Beijing Drops the Other Shoe?

James Carafano / January 05, 2011

Yesterday, Heritage China expert Dean Cheng mused that something must be up. He wrote, “As the world rang in 2011, one of the lesser noticed events is the absence of a Chinese defense white paper for 2010. The biennial public explanation of Chinese military capabilities and intentions was due out by the end of December. Yet as of Tuesday morning, no report has been released. This is a striking omission, as the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been assiduous in producing these reports in a timely manner.”

Cheng thought maybe the Chinese had something to hide. There are a couple of high-level U.S.–Chinese meetings on the calendar: a visit of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates next week, followed by President Hu Jintao’s coming to America. So Cheng wondered that “there may be something to the report or its context that the Chinese are hesitant to highlight.”

Well, now a Japanese news network seems hot on the trail of what that might be, reporting that the “Chinese military will consider launching a preemptive nuclear strike if the country finds itself faced with a critical situation in a war with another nuclear state, internal documents showed Wednesday.” (more…)