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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

China PLA Officers Urge Economic Punch Against U.S.


Senior Chinese military officers have proposed that their country boost defense spending, adjust PLA deployments, and possibly sell some U.S. bonds to punish Washington for its latest round of arms sales to Taiwan.

The calls for broad retaliation over the planned U.S. weapons sales to the disputed island came from officers at China's National Defence University and Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed by Outlook Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine published by the official Xinhua news agency.

The interviews with Major Generals Zhu Chenghu and Luo Yuan and Senior Colonel Ke Chunqiao appeared in the issue published on Monday.

China has the world's biggest pile of foreign currency reserves, much of it held in U.S. treasury debt. China held $798.9 billion in U.S. Treasuries at end-October.

But any attempt to use that stake against Washington would probably maul the value of China's own dollar-denominated assets.

China has condemned previous arms sales, but has taken little action in response to them. But Luo said the country's growing strength meant that time has passed.

"China's attitude and actions over U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan will be increasingly tough," the magazine cited him as saying. "That is inevitable with rising national strength."

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ever read....Tom Clancy?

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a war is coming......

Unknown said...

The United States is in the position where not only is there no leverage against China, but in a few keystrokes on a computer China could metaphorically bring the United States to its knees.

The full article is at http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25304-NY-Homeland-Security-Examiner~y2010m2d10-Terror-in-the-pits

Anonymous said...

I think China has successfully used our own weakness against us. We pushed to open China and we helped them market reforms to develop economically. Millions of Chinese students came to our universities. We thought freer markets and growing economic power would cause the people to demand more freedom and democracy by itself. The Chinese recognized that they could exploit us to speed up their economic development while maintaining their control over their people. Our weakness was in failing to recognize the exploitive realities of economics, and were getting exploited now because of it. Right Google? Guess your not leaving China after all are you?