American troops watch President Barack Obama in South Korea (White House photo)

James Fallows has a very interesting five-part series of posts (one, two, three, four, five) making the case that the U.S. media has been unfair in its portrayals of Barack Obama’s trip to China and that things actually went considerably better than the chatterers in DC would have you know.

He makes a strong case, but it’s difficult to get around the point that it’s hard to see why the President would fly to China unless the U.S. and Chinese foreign ministries already had some serious agreements ready to sign. There wasn’t a major multilateral conference in China that Obama had to attend. China’s not a longstanding American ally that gets a courtesy call just to say “hi.” If China and the United States weren’t prepared to announce major breakthroughs on major issues, that’s fine, but then why not save the trip for some future date when the breakthroughs are ready? There are worse things than a big trip that doesn’t end up with any key takeaways—the Bush administration appeared to have reached a one-sided nuclear deal with India a few years ago merely because they didn’t want to leave a presidential trip to India empty-handed—but it’s bound to leave people puzzled. At the end of the day, being president is a very busy job . . . what’s the need for superfluous trips?  

No president is going to be able to lay down the law on human rights, exchange rates, or sanctions on Iran when China owns over a trillion dollars in U.S. assets, when the U.S. economy is on life support, and when the American military Is mired in two losing wars. Until we get our house in order over here, nobody should expect China to be especially responsive to our wishes or expect its leaders to view the “American model” as especially appealing.

My question is, in the specific case of the US-China currency dispute what leverage does Chinese ownership of US assets give them? If we annoy them too much about our desire to see their currency appreciate, they might sell their dollar-denominated assets thus . . . causing their currency to appreciate? It doesn’t add up. China isn’t buying that stuff as a favor to us that they can then revoke. They’re buying it as an integral element of their exchange rate policy.

The real question about this is whether American officials really want them to stop. They say they do. But while dollar depreciation would be good for the American labor market, and good for the long-term balance of the world economy, it could make the deficit situation more urgent.

The entire world economy is being held hostage to a dynamic in which China links the value of its currency to the value of the dollar in order to prevent the frictional unemployment and related disruptions that would be involved in letting it right. This is created too much unemployment in China, it’s depriving other poor countries of opportunities to grow, it underlies the Giant Pool of Money phenomenon, and it’s clearly unsustainable.

But nobody seems to have any really great ideas for turning this around. Krugman’s column says “behind the scenes [Obama] better be warning the Chinese that they’re playing a dangerous game” and Wolf frames his column as what Obama should have said to Hu, concluding “Did Mr Obama speak so bluntly? Probably not. Should he have? Yes, I think he should.” But I don’t think there’s any really strong case to be made that Chinese leaders are unaware of the problem here. Two different U.S. administrations have made the point, Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the IMF has made the point, Chinese officials are probably capable of reading major FT and NYT columnists on their own, etc. And that’s fine—the real jobs of a Wolf or a Krugman are to lay out the economic issues, not the diplomatic solutions. But the Obama administration and its colleagues in Tokyo and Brussels do need to figure out a way to make the needed rebalancing of global trade flows happen. That means diplomatic and intelligence resources, staff time at high levels, etc.

Ellen Nakashima and John Pomfret have an interesting article on China’s exploration of internet-based national security capabilities. But one unfortunate aspect of it is a tendency to run together intelligence activities with warfighting activities.

They open, for example, with the fact that the Chinese government appears to have intercepted confidential emails from the McCain and Obama campaigns and then write this:

American presidential campaigns are not the only targets. China is significantly boosting its capabilities in cyberspace as a way to gather intelligence and, in the event of war, hit the U.S. government in a weak spot, U.S. officials and experts say. Outgunned and outspent in terms of traditional military hardware, China apparently hopes that by concentrating on holes in the U.S. security architecture — its communications and spy satellites and its vast computer networks — it will collect intelligence that could help it counter the imbalance.

“In the event of war” both the United States and China are equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. When the PRC already has the ability to destroy Los Angeles, worrying that in the future they may add the ability to read our email doesn’t make a ton of sense. By contrast, the ability to read email is a perfectly useful peacetime capability for a government that’s perhaps interested in what people’s emails say. But this is more or less on a par with longstanding signals intelligence as practiced by all majors countries—it’s not some kind of new superweapon that neutralizes our considerable military superiority.

An interesting take from Reihan Salam:

But as Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong argued in his brilliant 1992 book The Discourse of Race in Modern China, traditional notions about culturally inferior “barbarians” intermingled with Western forms of scientific racism to form a distinctively Chinese racial consciousness in the 20th century. The “yellows” were locked in a struggle with their equals, the “whites”–and both were superior to the “blacks,” “browns” and “reds.” The dislike and distrust of Europeans was always mixed with envy and admiration. The disdain for dark-skinned foreigners, in contrast, was and remains relatively uncomplicated. Maoist China railed against Western imperialism, and saw itself as a leader of the global proletariat of Africans and Asians.

Now, as China emerges as an economic and cultural superpower, those notions of Third World solidarity, always skin deep, seem to have vanished. It is thus hard to imagine China welcoming millions of hard-working Nigerians and Bangladeshis with open arms. This could change over the next couple of decades as China’s labor shortage grows acute. I wouldn’t bet on it.

If China remains culturally closed, the Chinese Century will never come to pass. Instead, the United States–a country that has struggled with race and racism for centuries, and in the process has become more culturally open and resilient–will dominate this century as it did the last.

I don’t really think speculation about who will “dominate” this century is a great way to think about things. Almost certainly in 2079 the United States of America will have less relative power than it does today, and that will almost certainly be a good thing—it will be because people in China and India and Brazil and Indonesia are richer and because Europe continues on a path of peace and integration. What’s more the reality is that countries with very divergent immigration policies (the US on the one hand, Japan on the other, or even compare Sweden and Denmark right next door to each other but with very different immigration regimes) can all be quite successful. But I agree with one of the key themes here. Precisely because the United States has struggled with racism throughout its history, we’re now much better socially and politically equipped to handle ethnic diversity in an amicable way than are many other places.

But suppose we buy into the more common negative current view of finance. There is still a big open question. Beginning in the early 1980s, the developed world and some big players in the developing world experienced a period of extraordinary growth. It’s reasonable to argue that in facilitating the flow of world savings to productive uses around the world, financial markets and financial institutions played a big role in this growth. Despite any role of finance in the current recession, are the market naysayers really ready to argue that worldwide wealth would be higher today if financial markets and financial institutions didn’t develop as they did?

A banker in Frankfurt put this same point to me, apparently believing it’s a brilliant argumentative trump card. In reality, it’s a bit nuts—it’s relying on a post-1980 boom that didn’t happen. The United States didn’t start growing faster in 1980:

The claim you’re supposed to make on behalf of the post-1980 US economy isn’t that it’s grown faster (it hasn’t!) but that it’s been less variable than was growth in the early postwar decades. That’s why the term “Great Moderation” was termed. Except in the wake of the current bust, it’s clear that no such decrease in variation was actually achieved. Growth has been the same as it was before, and yet median income growth has been substantially slower. In Europe and Japan growth post-1980 has been much worse than growth was in the previous decades.

The place where growth really has been much better since 1980 than it was before is China. This is not a fact to be neglected. Chinese growth has been very rapid, and very consistently maintained. And a very large number of people live in China, people who started this process being very poor. The past 30 years’ worth of economic growth in China have done an enormous amount to improve human welfare.

But the cause of this turnaround pretty clearly wasn’t financial deregulation in the developed world. It was policy shifts in China—the process, commenced by Deng Xiaoping, of moving away from central planning and joining the global economy. This doesn’t strike me as even remotely debatable. When we look at impressive growth over the past 30 years were looking at policy shifts in China, the success of container shipping, and to an extent shifts in developed world trade policy.

Paul Krugman has a wise column about the havoc being wreaked by China’s refusal to let its currency get more expensive relative to the dollar. Krugman thinks we should be trying to do something about this. But as Dan Drezner observes, though China’s dollar-linkage policy is a problem for us, it’s a much bigger problem for Europe and other developing countries:

As a matter of direct economic interest, however, why haven’t the Europeans and East Asians been screaming bloody murder about this? China’s policies are forcing them to take actions they don’t want to take — so why aren’t they complaining more loudly about this?

Why?

Optimistically, it’s been my experience that members of other countries tend to have a better appreciation than America does that making loud public demands is often a counterproductive diplomatic approach. But one has to fear that the real culprit here may be the European Central Bank’s weird deflationary bias.

Daniel Strauss asked via twitter what I think of this idea from Sidney Rittenburg:

If you had a second party alternative in China now, I think it would be an anti-foreign party. What else could you see as a platform to challenge the Communist Party, but to oppose the foreigners who are “buying up Chinese resources”?… There has to be a period of generally unfolding democracy. Not bang, all at once. And I think that will happen. I think it’s happening much too slowly.

I think it’s hard to know how exactly to evaluate that claim without specifying the counterfactual in more detail. What I do think is true is that people are sorely mistaken if they think a more democratic China would also be a China that’s less inclined to challenge US hegemony. The present Chinese leadership is almost entirely focused on economic growth and full employment as a way to stay in office. Some alternative version of Chinese politics would have more time for other projects.

Mansfield & Snyder argue persuasively in Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War that countries experiencing a transition to democracy are unusually likely to start wars. Basically it’s a good way for leaders in emerging democracies to corral public support.

This may surprise some of you, but within the walls of 1301 Pennsylvania Ave., there is a pretty lively debate among the scholars and staff who work here about whether or not we should continue a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan when we might instead be focusing on preserving our energies for rising powers. Obviously enough, those of us who work on Afghanistan and counterinsurgency feel one way (more or less), while those who work on China and the rest of Asia feel another way (again, more or less — it’s not a black-and-white disagreement)

I suppose you can therefore construct the following esoteric argument in favor of an ambitious COIN strategy in Afghanistan. Such an approach would probably be an unnecessary waste of resources in some absolute sense, but it’s a much better idea than an actively counterproductive anti-Chinese defense buildup would be. So if we assume the military-industrial complex has the ability to extract a more-or-less fixed quantity of resources out of the productive sectors of the economy, difficult COIN missions in backwater regions seems like a relatively benign application of those resources.

Joking aside, it’s worth keeping in mind when you see arguments about counterinsurgency that there are really two different debates happening. One is the debate inside the military and the defense policy establishment which is really a debate about COIN versus non-COIN military activity. Another is a debate about that pertains to the larger question of the strategic and budgetary priorities of the United States. In my experience COIN enthusiasts tend to have the better of the limited argument about the relative allocation of military resources, but generally decline to engage in a serious way with the larger question of national priorities. In other words, a debate that ranges from “we should fight a series of small wars against Muslims” to “we should prepare for a big war against China” is really seen as “lively” rather than incredibly cramped and narrow.

Noam Scheiber has a fascinating article on Chinese worries about the U.S. budget deficit and American policymakers’ efforts to calm those fears. The piece doesn’t really point to a hard-and-fast conclusion about how to resolve the situation and that’s more or less the problem:

The day China consumes more, relies less on exports, and accumulates far fewer dollars as a result can’t come soon enough. There’s a certain mutually-assured-destruction quality to our current relationship–Larry Summers calls it the “balance of financial terror”–in which one false move by either side could bring down both economies, and probably the entire global financial system, too. This makes dialogue a necessity. But what it really does is make you pine for a way back from the edge.

As The Atlantic’s James Fallows has pointed out, even if both sides behave responsibly, there’s the persistent risk of miscalculation–or maybe a rumor that triggers a bond market sell-off China didn’t intend. During the cold war, the hotline Kennedy and Khrushchev established was genuinely stabilizing, but it would have been far more stabilizing had the United States and Soviet Union stopped training thousands of nuclear warheads at one another. If, to stick with the analogy, the U.S.­-China relationship is only in the early 1960s, then it’s going to be a long couple of decades indeed.

It strikes me that any rational person looking at how the health care debate has unfolded is going to grow substantially more skeptical about the ability of the United States to pass major legislation in general. What’s more, if you contrast the health care situation with the relative ease with which it was possible to enact debt-financed tax cuts (in 2001 and 2003) and a debt-financed increase in Medicare spending (in 2003) you’re not going to get super-optimistic about the prospects of deficit reducing legislation passing in the future.

SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse, Paris (wikimedia)

Noam Scheiber has an interesting article in The New Republic laying out in some detail why even though the recession may be over real recovery is likely to take a long time. The basic issue is debt overhand. During a bubble, most people and firms began acting as if they owned lots of very valuable assets against which they could borrow money. Then the bubble pops, and it turns out that everything everyone owns isn’t worth as much as they thought. But their debts still are! That means that spending relative to income needs to become a lot lower than it was during the boom, and stay a lot lower for quite some time until things can balance out again:

Absent a strong demand for exports, the most plausible way for a country to crawl out of this kind of recession is for households to keep paying off debt until they can afford to spend again. Indeed, as Paul Krugman argued in a recent lecture series at the London School of Economics, the reason the United States didn’t slip back into depression after World War II–something many economists feared at the time–is that, 15 years after the initial crash, people had finally put their finances in order.

The trouble is that fifteen years is too long a time. What’s needed is something to spark an investment boom. Scheiber wants that to be industrial policy:

So far as I can tell, the only solution to the underlying economic problem is something that’s been a dirty word in Washington the last generation or two: industrial policy (that is, an active government role in the development of certain industries.) In his LSE lectures, Krugman quipped that “if someone could invent the 21-st century moral equivalent of the railroad, or actually even the moral equivalent of IT in the ’90s, that would help a lot.” I agree–that would help a lot. But waiting around for this to happen seems risky when the alternative is a decade of stagnation.

He thinks industrial policy can solve this problem. I think this is a bit like solving your problem by assuming a can opener. The problem with industrial policy isn’t that good industrial policy wouldn’t be a good idea, the problem is that nobody knows how to do good industrial policy on a systematic basis. If you scour world history for examples of industrial policy paying off you’ll find some, but you’ll also find tons of failures. Simply wanting it to work doesn’t resolve that issue.

That said, couldn’t the moral equivalent of the railroad be . . . the railroad. High-speed passenger rail is not, in fact, a brand new technology but from the perspective of the United States it might as well be. After all, we currently have exactly zero miles of true HSR coverage in this country. None. And it’s not even remotely a speculative technology it works perfectly well. It’s just expensive to build. Very expensive. But insofar as the idea is actually that we’re looking for very expensive medium-term investments that’s more feature than bug. For that matter, there’s also the very old and extremely proven technology of intra-city heavy rail, i.e. metro systems. Digging subway tunnels underneath developed portions of growing metropolitan areas, packing stations relatively close together, and allowing greater density to arise near the stations is an absolutely proven strategy for driving fixed investment and spurring growth. Again, the reason not to do it is that it’s extremely expensive. But if the view is that we ought to spend huge sums of money on something, this strikes me as more promising than hoping the government can direct future technological development.

Alternatively, Ryan Avent hopes Chinese demand can save the world.

Yesterday I found myself reading with interests about the Chinese government’s plans for expansion of the Shanghai Metro. Very sensibly, there’s not only an ongoing expansion plan designed to last through 2020, but there’s also an even longer-range plan looking forward to 2050. This seems like the right way to do it—everyone expects Shanghai to continue growing throughout this period, so it’s only sensible to operate with a long-run plan in mind. A plan that’s subject to revision, to be sure, but that can guide current decision-making and ensure that there’s always some more projects ready to come online if the resources become available.

What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, DC metro area will continue to add population. And people likewise clearly envision there being additional square feet of office space in the District and they’re also envision an increase in the District’s population. On top of that, we’re also trying to envision a less carbon-intensive future. All this pretty clearly implies that there ought to be some sort of plan in place for building additional Metro capacity through the central city. After all, the system is currently near its capacity for moving people, and the lack of any redundancy is already hurting us badly whenever any kind of problems arise.

Of course with plans in place the question would still arise of whether or not it’s possible to find the funds necessary to execute the construction of a new core-serving line. But my point would be that first things should come first, and you should always have plans in place so that you can be prepared to make the case for funding and think logically about the design of the metro area and the role transit can play. Instead, though, when we finish building something we tend to just . . . finish . . . as if further population growth somehow took us by surprise.

Well, I think it’s pretty clear that in an enormous, poor, authoritarian country you’re never going to get official statistics that are quite right. But there’s been a lot of disagreement since the recession really hit about exactly how unreliable Chinese economic data is. Officially, their stimulus program is working well and though growth is well down from its peak, it’s still quite robust. But there are a lot of doubts out there, but Jamil Anderlini from the Financial Times casts some further doubt.

The crux of the matter is that in addition to national economic statistics, China’s regions publish numbers. If you tally up the regional numbers, you basically always get a figure that’s higher than the overall national number, presumably because the leadership in each region has an incentive to fudge. And now:

In recent years, provincial figures have suggested consistently the world’s third-largest economy is bigger than Beijing’s published estimate, but the discrepancy appears to have widened this year.

Even state-controlled media reports and editorials have in recent days raised questions over their accuracy.

The Global Times, controlled by the People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, reported that the public reacted with “banter and sarcasm” to NBS figures showing average urban wages in China rose 13 per cent in the first half to $2,142.

John Makin has a helpful explanation of how China does national accounting statistics and how that interacts with the stimulus.

People Liberation Army Navy Sailor (wikimedia)

What Spencer Ackerman said:

John Cornyn said that we need the F-22 to fight our ally India, which is, you know, fucking crackers. According to Eric Kleefeld, he’s now clarified that to mean we need the plane in the event that we’d fight China. It’s kind of amazing that such a clarification is considered less insane.

It’s not inconceivable that at some future point the United States and China could become locked into some sort of worldwide Cold War-style conflict. But it’s crucial to recognize that a world that looks like that is going to be a stupendously bad future—in terms of economic growth, in terms of the prospects for human rights and democracy around the world, in terms of the global environment, etc.—compared to the future in which the U.S. and China are able to maintain a basically cooperative relationship. Building a dedicated “let’s go to war with China” weapons platform is going to make the conflict scenario more likely and the cooperative scenario less likely.

It’s fascinating to consider how much money could be made if 15-20 years from now consumption in China and India is up to the level currently seen in, say, Brazil. Coke’s most recent annual report indicates that Chinese consumption of Coca-Cola Company products increased from eight servings per capita in 1998 to 28 in 2008.

Meanwhile, National Review’s Andy McCarthy seems to have decided that since Uighurs are Muslims, violent Communist Party crackdowns must be a good thing.

Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki

One problem in the international realm is that unproductive conflicts between nations are exciting and headline grabbing, while amicable positive-sum interests tend to be a bit boring. Thus Barack Obama heading to Russia, focusing his summit activities on an issue where agreement was likely, and coming away quickly with an agreement in principle to hammer out the details of big bilateral cuts in nuclear arsenals hasn’t attracted much attention. If Obama had done something much less intelligent and gotten in a big, but ultimately pointless, public argument with the Russians about NATO membership for Ukraine or something it probably would have gotten more play. But agreement is good and conflict is bad. Leaders who seek agreement should be rewarded. And it ought to be noted that what’s been agreed to is a pretty big deal:

Arms-control analysts who support Obama’s determination to conclude a new START agreement say that the stated reductions are significant because they are realistic enough to receive the legislative-branch ratification required in both countries, yet ambitious enough to act as a first step toward Obama’s vision of a world eventually free of nuclear arsenals.

“They’ve hit the sweet spot in finding numbers that will be a significant reduction and likely to get the necessary support in their respective parliaments,” says Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington foundation focused on nuclear-weapons reduction and nonproliferation.

The numbers announced Monday, Mr. Cirincione notes, amount to a 30 percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two countries that possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

In other words, that’s a roughly 28 percent reduction in the total number of nuclear weapons in the world. It’s also a powerful signal to the French, British, and especially Chinese that the United States and Russia are serious about reducing arsenals and that the Obama administration really wants to pursue a nuclear-free world. The fact that the US and Russia contain such a large proportion of global nukes is, after all, a bit of an anachronism as in pretty much all other respects China has clearly replaced Russia as the number two geopolitical player and in some domains the European Union has set itself up as a more-or-less independent great power. It would be very plausible for the Chinese (and much less plausible, though still possible, for the Europeans) to decide they need to react to this situation by “leveling up” and building their own arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons.

Steps that give the Chinese confidence that they don’t need to do that, that the US and Russia are prepared to level down, will do an enormous amount to help build a more peaceful, more secure world. Not only in terms of the US-China relationship, but also in terms of India’s thinking about its nuclear needs and therefore Pakistan’s thinking and therefore the general problem of proliferation around the world. These reductions, if they come to pass, will be a huge deal.

Chiang Kai-Shek (Library of Congress)

For several decades around the middle of the twentieth century, US policy toward China was heavily influenced by the “China lobby,” an amalgamation of evangelicals interested in Chinese missionary work, businessmen interested in the Chinese market, members of the Kuomintang political elite, and Cold War ultra-hawks who pushed the United States toward heavy alignment with the KMT and policies of brinksmanship with Communist China.

Robert Farley takes a look back at their heyday:

The language that the China Lobby used to preclude US rapproachment with China will be familiar to contemporary readers; China was a rogue state that could use its nuclear weapons randomly at any given time, and as such wasn’t fit for diplomacy. At one point, Chiang Kai Shek claimed knowledge of the location of the most important Chinese nuclear facilities, and suggested that he could take them out, if only the US would loosen the leash a bit. The PRC, it seemed, was full of atheist maniacs who didn’t believe that 72 virgins would be waiting for them when they died, and consequently could do ANYTHING. Lousy atheists. Anyway, strategic considerations (and sanity) precluded any meaningful unleashing of Chiang, but the influence of the Lobby in the executive branch and in Congress helped prevent a Sino-American dialogue over Vietnam, the final status of Korea, the role of the PRC at the UN, and the potential for collaboration with the Soviet Union. When any President hinted at acknowledging the PRC, the Lobby could arm Congressional opponents with money and righteous rhetoric about the dangers of appeasing Beijing. Nixon was able to break the cycle, in part because the most vocal China advocates came from within his own party, but also because of the shifting strategic situation of the early 1970s. Concern about increasing Soviet power and the need for a way out of Vietnam eventually overwhelmed the story that the Lobby was trying to sell.

At any rate, I don’t like arguments purely by analogy, but one point I try to make in my book is that while neoconservatism is a relatively new phenomenon, the basic ideas that undergirded the neocon foreign policy approach in the early 21st century have a long lineage in twentieth century American foreign policy. And it’s a lineage of pretty consistent wrongness. The main difference is that in the 20th century these impulses were usually either checked (no engagement with the PRC, but no “unleashing” of Chiang either) or else channeled into relatively unimportant developing world sideshows (Arbenz coup, assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the contra war). Under Bush, however, this approach came to be applied to the central areas of strategic concern for the United States with catastrophic results.

Relatedly, if you want to understand the intellectual decline of the Bush family, this weird anecdote about unleashing Chiang is priceless.

For quite a while, I subscribed to the theory that China’s capitalist development would require the diffusion of modern information technology, and the diffusion of modern information technology would necessarily tend to undermine the Communist Party’s dictatorship. But over the past few years, the dictatorship has proven itself to be much more resourceful about squaring this circle than a lot of us used to assume was possible. The key factor is that the Chinese market is so enormous that China can impose rules like this new one and know that many companies will want to play along:

China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet. The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC’s starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.

This also highlights why political developments in China are so crucial for the entire world. If, say, Iran tried to do this it almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But companies will fall all over each other to cater to the Chinese market. Then, once the technology is in place other autocracies can try to piggyback on work that’s been done in and for China. But absent China, almost all of world output would be happening in democratic nations, and it would be easy to structure the global economy in the kind of way optimists were hoping it would work for China.

Robert Farley brings to my attention the news that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has reached an agreement with the government of Brazil to begin training PLAN pilots on board the Sao Paulo. This is big news. Difficult and expensive as it is to build and aircraft carrier, and the planes to fly on it, and the ships to protect it, it’s probably even more difficult to get personnel who are trained in the art of naval aviation:

Aircraft carriers represent a huge investment of time and effort. Apart from the carrier itself and the aircraft, a navy needs to assemble a battlegroup capable of protecting the carrier, and needs to master fixed wing big deck carrier operations. This last is exceptionally complicated, and its difficulty is not to be underestimated. Operating a modern aircraft carrier requires a high level of professionalism and expertise on the part of the pilots, the aircrew, and the ship’s regular complement. For example, taking off from and landing on a carrier is much more complicated than similar operations on land. Pilots also have to master a set of navigational skills that will guarantee they can find their carrier under adverse conditions. The maintenance requirements for aircraft at sea are much greater than for aircraft on land, because of the corrosive effect of seawater. Coordinating an air group at sea is difficult, and coordinating take offs and landings such that sorties can be maximized is very difficult indeed. We know all this because it took the United States quite some time to master jet aircraft operations on big deck carriers. Until the Chinese master such operations, they’re looking forward to large numbers of accidents and carriers of limited effectiveness.

The easiest way to get the job done is to get help. A handful of people training alongside a large group that already knows what it’s doing is a lot more practical than trying to train everyone up simultaneously from scratch. Right now, only Russia, the United States, France, and Brazil operate carriers that carry conventional aircraft so learning from Brazil will be very useful for the Chinese. And the Chinese have the economic clout to be useful to Brazil in a variety of ways.

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