had little if any rescue training.
The army had about 100 helicopters ferrying food, supplies and medical teams into remote mountain areas and rescuing the injured, according to Dennis Blasko, a former U.S. Army attaché in Beijing. "The management of aircraft and helicopters operating in the area is probably the largest extended operation the PLA has ever conducted," Blasko said.
But the helicopters were too small to haul heavy equipment, many experts said, and there were not enough to keep up the pace of rescue operations.
Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the military's response did not reflect well on its preparedness for a potential war, for example, over Taiwan, the independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory. Just 15 paratroopers dropped into the mountains near the earthquake's epicenter, two days after the quake struck. Bad weather and rough terrain were no excuse for not sending in a larger force, and sooner, he said.
"The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours," he said, referring to a county near the epicenter. "It took 44 hours."
Granted, Chinese quake victims were happy they came at all. In interviews across Sichuan last month, most survivors praised the efforts of the troops, whose mere presence appeared to calm and comfort people. In Wenchuan, locals wept when helicopters landed, an army official told state media.
Allan Behm, a former official in Australia's Defense Ministry, said soldiers did not fare well in saving victims because the army is still focused on conventional warfare rather than engineering skills. In spite of its efforts to modernize, Behm said, "The PLA is still built on the idea of bringing hundreds of thousands of troops into the battle area."
Seven weeks later, 137,000 troops remain deployed in Sichuan, pitching tents for the homeless, feeding people, repairing roads, and clearing and moving thousands of tons of debris.
The military's response has won the ruling Communist Party a degree of public support that American presidents often enjoy in wartime. But to those who follow the military's progress closely, the army's relief effort has also shown that it has a long way to go to become a peer to the U.S. military.
"There may be some real growing pains," said Jonathan Pollack, a China specialist at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. "Where does the military fit into all this tumult that is going on in Chinese society?"
China has often deployed the People's Liberation Army, along with a separate paramilitary force, the People's Armed Police, to respond to natural disasters, social unrest, and other domestic security issues. Tai Ming Cheung, a senior fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at University of California, San Diego, said that, in addition to preparing for a possible conflict with Taiwan, China is "focused on projecting power inside its borders, to ensure social stability."
This year, PLA units from southwestern China's Chengdu Military Region were deployed to southern areas hit by heavy snowstorms in January. In March, they were transferred to Tibetan areas of western Sichuan to pacify anti-government protests. Then, in May, the earthquake hit, and they came down from the Tibetan plateau to rescue people buried under collapsed buildings.
The range of its recent missions, and its stated mission to support national construction, national defense, and disaster relief, experts say, suggest it is still searching for its role.
Some Western analysts say that Beijing's willingness to accept aid from several foreign militaries reflects a new openness in the military that had been characterized by secrecy.
But with the earthquake zone flooded with reporters, helicopters passing overhead, and truckloads of troops present in every town, this particular mission exposed the army to public scrutiny, perhaps more than at any time since army units crushed student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing in 1989. For the first time ever, its top commanders held news briefings in Beijing to discuss the work of the troops.
Beijing asked the Pentagon's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which operates spy satellites, for high-resolution images of quake-hit regions. China also used 15 of its own satellites to gather reconnaissance, according to Eric Hagt, director of the China program for the World Security Institute in Washington. It may have asked for satellite images to show its willingness to work with the international community on a humanitarian mission, Hagt said.
After the last major earthquake, in Tangshan in 1976, the Chinese military refused foreign aid, the thinking at the time being that national disasters should be kept secret. In contrast, China's decision to allow two U.S. military transport planes to enter Chinese air space and land in Sichuan Province, Mulvenon said, was evidence of a more open and transparent military.
Chinese and Western analysts agree that the military's lack of heavy-lift helicopters and aircraft created a serious bottleneck in the early days of the relief effort. Troops had poor communications and did not have immediate access to surveillance imagery to help them make decisions, they said.
"They were visible everywhere," Hagt said of the soldiers, "but the actual achievements of the mission were far less admirable. How many more people they could have saved with the proper equipment, technology, know-how and training is hard to know."
So far, the official death count is almost 70,000. Hu, the spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Beijing, said at a news briefing May 18 that soldiers had dug out 21,666 people from the rubble. It seemed like an impressive number, perhaps too impressive. A month later, another military official clarified that the army had saved 3,336 people.
"We're mostly digging out bodies," said a soldier in the city of Dujiangyan, as he sat on the curb smoking late on the afternoon of May 15.
Moments earlier, helicopters had dropped thousands of pink paper flyers. Each leaflet had with instructions from the Chengdu Military Region, under the heading: "General Information about Saving Yourself in an Earthquake." The 72-hour "golden period" for saving people had already passed.
One Chinese reporter, who asked not to be named, traveled with a group of PLA soldiers to the town of Yingxiu, near the epicenter.
He said they got there at dusk, about 48 hours after the quake hit. The radios the soldiers carried with them had a range of only five kilometers, or three miles. Some soldiers didn't have field rations, and bought crackers to feed themselves.
Thousands of victims remained buried under collapsed buildings, including more than 200 students at the local elementary school.
Eight hundred injured people had been brought to a clearing, to wait for helicopters. But by noon the next day, few helicopters had come, and about 10 people had been evacuated by air, the reporter said. Many died in the clearing, waiting to be rescued. The medicine had run out.
The town had only a single electrical generator, and the troops had no power tools. At the Yingxiu Primary School, the soldiers dug with their hands. Some children could be heard singing under the rubble, the reporter said, presumably to keep their spirits up.
A day later, the singing stopped.
Unearthed in quake: Flaws in Chinese military capability
By Jake Hooker
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
BEIJING: They were 19-year-old farm boys in cloth shoes and rucksacks, soldiers of the People's Liberation Army, responding to a national emergency.
They marched into the mountains, with shovels tied to their backs. They cleared rocks the size of houses from blocked roads, with ropes and brute force. They crawled over piles of bricks and concrete, listening for human sounds.
"In order to save people buried under rubble, many soldiers' hands were cut and bloodied, and they kept their hands moving," Hu Changming, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said at news conference in May. His remark was intended as a form of praise.
China deployed roughly the same number of soldiers after the May earthquake in southwestern Sichuan Province as the United States has stationed in Iraq. Approximately 130,000 troops from the army, navy, air force and Second Artillery scrambled to the mountains of Sichuan, China's broadest deployment of its armed forces since it fought a border war with Vietnam in 1979.
It was indeed a gritty, hands-on effort, unfolding under the clear view of the public and the media, and it offered analysts the best chance since the nation's rising economy starting pumping tens of billions of dollars into the military to assess the Chinese military's performance in a crisis. The army got good marks for public relations domestically, but left some veteran PLA-watchers underwhelmed.
James Mulvenon, an expert on the Chinese military, said the earthquake showed the army's best and worst sides: It mobilized quickly, but the troops were unprepared to save lives in the first 72 hours, when thousands were buried under toppled masonry and every minute mattered.
"You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands," said Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. "It was not a stellar example of a modern military."
In an online forum of the state-run People's Daily, Zhang Zhaozhong, a leading defense analyst, said specialized units such as the 38th Army Corps of Engineers, the engineering division of the Second Artillery and the Marine Corps understood how to rescue survivors from beneath collapsed buildings. But he added that the vast majority of deployed forces, ordinary combat troops, had little if any rescue training.
The army had about 100 helicopters ferrying food, supplies and medical teams into remote mountain areas and rescuing the injured, according to Dennis Blasko, a former U.S. Army attaché in Beijing. "The management of aircraft and helicopters operating in the area is probably the largest extended operation the PLA has ever conducted," Blasko said.
But the helicopters were too small to haul heavy equipment, many experts said, and there were not enough to keep up the pace of rescue operations.
Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the military's response did not reflect well on its preparedness for a potential war, for example, over Taiwan, the independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory. Just 15 paratroopers dropped into the mountains near the earthquake's epicenter, two days after the quake struck. Bad weather and rough terrain were no excuse for not sending in a larger force, and sooner, he said.
"The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours," he said, referring to a county near the epicenter. "It took 44 hours."
Granted, Chinese quake victims were happy they came at all. In interviews across Sichuan last month, most survivors praised the efforts of the troops, whose mere presence appeared to calm and comfort people. In Wenchuan, locals wept when helicopters landed, an army official told state media.
Allan Behm, a former official in Australia's Defense Ministry, said soldiers did not fare well in saving victims because the army is still focused on conventional warfare rather than engineering skills. In spite of its efforts to modernize, Behm said, "The PLA is still built on the idea of bringing hundreds of thousands of troops into the battle area."
Seven weeks later, 137,000 troops remain deployed in Sichuan, pitching tents for the homeless, feeding people, repairing roads, and clearing and moving thousands of tons of debris.
The military's response has won the ruling Communist Party a degree of public support that American presidents often enjoy in wartime. But to those who follow the military's progress closely, the army's relief effort has also shown that it has a long way to go to become a peer to the U.S. military.
"There may be some real growing pains," said Jonathan Pollack, a China specialist at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. "Where does the military fit into all this tumult that is going on in Chinese society?"
China has often deployed the People's Liberation Army, along with a separate paramilitary force, the People's Armed Police, to respond to natural disasters, social unrest, and other domestic security issues. Tai Ming Cheung, a senior fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at University of California, San Diego, said that, in addition to preparing for a possible conflict with Taiwan, China is "focused on projecting power inside its borders, to ensure social stability."
This year, PLA units from southwestern China's Chengdu Military Region were deployed to southern areas hit by heavy snowstorms in January. In March, they were transferred to Tibetan areas of western Sichuan to pacify anti-government protests. Then, in May, the earthquake hit, and they came down from the Tibetan plateau to rescue people buried under collapsed buildings.
The range of its recent missions, and its stated mission to support national construction, national defense, and disaster relief, experts say, suggest it is still searching for its role.
Some Western analysts say that Beijing's willingness to accept aid from several foreign militaries reflects a new openness in the military that had been characterized by secrecy.
But with the earthquake zone flooded with reporters, helicopters passing overhead, and truckloads of troops present in every town, this particular mission exposed the army to public scrutiny, perhaps more than at any time since army units crushed student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing in 1989. For the first time ever, its top commanders held news briefings in Beijing to discuss the work of the troops.
Beijing asked the Pentagon's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which operates spy satellites, for high-resolution images of quake-hit regions. China also used 15 of its own satellites to gather reconnaissance, according to Eric Hagt, director of the China program for the World Security Institute in Washington. It may have asked for satellite images to show its willingness to work with the international community on a humanitarian mission, Hagt said.
After the last major earthquake, in Tangshan in 1976, the Chinese military refused foreign aid, the thinking at the time being that national disasters should be kept secret. In contrast, China's decision to allow two U.S. military transport planes to enter Chinese air space and land in Sichuan Province, Mulvenon said, was evidence of a more open and transparent military.
Chinese and Western analysts agree that the military's lack of heavy-lift helicopters and aircraft created a serious bottleneck in the early days of the relief effort. Troops had poor communications and did not have immediate access to surveillance imagery to help them make decisions, they said.
"They were visible everywhere," Hagt said of the soldiers, "but the actual achievements of the mission were far less admirable. How many more people they could have saved with the proper equipment, technology, know-how and training is hard to know."
So far, the official death count is almost 70,000. Hu, the spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Beijing, said at a news briefing May 18 that soldiers had dug out 21,666 people from the rubble. It seemed like an impressive number, perhaps too impressive. A month later, another military official clarified that the army had saved 3,336 people.
"We're mostly digging out bodies," said a soldier in the city of Dujiangyan, as he sat on the curb smoking late on the afternoon of May 15.
Moments earlier, helicopters had dropped thousands of pink paper flyers. Each leaflet had with instructions from the Chengdu Military Region, under the heading: "General Information about Saving Yourself in an Earthquake." The 72-hour "golden period" for saving people had already passed.
One Chinese reporter, who asked not to be named, traveled with a group of PLA soldiers to the town of Yingxiu, near the epicenter.
He said they got there at dusk, about 48 hours after the quake hit. The radios the soldiers carried with them had a range of only five kilometers, or three miles. Some soldiers didn't have field rations, and bought crackers to feed themselves.
Thousands of victims remained buried under collapsed buildings, including more than 200 students at the local elementary school.
Eight hundred injured people had been brought to a clearing, to wait for helicopters. But by noon the next day, few helicopters had come, and about 10 people had been evacuated by air, the reporter said. Many died in the clearing, waiting to be rescued. The medicine had run out.
The town had only a single electrical generator, and the troops had no power tools. At the Yingxiu Primary School, the soldiers dug with their hands. Some children could be heard singing under the rubble, the reporter said, presumably to keep their spirits up.
A day later, the singing stopped.
