The Times states:
By any measure, Mr. Hu is the most constrained Chinese leader in modern times. The notion that he could engineer a sweeping policy change the way that Mr. Deng threw open China’s economy three decades ago is unthinkable; more often he is a negotiator, brokering deals in a collective leadership where he never seemed to fully consolidate power.
Any China watcher would for years have seen that the PLA has its hands in many pots, industrial, military, financial, and as such has also stretched itself far and wide with interests in many of the countries in which one observes China's reach.
This poses a significant set of risks that we never saw in Russia. The Russian Army was under the control of the folks in Moscow, and they had no separate sources of revenue from their own businesses. They did not control telecommunications, the press, and many other key elements of their economy as the PLA does.
The position of the PLA has rarely been spoken of as what it is, a shadow government, and one whose path seems to be diverging from the apparent government. The challenge to the US will be to assure that we do not see another 1941 where a strong Army decides to go off on its own.
The Times continues:
The rise of state-owned corporate behemoths, independent power centers in their own right, has also changed the politics in China and made it harder to address disputes with the United States and other big trading partners.
But behind the behemoth is the PLA in many cases. And we are not talking with the PLA, and when we seem to approach them they stretch their wings and show their talons.
The Times then states:
China’s ban on exports of crucial rare earth minerals, cast by the government as a corporate decision made without state direction, is the most recent example of the tensions this drift toward state control has raised. But there are others: China Mobile, which dominates the nation’s vast wireless market, is pressing phone makers to adopt a Chinese standard for wireless communications that ignores the accepted global standard.
If you have 1.2 B people then who cares about a wireless standards especially if what you design allows for widespread access by the PLA and its agents. In addition when you manufacture devices and chips used elsewhere, you may make the Iranian software issue pale by comparison. We have discussed the rare earth issue several times before, well before the national press. This is a small issue which the US can overcome by just opening the mine in California if the EPA would let us. Albeit not a problem for the PLA it could become a strategic issue for the US.
We never had to negotiate with two countries with Russia, we may when dealing with China.
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