[Airbornelawyer]

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

The chances of war with China may be small, but I think "close to nil" is an exaggeration. Taiwan and North Korea are two possible starting points, for example.

Looking at it from a Chinese perspective, there are a dozen or so potential starting points for conflict, though some are remote and others would not implicate the United States.

Numbers correspond to the attached map.

1. Civil unrest/uprising in Tibet. Probably unlikely to evolve into any sort of insurgency, but potentially a problem. There is also some question as to what degree of support China may be giving to Maoist guerrillas across the border in Nepal.

2. Conflict with India. India and China have a common border of about 2,800 miles and fought a border war in 1962. Smaller border clashes have followed, and both countries maintain large military forces in the region. Though a 1996 agreement allows for bilateral talks and confidence-building measures, the substance of the dispute is unresolved. India alternatively pursues close relationships with the US and the USSR/Russia to contain China, while China pursues such relationships with Pakistan to contain India. Both sides have nuclear weapons, though, which tends to moderate their behavior.

3. Civil unrest/uprising in Chinese Turkestan. Though they don't make the news much, China has millions of Turkic Muslims who don't particularly like being under China's thumb. When there was a Soviet Union, both countries had a common interest in suppressing their Turkic populations. But now China borders two independent Turkic countries - Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. While neither is a military threat to China, or is even especially inclined to support Islamists among China's Muslims, they still threaten Chinese control by virtue of (i) their very existence and (ii) the fact that as China prospers economically, even poorer Uighurs can get access to Turkish satellite television broadcasts in Central Asia and see what they are lacking. China has done and will continue to do everything it can to portray any dissent among these Turkic Muslims as part of the grand Islamist conspiracy, in the hopes that we will condone or at least ignore the measures they take to suppress dissent.

4. Mongolia. China still considers Mongolia to merely be Outer Mongolia awaiting return to the Chinese fold, but they aren't in any hurry to reclaim the country. China is worried, however, by two things. First, Mongolia has aggressively cultivated good relations with the United States, even sending troops to Iraq (after a 700-year absence). Second, Mongolian pop culture is seeping into China, undermining Chinese social control in Inner Mongolia (a Mongolian heavy metal band whose heroes are Metallica recently had its music banned in China). Only a slight threat that anything might happen militarily, but it does contribute to China's sense of paranoia.

5. The last Sino-Soviet border conflict was, like the Sino-Indian Border War, some time ago. And China is now Russia's largest customer for military hardware. But some degree of tension remains. Possibility of a war between the two countries is remote, but I have seen some rather outlandish scenarios (not including those in Tom Clancy novels) that factor in such a conflict.

6. North Korea. In the near term, if there were to be any conflict between China and one of its neighbors, war with North Korea actually seems the most likely. Even the old Communists of the Chinese politburo have to be worried about North Korean irrationality, and China already maintains a cordon sanitaire on its side of the border to deal with refugees fleeing North Korea. It is not far-fetched to imagine China pushing that cordon sanitaire closer to and across the border, and the DPRK not reacting too favorably to their Communist brothers.

7. A naval incident, fishing rights dispute or dispute over other issues (missile defense, North Korea, Taiwan, trade) could lead to a conflict in the East China Sea directly with Japan, South Korea or the US. Again, somewhat remote, but maybe NDD is right that the USAF and Navy need some scenario to justify those F-22s and CBGs.

8. Volumes have been written on a war between the PRC and the ROC, and whether and how that would implicate the US.

9. It hasn't been talked about much recently, but before 9-11, there was a fair amount of debate over the possibility of conflict in the South China Sea over the disputed Spratley and Paracel Islands. Everyone in the region - the PRC, the ROC, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam - lays some sort of claim, and the potential oil and natural gas reserves there make it something the parties might consider worth fighting over. The islands and surrounding shipping lanes are also prone to piracy, so trading countries outside of the region, including Japan and the US, also have to be concerned.

10. China's last border war with Vietnam was 1979. It exposed the weaknesses of the PLA's conventional military forces, as Vietnamese gunners picked off Chinese tank unit commanders opening their hatches to use signal flags to command their units. That dismal showing was probably as much an impetus for Deng Xiaoping's modernizations as any worries about the USSR and the US. Like most of the other border war scenarios, a renewed conflict is a remote possibility, but it remains there. In connection with a conflict over the Spratleys, the possibility increases slightly, but is still rather remote.

11. I threw this one in even though I have no idea what the potentiality for a conflict is here. Burma, like North Korea is a rogue state with otherwise good relations with China. I suppose if there is a threat it arises less from conventional sources like a border dispute than from unconventional sources like narco-trafficking. If Chinese economic growth leads to its growing middle class becoming consumers of drugs, China might decide it needs its own counternarcotics strategy. Burma could be China's Colombia.

You can add your own speculative scenarios too. Two I did not put on the map were a direct conflict with the United States not involving a regional conflict, and civil unrest among the Han Chinese themselves, as opposed to minorities like the Uighurs and Tibetans. As to the latter, it's been 15 years since Tiananmen, but the memory remains. The Communist Party has to be paying close attention to various more recent manifestations of people power around the world, too. Even China's economic growth has the seeds of conflict, as it is creating two Chinas - one China where a growing middle class is seeing its economic prosperity not matched by the political freedom it increasingly learns is enjoyed by middle classes in other countries, and another China of tens or even hundreds of millions of people still living in pre-industrial conditions in villages without paved roads or running water.