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US-China relations
China

US must bolster its shipbuilding ports, military readiness as China keeps strengthening: analysts

  • American defence posture is vulnerable amid Beijing’s build-up of its advanced missiles, warships and technology, influential government panel told
  • Ports have been lost to ‘movie studios and craft breweries’, and US must be ‘visibly prepared for a protracted war’ to deter China, analysts add

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US President Joe Biden, speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 13, has pledged to look into a petition from a group of unions asking his administration to review China’s subsidies for shipbuilders. Photo: Bloomberg
Robert Delaneyin Washington

American policymakers were warned on Thursday not to misinterpret one of ancient China’s best-known quotes about the highest form of skill in warfare: the ability to subdue an enemy without fighting.

That was one of the key messages witnesses told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) in Washington on Thursday, along with dire calls to reestablish American shipbuilding ports lost to “movie studios and craft breweries” and to be “visibly prepared for a protracted war”.

While the essential quotation in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War might suggest to US planners that China is unlikely to launch any pre-emptive attacks on the military installations of the US and its allies in Asia, Beijing’s build-up of advanced missiles, warships and technology to drive them hints at the opposite.

Following Sun’s logic would make Beijing as inclined to strike the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems – also known as C4ISR “systems of systems” – as it would be to bide its time in reunifying Taiwan with the mainland, Michael Dahm of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a Washington-based think tank, told the advisory body.

“What Sun Tzu actually meant was that to win without fighting is to destroy your enemy before they are able to form orderly ranks,” Dahm said.

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