Why China's Military May Be a Paper Tiger

I'm not sure how I found it, but there is a blog out there, 傻冒儿 Stupid Hat aka ShaMao'er that I check out regularly.

He has some very good insights into China, being of Chinese ancestry, having gone to PRC in the in the 1990s, and now working on issues of US/Chinese trade.

Truth be told, that there is a lot that Chinese and Americans don't understand about each other, and his posts, roughly biweekly or so, tend to provide a lot of insight through the little things that reflect on culture.

Case in point: a few days ago, he was mused in a post titled Demographic defeat on the capabilities of the Chinese army to manage a protracted struggle.

He wondered whether the long standing one child per family policy may be making the PLA a hollow force:

Basically, my friend’s argument boils down to the fact that in Chinese culture, both traditional and modern, the family name is sacrosanct. It is intolerable for a family to be left without sons to carry on the name and lineage. While there is some semblance of this sentiment in the West as well, I came to appreciate that it is a far more important matter to Chinese than it is to Westerners. That is why people know the story of Marshall Peng. [The possibly apocryphal tale of Chinese army in Korea during the war being mobilized to "Save Private Ryan"] That is why people know some poems that deal with this subject. It is apparently a recurrent tragic theme in Chinese art and culture and is simply intolerable.

So, according to this theory, given the one-child policy that has been in place since the mid-1970’s, a good portion of the Red Army’s rank and file are currently single children. Given the exemptions for some rural people and for ethnic minorities and others some maybe in 2 child families but in any case the fact remains that a very large portion of the Army will be the single male child. In the event of a serious military conflict, this fact would render China unable to wage a protracted and costly struggle. The tearing of the social fabric that the loss of so many male family heirs would entail would break Chinese society and public outrage would end the conflict. Although Nationalism is a very potent force in China that would propel conflict, the decimation of family lines would easily trump it.

Obviously the death of a child in wartime is always a personal tragedy, but he makes an interesting point, which I would like to discuss with my neighbor, who works with Army Intel with a specialization in China and the Chinese language.