Guest post by my friend and colleague M. Taylor Fravel, Associate Professor of Political Science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He can be followed on Twitter @fravel.
At the end of 2011, a study by the Asian Arms Control Project at Georgetown University on China’s nuclear forces attracted a great deal of attention, including a page one article in The Washington Post. The project documented the construction of networks of tunnels by the Second Artillery, the PLA’s strategic rocket forces, and suggested that China might have as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads – a figure roughly ten times higher than the current estimates of the U.S. government and independent research organizations such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Experts and analysts quickly challenged many of the study’s most provocative claims about the number of Chinese warheads and fissile material production. Questions were also raised about the Chinese-language sources that formed the basis of the study’s conclusions. A key source for the study’s claim about the number of warheads was Chinese blog posts. To track down the original source for this claim, Greg Kulacki from the Union of Concerned Scientists, traveled to several libraries, including one in Hong Kong. He learned that the original source was an article by a junior American naval officer published in 1986 whose data was reprinted in a 1995 Chinese-language magazine published in Hong Kong, repeated in an anonymous Usenet bulletin board post and subsequently recycled through online discussion forums for the next decade or so.
The Georgetown team trumpeted their use of open or unclassified Chinese-language sources of information as a new resource for the study of China’s military. As other scholars and I documented back in 2005, a veritable explosion of open-source information from China about military affairs has occurred, much of it online. These sources include the PLA’s official publications such as newspapers, journals, and books, as well as unofficial sources, including popular magazines, online discussion forums, and unofficial websites.
Still, as Kulacki’s leg-work demonstrates, the proliferation of such open sources is a mixed blessing for scholars and analysts of the PLA. On the one hand, more information is now accessible, which should improve the quality of research. On the other hand, more information than any one individual can digest is now available – and mostly only in Chinese.
The volume of Chinese-language information now available places a premium on verifying the accuracy and authoritativeness of data from unofficial sources, especially blogs and online discussion forums. Otherwise, the Internet becomes a convenient tool, unwittingly or not, for “information laundering” defined as concealing or masking the origins of a piece of data.
The seriousness of information laundering is evident throughout the Georgetown study. Glancing through the slides of the presentation, one claim caught my eye: that the Second Artillery had 12 launch brigades facing India, including eight in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. This was curious for two reasons. First, the Second Artillery has only about thirty brigades, the majority of which are located in either China’s hinterland or coastal provinces, not near India. Second, there are no confirmed reports of Second Artillery brigades inside Tibet.
The sources for this claim in the Georgetown study demonstrates how easily information can be laundered online. The first source was a segment from a military news show from the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV network. The second source was a post from a now defunct blog, www.chinese-army.com (that only appeared to be online for the month of November 2010 according to this cache of the site). The blog post was redundant, as it only contained a crude machine translation of the transcript of the television segment.
The Phoenix television segment, however, was based not on information from China, but instead from India. The segment was entitled “The Indian media states that the PLA has deployed 12 missile brigades on the border aimed at India” (印媒称解放军边境部署12个导弹旅瞄准印度). The source for the segment was reportedly an essay in the Times of India by a former Chief of the Army Staff of the Indian Army. Yet a search of the Times of India’s website as well as the news database Lexis-Nexis couldn’t locate this essay. As a result, the claim in the Georgetown study about Chinese missile brigades in Tibet was thoroughly laundered. The original source for the claim can’t even be identified, much less verified.
Open-source information holds great promise for the study of China’s rapidly changing military. But they must be used with great care, especially if the data comes from unofficial outlets such as blog posts and online forums. Just because a piece of information about the PLA is available on the Internet in Chinese doesn’t endow it with authoritativeness in the absence of verification and corroboration.
This article originally appeared in The Diplomat.
Related posts:
Ray Kwong is senior advisor to the USC US-China Institute, a charter member of the Asian International Business Advisory Group, a Forbes contributing writer and columnist for the Hong Kong Economic Journal. He is currently facilitating talks between China and U.S. interests on such matters as clean energy economics, nanotechnology and commercial aerospace. While it sounds way cooler than it really is, he is also a member of the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Market Advisory Board and the McKinsey Quarterly Executive Panel. You can follow him on Twitter @raykwong. Eyeball Ray's posts from Forbes ChinaTalk.
Ray Kwong has 17 post(s) on Asia Security Watch
1 comment
HB Pencil says:
Jan 12, 2012
Thank you for this post. I read that Washington post article and wondered about its validity (even the article suggests that there is significant pushback from seasoned observers.) I felt that that the real value of their work was training a new generation of intelligence analysts in what was looking like a dying art from cold war.
The actual value of the project as intelligence resource seemed to fall short. There is only so much you can do with the limited intelligence capabilities available in the public sphere and this article really illustrated that. Basically Karber stretched ever resource possible and the best guess he had was 3000 warheads… which to me indicated their best guess was based on extremely vague information. I think they did highlight an important part of the PLA's nuclear force posture, the concealment of their ICBM forces. Though I don't think that was a huge revelation for anybody who has watched Chinese military issues for the past 20 years.
Going back to the original poster, It seems to me that we need a completely new approach strategic relations with China. Listening to the Brookings' Institute podcast on Track 2 discussion with Russia on Missile defence*, it seems to me that the West and the Russians speak the same "language" concerning nuclear arms. This goes back to the Cold War and the post Cuban missile crisis fallout. The common language facilitated dialogue and eventually agreements on their use. Such concepts as signaling, verification, second strike were well understood by both sides, which generally abided by their principles. We don't have that relationship with the Chinese. I'm sure they understand these concepts, but their strategic culture is one that is just so unknown to us. The mere fact that we don't even have a ballpark sense of how many warheads and road mobile ICBMs they possess, illustrates just how primitive Sino-American nuclear relations are.
I know that Chinese authorities remain skeptical of high level negotiation at this point, due to the PLA's broader strategic culture. However I think some thought and focus should be spared to at least start engagement with the chinese, and not just focus on bilateral Russian American relations or multilateral NPT discussions.
A final point. I recently read James Acton's recent work: Deterrence During Disarmament: Deep Nuclear reductions and International Security,
http://www.iiss.org/events-calendar/2011-events-a…
Its really worth a read. I think the proposals for dramatic cuts fit nicely with the PLA's reported size and force posture.
*http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/events/2011/1026_russia_arms/20111028_us_russia_arms_control_panel1.pdf