OFFICIAL CHINESE PUBLIC SECURITY SPENDING TO OUTSTRIP OFFICIAL CHINESE MILITARY SPENDING

CHINESE SPENDING

FOR

PUBLIC SECURITY

TO EXCEED

SPENDING

FOR THE

MILITARY

THE "MARBLE BOAT"

THE SUMMER PALACE

BEIJING AREA

Photographed 1981

This week came the news that officially, China would be spending more on combating potential internal enemies (through its budget for "law enforcement and public security") than on combating potential external enemies (through its military budget).

According to the New York Times, the Chinese government "said it planned to spend $95 billion on the police, state security, armed civil militia and jails, 13.8 percent more than last year. Military spending rose 12.7 percent to $91.5 billion."

Much of the discussion of these disclosures focused on whether the domestic-foreign priority ranking would still hold if the real figures for both kinds of spending were known. In short, was this factoid true at all?

Of course, it would not be the first time that defeating the internal enemy was thought more urgent than trying to defeat the external one: think of the KMT, the Communist "bandits," and the Japanese invaders during the Sino-Japanese War, which started earlier than World War II (or began World War II, depending on one's perspective).

And somehow the mind goes back to the Empress Dowager's folly, that "Marble Boat" she had built on the Summer Palace grounds, with funds intended for the Chinese military of the time.

When I look at the photograph above, I cannot help thinking of my old mentor, John King Fairbank, and his quip that it was just as well that all the money went into this "marble" boat and not into "real" ones for the navy, to fight off the encroaching Great Powers, for the real ones would long ago have been sunk -- without making China strategically stronger.

Of course now Beijing does not have to choose between real boats and "marble" ones, between showcase projects for "soft power" and hard power projection abroad, and between ships and many, many boots on the ground -- right in China itself -- and, oh yes, the kind of cyber-surveillance merely fantasized before.