Do you know who this woman is to the left ? She’s Senior Colonel Yao Yunzhu.
Any clearer? She is the Chinese interface with the western military and interestingly, was seen at STRATCOM in Omaha. Still not clear? STRATCOM handles all aspects of US nuclear war, inc. strategy. A senior Chinese military figure was invited there?
Yao is currently a senior researcher at Department of World Military Studies at the Academy of Military Science (AMS). She joined the PLA in 1970. She holds a master’s degree of arts from the PLA’s Foreign Languages Institute, and a PhD in military science from the AMS – the first woman in China to earn a doctorate in this field of study.
She spent last year at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and is currently a fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
During a dinner held in early 2007 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, she became the first Chinese military officer to comment publicly about the controversial 2007 Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) test. Previously, only the Chinese Foreign Ministry had issued brief statements about the ASAT test.
General Kevin Chilton, commander of US STRATCOM invited her but in so doing, Yao, who speaks good English, may well have learned more than she gave away. Kissinger had previously praised her astuteness and grasp of international issues.
She says that there will be a militarization of space.
In the booklet Chinese Foreign Policy, Pragmatism and Strategic Behaviour, in Chapter 7 – Traditional Chinese Military Thinking, Yao and Junbo write:
There is a lot greater chance in war, said Mao, merely following traditional Chinese thinking, if the army has moral right on its side. Yao and Junbo write:
Thus:
So, take a scenario where both China and Russia have been strongly opposing the utilization and proliferation of weapons in space, on the grounds, unofficially, that they are for now outgunned and the US have been blocking limitation talks. China’s policy is “nourishing obscurity” until the time is right, at which time, they shall declare the need to put right the moral wrong.
That’s the traditional approach but Deng Xiaoping added a different approach, more closely aligned with the west – that national strategic and material interest is paramount. Yao writes that with this as a major goal but with the strategy of the moral force of right-thinking, morale and one purpose inevitably winning the day.
In practical terms, the US intransigence on space weapons would require a Chinese response, both on the grounds of morality [the safety of the world] and of national interest [the safety of China].
The authors say Mou and Li [Stratagem and Strength] are two differences between China and the west, with the Chinese depending heavily on stratagems [Sun Zi’s “subduing the enemy without fighting”] and the west on blasting through with superior weapons.
Yao says the western military thinkers turn to strength because it is easier to quantify than wisdom and westerners are “hard thinkers”, requiring concrete answers to concrete questions, relying on cut and dried truths. She says:
This is what the westerners face in their wars, e.g. Afghanistan and why the Chinese feel the west must inevitably lose. China plays a game of allowing the west to expend its effort on military action in unwinnable fights whilst back at home, the carcass of their society rots away.
When the time is right, the Chinese step in.
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