Some Recent Thoughts

o start off, I want to announce that I might be posting less in the future, because during the recent time, I have become less interested in military aviation and naval shipbuilding. I have never posted as passionately as some other bloggers and I do apologize if the quality of my posts go down as a result of this.

There are just a lot of things politically these days that I think we could explore here. I think it's important to talk about some of the implications of the new Obama administration in China & US relationships. I'm sure most of you caught the fact that Hilary Clinton went to East Asia and made the all important China stop in her first oversea stop as the Secretary of the State. In many ways, it was amazing the transformation in the relationship between the two countries from the 90s when she was the first lady to now. The visit showed the growth of China's economic, political power and national strength during this period. I don't think I'm only speaking for myself when I say that it looked like Hilary basically got on her two knees and begged China to give USA more money. All the human rights associations were outraged by what they perceived to be a retreat by this administration toward China's human right violations. What they don't seem to see is that the fundamentals of China's relation with the West has changed with the latest economic troubles. For the first time since opening up in 1978, the West needs China more than China needs the West. In the past, Chinese gov't generally listened to Western lectures on trade practices, democracy, raw of law and free market principles. With the latest change, the West has lost its moral and economical authority over China. Despite the speculations by numerous Western economists that Chinese society is having growing unrest over its own economic problems, I really think it could not be further away from truth. From talking to everyone back at home and those who recent just came out, the general population still supports the totalitarian regime, which has become more of a populist regime in the recent years. From its coverage of the Tibetan unrest, it's clear that the Politburo is far more concerned about domestic support than international opinion. China falling apart is about as likely as Alberta leaving Canada or Alaska leaving USA.

Having established Chinese gov't's stability at home and strength abroad, will it take up the offer of a much weakened US gov't for a partnership in coming out of this depression that we are just falling into? First of all, the Chinese central bank knows what's going to happen with the Obama administration passing more bail outs, running up larger budget deficit and generally going deeper into debt. With so much extra liquidity injected into the system, we will start seeing inflation in the coming years and it will only lead to the destruction of the US dollar. The return that China gets on all those treasury bonds and agency bonds really can't cover the drop in the purchasing power of USD in the coming years. The problem is that if China stops adding to their treasury portfolio, the treasury will be forced to issue more debt and sell that to the Feds (which they have already started doing) or increase the yield to attract more buyers. I don't profess to be an economist, so much of what I say are thoughts based on what I read and hear. In the former case, you are using borrowed money to artificially keep up the price of treasury. But the problem is that this will simply deplete the money that the Feds has in its reserves in the long run. So, you are forced to go with the second option of increasing the yield to attract more buyers. Unlike Japan in the 90s, Americans don't have enough savings to buy all those treasury bonds. So, they would have to issue higher coupons or sell them at a bigger discount to attract foreign buyers and the more high risk domestic investors. The higher yield would increase the national debt over the long run. All of this would lead to a further destruction of the US dollar and decrease the economic strength of America. If you look at the Weimar Republic in the 20s or Zimbabwe right now, those are two extreme cases of what such reckless economic policy can lead to. With that in mind, should China really help the current administration to continue financing this huge budget. Think about it this way, would the US defense budget be increasing every year if they don't have foreign buyers investing in the treasury? Right wing hawks often talk about China using the money it got from trade surpluses for its military expansion, but it's actually the other way around. Without China buying Treasury bonds, would America be able to invest as much money in all these expensive defense projects? So, I think what China should do is to stop buying as much treasury bonds (which you are already seeing from the Japanese), buy more gold, silver, oil and natural resources around the world. And hope that US will learn to swallow the hard pill, start cutting down the size of the gov't and reduce these huge deficit.

The other part which I think is really interesting is China's recent shopping trip to Europe. Much was made out of the orders the Chinese delegation signed in Germany, Britain and Switzerland. I think China needs to show to the world that it's committed to free trade and not protectionist policies at such uncertain times. The Chinese economy have basically depended on selling goods to other countries for a long time and it will need to continue to trade with other countries to get out of the "recession" that it is in. I would expect such a trip to also be made to North America to ease the possible protectionist measures of the current administration.

Two 054As together in HP

We've seen some new photos of 054A from HP shipyard. 530 returned for more work as seen in the photos. It's actually kind of interesting that we see scaffolding on 530's foremast instead of the third 054A from HP. Unfortunately for us, the views are blocked, but you can still see the VLS cells on both ships. Clearly, the number of missiles have not changed in the new batch.

054A status in different shipyards

So, after a lot of waiting, the 3rd 054A from Huangpu shipyard was launched yesterday. I have a bunch of pictures from day and night showing them. You get a nice view of the Bow Mounted Sonar and all of the different sensors. Not surprisingly, we are not seeing any major change between the sensors and weapons on this ship and the previous ships. Without further adieu, here are some of the ships:






At the same time, we are finally seeing some progress in the HuDong shipyard too. Looks like they've finally fixed the crane problem. The foremast of the ship has now been installed on the 3rd 054A from this shipyard. It looks probably 3 or 4 months away from launching.



We've also seen some pictures of F-22P's first unit undergoing sea trials.

New JH-7A regiment

Recent photos like the following have shown JH-7A in a new regiment. According to the article that accompanied these photos, the regiment conversion is complete. Considering that this article was in Xinhua, we can be sure that the entire regiment have been converted and the pilots have more or less went through the course for JH-7A. Xinhua doesn't normally talk about a new regiment until it achieves operational status.


So, it looks like we now have 3 PLAAF regiments. One for the 28th division, one for the 5th division and one now for the 11th division.
If we look at Sinodefence's Orbat, the JH-7As are basically going into and replacing old Q-5 divisions. So in those divisions, what you see is normally 1 Q-5 regiment and 1 JH-7A regiment. From the look of it, all the Q-5 only divisions have already received a JH-7A regiment. PLAAF seems to have a balanced distribution policy where all the divisions other than the elite divisions of 1, 2, 3 and 29th receive at most 1 regiment of 2.5+ generation (so, flankers, J-10, JH-7A or J-8II). At the same time, they also try to give each military region a regiment of a new type of aircraft before giving a second regiment of that type to a region. From this, I'm guessing the next division to receive JH-7A would be the 15th division, because it is being converted to a attacker division (starting with a new Q-5D regiment) and it also belongs to the Beijing MR which has no JH-7A regiment yet. the other possibility is replacing one of the old H-6 regiments or equipping on a second regiment in 28th division. I think we will see probably 2 more PLAAF regiment of JH-7A and maybe 1 more PLANAF regiment of JH-7A before the end of the production run. That would give a total of 8 JH-7A regiment = around a production run of JH-7As. Add on top of the 20+ JH-7s in PLANAF, there will probably altogether be 250 JH-7/A serving in PLAAF/PLANAF.

Yuan submarines are in service

The Yuan class submarines, also known as 039A, have been described as an important part of China's growing submarine threat. The first Yuan's photos started popping out in 2004 and it joined service in probably 2005 or 2006. The second Yuan's photos started coming out in 2007 and we saw a slew of photos in 2007 and early 2008. But just as we started to see a new variant, 039B, we stopped seeing pictures again. So, now we get a photo of what appears to be 3 Yuan and 1 039G in a flotilla. Each submarine flotilla has 4 submarines (I think). So, it appears that a fourth 039A hasn't joined service yet, because it would make sense for the first 4 039A to be in the same flotilla. Here is the photo.

It appears that this is a variant of 039G rather than 039G1 from the arrangement of the limber holes. Consider that all 3 039G was in East Sea Fleet, it makes sense that this flotilla is in 039A.

So, it definitely seems that 039As are in service and would be playing a big role in any kind of Taiwan scenario.

China and NATO military cooperation

Recently, the Ukrainian Defense Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov made a week long visit to China. They talked a lot about military cooperation during this time. If you haven't noticed yet, Ukraine is one of China's most important partners in military cooperation. Two of the highest priority projects right now (naval aviation training and large transport) are getting a lot of help from the Ukrainians. On top of that, China also relies on Ukrainians for many of the engines used on air planes, helicopters and ships. It also has bought missiles for Russian built flankers from the Ukrainians and worked with the Ukrainians to upgrade weaponry bought from Russia. On this trip, the Ukrainians also indicated that Ukraine might purchase L-15 and seek for shipbuilding help from China. Clearly, this military cooperation relationship will continue for sometime. We also know that there are many in Ukraine and US calling for including Ukraine in NATO. So, exactly how will joining NATO affect China's military cooperation with Ukraine?

It was speculated that after the orange revolution in Ukraine, US pressured Ukraine to limit its military cooperation with China. Although, that doesn't seem to have been true. Turkey is another NATO country that have had some military cooperation with China. We know that it entered into joint development relationships with China for WS-1B and B-611. However in both cases, China was in effect exporting them to Turkey (I don't think Turkey contributed that much), so the Bush Administration didn't really object to them. Of course, there have also been export of minor systems from EU countries to China like Spey Engine, Skymaster radar, ship propellers, diesel engines and some other items. Due to American pressure and the improvement of Chinese hardware, dual use exports have pretty much reduced diesel engines and a possible future Z-15 military version. And due to American pressure, the support around lifting European arm embargo in 2005 basically faded. Even if the embargo gets lifted in the next 2 or 3 years, it's hard to see how much lifting embargo will even help China. Canada has also had some cooperation with China in supplying initial batch of engines for Z-10, Z-8F and Y-8. Even though there is no explicit embargo by Canada on China, it's hard to see any significant military cooperation between the two countries with US around the corner.

Generally, US pressure will force most NATO countries from exporting sensitive technology or assisting the development of advanced weaponry to China. At the same time, the availability of US weapon means that these NATO countries will likely not import anything from China either. And if Ukraine ever joins NATO, that problem would mean the end or near the end of future military cooperation between the two countries.

A visit around the HD shipyard

Recently, I found some new pictures from the HD shipyard showing F-22P's 2nd unit, 3rd unit and also the 3rd unit of 054A. It's rather interesting, It's kind of interesting looking at these ships. F-22P is basically an improved version of Jiangwei-II class using export versions of certain systems from 054A. It looks like China will be trying to export 054 series in the future (we've already seen F-16U as one such model). The 053 series achieved a couple of nice export contracts with the current F-22P contract and the Thai contract in the late 90s. In many ways, China learnt a lot about ship design from the F-25T. Many of the flaws in Chinese naval ship design was broadcast to the world. In fact, I still read such reservations today from numerous posters who examined F-22P to look for similar issues. The question is whether or not 054A can compete in the very crowded market of surface ship of 3000 to 5000 tonne weight class. 054A has in fact been compared to variants of La Fayette class like the Formidable class. In the future, it would have to also compete against export versions of LCS, FREMM, Project 22350 and MEKO series. In most cases, I can imagine that it has quite an advantage in terms of prices, although there is still a general reservation out there regarding Chinese shipbuilding and weaponry. It also doesn't help that China tends to put export versions of sensors/weapons on these ships. It really is hard to say at this point who would buy 054 series ships from China, but PN is the first name that comes out of my head. Maybe in 5 years, we will see something like this again, but F-22P will be replaced by 054A, whereas 054A gets replaced by a later variant.

Anyway, the pictures are shown below. The first 3 are 054A and the ones after that are the 2nd and 3rd units of F-22P. The first one is already doing sea trials and the second one might be ready soon.