John J. Tkacik, Jr. has posted a must-read on China's military buildup at the Heritage Foundation website. Beijing announced last week that military spending would rise more than 17 percent in 2007 to a total of $45 billion, but Tkacik says the actual figure may be ten-times as much.

A closer look at China's military spending raises profound questions about China's geopolitical direction. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), China's effective military spending is far greater than $45 billion, or even the U.S. Department of Defense's $105 billion estimate. In fact, it is in the $450 billion range, putting it in the same league as the United States and far ahead of any other country, including Russia. This figure reflects the reality that a billion dollars can buy a lot more "bang" in China than in the United States.

How much "bang" you ask? Reuters reported yesterday that the Chinese may try and deploy their first aircraft carrier as soon as 2010. But over at Ares, the official blog of Aviation Week, Catherine Hockmuth casts some doubt on the claim, saying that such plans face at least one major obstacle: "the enormous cost of developing and operating a carrier fleet, which includes warships, supply ships and submarines to protect the carrier."

While the massive increases in China's defense budget in the last few years should be considered a major threat to the balance of power in the Pacific, the claim reported by Reuters is highly dubious. In the event of a conflict between the United States and China, a Chinese carrier would likely be the Pentagon's number one target--and an easy one at that. If the U.S. military can see it, they can destroy it, and there's no hiding an aircraft carrier. For this reason the Chinese are likely to focus their naval budget on building submarines--which are difficult to track and thus present a far greater challenge for the U.S. Navy--with advanced missile and ASAT systems. This line of thinking is put forward by a professor of China's Dalian Naval Academy, Liu Huanyu, whose work was translated by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in their assessment of China's ASAT and space warfare program, policies, and doctrines. Liu writes,

China is in urgent need of new effective defense forces. Constrained by its national resources, the broad goals of economic development, and the international environment in the area, it is impossible and unnecessary for China to develop large scale aircraft carriers…..What China needs now is an effective capability to intervene on the ocean, which means a new sea power. The sea-based anti-satellite platform is a major component of the new sea power and must be given a high priority. If this new avenue is explored as soon as possible, China can hopefully improve its sea power dramatically within 10 years.

The assessment, which relied on open-source articles from Chinese military journals, provides an excellent glimpse at the current thinking of Chinese military strategists. And while the Chinese are clearly working toward developing some very threating asymmetric capabilities with all that defense spending, there's very little evidence of a serious effort to build and deploy an aircraft carrier.