China = Q.C. Disaster

You think the U.S. has problems with trapped miners, collapsing bridges and extreme weather? Well, check out this round-up of headlines from China this weekend:

"Typhoon Sepat hits China after mass evacuation"
"Hopes dim for over 180 trapped miners in China"
"Death toll in China bridge collapse climbs to 64"

Wait a minute! you’re thinking. This is a military blog! Why do we even care about China’s safety and quality-control crisis? Because Pentagon brass tout China as the next Soviet Union in a future Cold War. But China’s fast-expanding military has many of the same problems as its quality-impaired civil sector. Take submarines, for example. Four years ago, mechanical failures aboard an outdated Chinese submarine resulted in the deaths of 70 sailors. This was no isolated incident, as U.S. Navy Captain Brad Kaplan, the U.S. Naval Attaché to China, explained in a recent issue of Sea Power:

Although it deploys a force of more than 60 submarines, [People’s Liberation Army Navy] units lag behind Western standards, and most weapons and sensor systems are based on older Russian technology. … The PLAN’s four Kilo units remain the submarine force’s most capable boats, although the capability of their crews to operate them effectively in a tactical environment is suspect. … Progress in replacing aging Han-class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) with the new generation Type 093 SSN has been slow. The Type 093 SSNs have been compared in capability to the Russian Victor III SSN class [from the 1970s].

Liselotte Odgaard from the MIT Center for International Studies, drew the bottom line in a piece for AlterNet:

*Chinese dependency on Russian arms deliveries and its arduous efforts to catch up with the Revolution in Military Affairs imply that China is far from the U.S. level of military prowess, especially in naval and aerial capabilities. A well-equipped and well-trained navy and air force is a necessary condition for exercising strategic influence in large parts of China’s Asian home region, such as the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, the Taiwan Strait and the Japanese isles. This goal remains out of China’s reach for several decades. *

In related news, Beijing is finally opening up its once entirely state-owned defense industry to private investment, only a couple centuries behind the U.S.