Compass: The tireless assault on China

August 10th, 2006 at 16:52 Björn Hallberg

If there is one thing I am convinced of it is that the Chinese people are indeed different from the rest of us. Apparently they have a far greater capacity for simply taking shit from America and happily being the bogeyman of the world, while financing the follies of the empire. So here we go again with the story of China’s alleged entry into the global positioning race. At least Defense Tech admits China has been wronged, before going into a variation on the bogeyman theme.

As has been widely reported, China plans to construct its own global satellite navigation network. Or so it would appear. No one’s quite sure. The system, dubbed Compass, is mired in confusion, with possible intentions ranging from a modest upgrade of their regional Beidou system to a full blown competitor to GPS and Galileo.

China invested in the European Galileo system through the Galileo Joint Undertaking. Remarkably, this investment will not allow the Chinese any role in Galileo when it transitions to the Supervisory Authority at the end of the year, likely due to the sensitive nature of Galileo’s encrypted signals. It’s no surprise, then, that China would feel betrayed by its partnership in the Joint Undertaking. Compass may be a result of China’s desire to strike out on its own– or a bluff aimed at wrangling a more substantive role in Galileo.

Another consideration: there is a possibility that Compass could jam GPS and Galileo. Even as a regional system, Compass could have significant military implications. These aspects will be discussed in another entry tomorrow.

It’s quite disgusting actually how the EU will effectively, or so it seems right now, snub non-European participation in Galileo. No doubt a couple of years of American threats and lobbying ‘helped’ us Europeans to ’see the light’. Of course, we will no doubt get only baubles in return from our American masters, just as the Chinese got from helping us.

The innuendo and rather half-baked fears and criticism of China follows a pattern that should be all too familiar to those that have been following how the west treats upcoming contenders. First comes the sudden shift in the perception of the world and the people in it, at least insofar as the Chinese go, to a Hobbesian outlook. Other people can’t be trusted but we are to trust the US military and its handling of the GPS, which they rely on daily to spread terror and destruction. Then comes the international relations ideology that best corresponds to the Hobbesian outlook, namely the realist school, as it has festered in the U.S. Simultaneously the issue broadens and comes to include the thinly veiled denial of technology which of course is a version of Friedrich List’s brilliant observation that developed nations are kicking away the ladder. Whatever is being floated regarding China’s “Compass,” I’d surely take it with a sizeable grain of salt. Because it’s not a matter of “defense tech” or rubidium. It’s just the same old story of the selfish west and their schemes.

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