Read the article here (PDF).

Press Release

The report documents identifiable cases of miscalculation regarding U.S. assessments on the development speed of Chinese indigenous weapons systems.  U.S. analysts and policymakers should expect to see continued advancements in the ability of the Chinese military to produce modern weapons platforms as well as an attendant increase in the operational capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army and need to enhance analytical tools and capabilities to keep pace with these changes.

Executive Summary

The rapid economic growth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1979 has enabled the country to implement an extensive military modernization program. Since the mid-1990s, China’s military reforms have accelerated and defense spending has steadily increased. In China’s 2008 white paper on defense, China projected that it would lay a “solid foundation” for the development of national defense and the armed forces by 2010, “accomplish major mechanization and make major progress in informatization by 2020,” and reach modernization of its national defense and armed forces by the middle of the century.

China’s process of modernizing its armed forces has involved the development of indigenously designed weapons systems—some of which appeared to undergo a process of development, procurement, and/or deployment that outpaced the estimates of U.S. and other foreign observers. This paper specifically focuses on four key weapons platforms that have been discussed as “surprise” developments to U.S. analysts:

·         Type 039A/B/041 (Yuan-class) diesel-electric attack submarine
·         SC-19 anti-satellite (ASAT) system
·         Dongfeng-21D (DF-21D/CSS-5) anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM)
·         Jian-20 (J-20) stealth fighter aircraft

Key Findings

Based on the four case studies covered in this report, there are no universal trends in publicly reported U.S. government analysis on the development of indigenous Chinese weapon systems. Evidence broadly suggests that U.S. analysts did not expect the emergence of the PLA Navy’s Yuan-class submarine when the class was unveiled in 2004, much less that this class could potentially be utilizing air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems. On the other hand, U.S. officials were keenly aware of Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons development, and reports show that U.S. officials were also aware of potential ASAT testing activity in 2007, although it is possible that the exact timing of the test was unexpected. However, while U.S. government analysts accurately anticipated several developments, such as the emergence of China’s SC-19 ASAT system, China’s selective transparency—or strategic deception that asserted opposition to the development of space weapons—may have misled foreign observers outside of military and intelligence channels.

There have been, however, identifiable cases of miscalculation regarding U.S. assessments on the development speed of Chinese indigenous weapons systems. While U.S. intelligence sources acknowledged the development of a land-based anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) in 2008, academic and government sources have both indicated that the United States underestimated the speed of China’s ASBM development. U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) officials have assessed that the ASBM reached initial operational capability (IOC) in December 2010, and official Chinese media and Taiwanese sources have reported that the ASBM is now field deployed with PLA missile units. China’s fifth-generation fighter, the J-20, was originally projected to begin prototype testing in 2012; however, the United States also underestimated the speed of its development, as the aircraft made its first publicized flight in January 2011.

Particular challenges to accurate predictive assessments on indigenous Chinese military developments include:

·         Information denial and/or deception: The PRC exercises secrecy over many aspects of its military affairs, and in some instances puts forth false or misleading information. The lack of transparency in the PRC’s military modernization has been a frequent complaint of U.S. defense officials in recent years.

·         Underestimation of changes in China’s defense-industrial sector: Once viewed as a bloated and sclerotic industrial sector incapable of adaptation, in the past decade the PRC defense industry has outperformed the expectations of its critics. While it still faces many problems, the Chinese defense industry is far more capable of producing modern weapons platforms than would have been the case in the 1980s or 1990s.

·         Difficulty in understanding the PRC national security decision-making process: The decision-making processes of the Chinese government are opaque, particularly in regards to military policy and national security issues. The public emergence and/or testing of some indigenous PRC weapons platforms has also revealed apparent problems of poor bureaucratic coordination, and the possibility of a civil-military divide at the top levels of Chinese policymaking.

·         Underestimation of Beijing’s threat perceptions: Many analysts in media, academia, and the government may have failed to fully appreciate the extent to which the Chinese leadership views the United States as a fundamental threat to China’s security. These threat perceptions have been inflamed by a number of events in recent years, to include the 1996 Taiwan Straits Crisis and the accidental 1998 bombing of the PRC Embassy Annex in Belgrade by U.S. aircraft.

·         China’s increased investments in science and technology: China’s intensive efforts over the past two decades to stimulate its indigenous capabilities for scientific research and development (R&D)—whether through science education, state funding for research, seeking technology transfers from foreign companies, or industrial espionage—have significantly increased its ability to produce more advanced weapons systems. Furthermore, China’s increasing knowledge of dual-use technologies (i.e., those with both commercial and military applications) in areas such as electronics has also offered significant cross-over benefits to the defense-industrial sector.

·         Inadequate capabilities for and/or attention to the exploitation of open-source Chinese language materials: Some of the past flaws in analysis on China’s weapons program could have been partially corrected by increased attention to open-source materials, particularly in regards to academic technical journals and related publications. Increased attention to the messages in authoritative PRC media and political science publications would also have improved understanding of the worldview of the Chinese leadership.

The trends of past decades are no longer a reliable guide to the performance of China’s defense industries. Furthermore, U.S. observers should not take at face value statements from the Chinese government on military policy, as they could either be deceptive, or simply issued by agencies (e.g., the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that have no real say over military matters. Based on the trends identified in this paper, U.S. analysts and policymakers should expect to see continued advancements in the ability of the PRC to produce modern weapons platforms, and an attendant increase in the operational capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army.

Disclaimer: This report is the product of professional research performed by staff of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and was prepared at the request of the Commission to support its deliberations. Posting of the report to the Commission’s website is intended to promote greater public understanding of the issues addressed by the Commission in its ongoing assessment of U.S.-China economic relations and their implications for U.S. security, as mandated by Public Law 106-398 and Public Law 108-7. However, the public release of this document does not necessarily imply an endorsement by the Commission, any individual Commissioner, or the Commission’s other professional staff, of the views or conclusions expressed in this staff research report.

Andrew Erickson and Amy Chang, “China’s Navigation in Space: What New Approaches Will China’s Space Tracking Take?” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 138.4 (April 2012): 42-47.

Read the report here (PDF).

Read the article here (PDF).

The organizers of this conference recruited me to address it because I am a sort of living fossil. As a certified antique, exhumed from the diplomatic strata of the past, they thought I could not avoid having an historical perspective on things. While you were pondering naval matters today, they were sure that I would be contemplating my navel and reminiscing about ancient events. I don’t want to disappoint them, so bear with me as I speak of things as they were forty years ago today – on Monday, the tenth of May 1971.

I had then just returned from training in Mandarin and Taiwanese. In the inscrutable wisdom of government personnel systems, this was thought somehow to qualify me to become, among other things, the officer-in-charge of the United States’ virtually non-existent economic interaction with the China mainland. (In all of 1971, bilateral trade came to less than $5 million. We do more trade with China in a single hour now.) Instead of focusing on that not very demanding aspect of my job, on that Monday, forty years ago, I was busy at other things. Like a few other colleagues in the State Department’s Office of Asian Communist Affairs, I was writing papers in support of Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to “Pei-p’ing,” as political correctness then demanded we call it. The United States had spent more than two decades trying to destabilize and overthrow the People’s Republic, championing the lost cause of its defeated rival in the Chinese civil war, and excluding it from participation in international councils.

This was hardly an auspicious basis on which to enlist China in our then quarter-century-old grand strategy of containment of the Soviet Union. The shift from antagonism to attempted cooperation reflected realistic judgments about our international circumstances and the trajectory we were then on as a country. President Nixon recognized that our interests would be best served by abandoning failed policies and preconceptions. He boldly sought to seize previously unimagined strategic advantages for our country. To the surprise of many, he brought this off.

To reach an accommodation with China, the United States had to choose between ourlongstanding politico-military commitment to Taipei and the imperatives of our national interests as affected by the Cold War. Then, as now, the Taiwan issue constrained our relations with Beijing. It threatened an eventual, bloody rendezvous between Chinese nationalism and American military power. Then, as now, war would have been disastrous for both sides. Washington and Beijing crafted our rapprochement by deferring to later resolution the casus belli between us – the question of Taiwan’s relationship with the rest of China. Both this issue and the American role in it remain unresolved. Neither Chinese nationalism nor the Taiwan issue has gone away.

China has been patient for four decades, but it is now actively pondering how best to remove the United States from what is – from its point of view – our very unhelpful residual military role in cross-Strait relations so that Beijing’s negotiators can settle the Taiwan issue with their counterparts in Taipei. That, I take it, is a principal focus of the national review of policy toward the United States that China is reportedly poised to launch. Americans cannot safely assume that China’s recent objections to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan or other military actions on our part are pro forma or “just more of the same.” It’s at least as likely that we will soon once again confront the necessity to choose between the self-imposed shackles of longstanding policy and the imperatives of our long-term strategic interests.

The underlying issue today is at root the same as forty years ago – the contradiction between U.S. policies designed to frustrate China’s achievement of its core objective of national unity and our need to reduce enmity and increase cooperation with China. But the context in which we must wrestle with this contradiction today is radically different. The balance of prestige, if not yet the balance of power, between the United States and China has shifted.

In international affairs, prestige is the shadow cast by the power of states to shape systems, attitudes, trends, and events. It is generated by the perceived decisiveness of a nation’s political system, its economic strength, and the vision and wisdom of its leadership, as well as its military prowess. Prestige is a major determinant of the ability of a nation to preserve the privileges of the past or frame the freedoms of the future. Current trends in this regard do not favor the United States over China.

It is not just that China and others are regaining the regional preeminence they enjoyed before thenow defunct era of Western colonialism. It is also that America’s fractious politics are now dispiriting rather than inspiring to foreigners and citizens alike. The financial system and economic model of the United States have been discredited in the world’s eyes. Few look to us for leadership on either global or regional issues, whatever their nature. Only our military power is fully respected. But, as we have shown the world in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, there are limits to what military power alone can accomplish. China is widely seen as having its act together. The United States is universally viewed as in big trouble on a dismaying range of issues and not doing much, if anything, about any of them, other than more of the same.

Our fiscal situation is a central element of this perception. Total federal revenue, from all sources (income, corporate, excise, social security, and medicare taxes) is now $2.2 trillion annually. Total federal transfer payments to individuals for unemployment, pensions, medical care, and the like come to $2.4 trillion. The United States government is out of cash; it has to borrow $200 billion even before it begins to fund its operations. The $1.3 trillion it costs to run the government is, in effect, all borrowed, much of it from foreigners. About $700 billion is for the defense budget. Another $300 billion or more is military-related but in other budgets. Total U.S. military spending comes to well over $1 trillion. Most of our politicians remain in denial, but growing numbers of them have begun to realize that America can’t afford to continue anything like this level of outlays for our armed forces.

To our creditors, America now looks like a huge, insolvent insurance company with a mostly military workforce living on credit rollovers. Washington can’t even pass a budget, let alone devise a credible plan to pay down our debt. Increasingly, America’s creditors see the United States as a bad bet, not a safehaven for their money. This is not good. And it is not smart, in such circumstances, to enter a race with the People’s Liberation Army, as we did with Soviet armed forces, to see who can spend whom into the ground.

Unlike the Soviet Union, China has a highly successful economy that is widely seen as a model combination of industrial policy with market economics. Not everybody likes China, but it has a reputation for coherent strategic vision. China does not operate an empire of captive satellite nations, have a history of global power projection, seek to export an ideology, or propose to expand beyond its traditional frontiers. It has not configured its forces for an attack on our homeland, even if it has made provision for retaliation against us in the event we strike its homeland. China has begun, however, to object to American naval operations in its near seas that it considers hostile to it. By its attempts to deny our right to carry out such operations, China jeopardizes our exercise of at least a portion of the global hegemony to which we have recently become accustomed. And the Chinese seem bent on developing defenses we cannot easily overwhelm. These are threats to our omnipotence even it they are not threats to our homeland.

China is also beginning to show a capacity to innovate militarily in ways that challenge American ingenuity. The good news is that China thus stimulates expensive new U.S. research and development projects as well as procurement and a conference or two. It is becoming a justification for “military Keynesianism.” But, as the numbers show, even without China as a major driver, military spending is already an unaffordable burden on the U.S. economy. In marked contrast, China’s defense budget is neither a significant strain on its economy nor likely to become one. With a GDP that seems destined to dwarf that of the United States in the foreseeable future, China does not anticipate resource constraints as it seeks to counter and outmatch the threat to it from America.

The United States is now fiscally hollow. Yet we are entering a long-term military rivalry with China on terms that are easily bearable by China but fiscally ruinous for us. This rivalry is all the more disadvantageous because China is competing in notably cost-effective ways, and we are not.

Aggressive reconnaissance in cyberspace is a less expensive and fatiguing way than naval and air patrols by which to probe military capabilities and map targets in other nations. Ballistic and submarine-launched cruise missiles can kill capital ships like aircraft carriers at a fraction of what it costs to build them. It’s much cheaper to shatter or blind satellites than to launch, maintain, or protect them. Defensive measures are less demanding of human and material resources than power projection against them.

This should give us pause. In some disturbing ways, Sino-American competition is beginning to parallel the contest between us and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. This time, however, the United States is in the fiscally precarious position of the USSR, while China plays the economically robust role we once did. The political and economic weaknesses of the USSR made it unable to compete with us on any terms other than military. The huge expense of amilitary contest with an economically fitter enemy ultimately bankrupted the Soviet state and brought it down. Moscow’s conviction that the best defense is an overwhelmingly strong offense locked it into a military competition that, in retrospect, was as unnecessary as it was ultimately fatal.

Based on parallel logic, we have come to spend as much as the rest of the world combined on capabilities for military coercion. Our current force structure and global military posture are not dedicated to the defense of our homeland but to sustaining a credible capacity to overwhelm other nations’ ability to defend their homelands and adjacent areas, including their near seas. Americans do not worry that foreigners will impose their will on us. Our armed forces exist to impose our will on those who challenge or resist it. In this context, China’s improving defenses are only part of what drives our military strategy. Still, they loom ever larger in its sights.

As their strong preference for asymmetric counters to the instruments of American power projection illustrate, the Chinese are not just seeking security, but affordable security. Perhaps, given the state of our finances, we should do so too. But it’s hard to see how an objective of affordable security for the United States could be compatible with maintaining the assured ability to overpower China’s constantly improving defenses.

The subject you are discussing – China’s strategy for its near seas – is very relevant. The Chinese have begun to make it clear that they will not be prepared indefinitely to tolerate the long-term menace of provocative foreign naval operations near their homeland’s coasts. So it is in its near seas that China’s determination to carve out an exception to America’s global dominion is finding its clearest expression. This determination does not make China a threat to the United States, but it reinforces the point that China is a threat to U.S. military supremacy in Asia and possibly beyond it.

In this context as in others, it would seem wise to minimize activities that increase rather than diminish China’s perceived need to prepare itself for future combat with the United States. To the extent that the U.S. and PLA navies come to confront each other in China’s near seas, the stimulus for China to focus on ridding these seas of foreign threats simply increases. There is, after all, an ineluctable asymmetry at play. The United States can cease to patrol China’s near seas if it chooses, but China cannot cease to abut them.The U.S. Navy insists on the right to conduct all sorts of operations in exclusive economic zones – EEZs – as an essential legal underpinning of our national interest in maintaining a dominant naval presence around the world. China sees its maritime perimeter through its experience of national humiliation by repeated assaults from the sea. What is a legal principle for Americans is a defense imperative for China. Such differences are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Nor can we assume that bringing them to a head would necessarily resolve them in our favor.

The United States is not a party to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and so not in a position to avail ourselves of the Convention’s dispute resolution mechanisms. International law evolves to reflect changes in military preoccupations, technologies, and balances. Hence, the worldwide move – which the U.S. Navy stoutly resisted – from a three to a twelve-mile limit. Hence the subsequent creation, also initially opposed by the United States, of a two-hundred-mile EEZ. It’s hard to argue that American views enjoy greater international deference today than they did thirty or forty years ago.

There are many countries concerned, like China, to secure themselves from potential attack from the sea. In the post Cold War era, there are not many nations interested in preserving conditions conducive to global power projection or worldwide naval operations. If push came to shove, a majority of UNCLOS member states might support China’s views over ours. If the Chinese were to mount their own aggressive reconnaissance operations off Guam, Pearl Harbor, San Diego, and Puget Sound, even our own politicians might object to their right to do this. In a world of more than one large and competent navy, the application of the golden rule to naval operations is an ever-present, if perhaps novel and unwelcome, possibility.

In sum, having a legal right to do something does not make it wise to rub others’ noses in it. Lurking offshore to satisfy a prurient interest in the military preparedness of other nations to defend themselves can clearly be useful. Possibly, in some circumstances, it could be essential. But the best way to preserve the right to do it may be to refrain from doing it too obviously, too frequently, or too intrusively.

Antagonistic encounters in China’s near seas are a significant factor in worsening Sino-American military relations but they do not have the impact of U.S. moves to shore up Taiwan’s resistance to reunion with the mainland. The Taiwan issue is the only one with the potential to ignite a war between China and the United States. To the PLA, U.S. programs with Taiwan signal fundamental American hostility to the return of China to the status of a great power under the People’s Republic. America’s continuing arms sales, training, and military counsel to Taiwan’s armed forces represent potent challenges to China’s pride, nationalism, and rising power, as well as to its military planners. These U.S. programs appear to reflect judgments by the American elite that the Communist dictatorship on the mainland is fundamentally illegitimate and should be prevented from extending its sway to other parts of China even by peaceful means. U.S. interactions with Taiwan and Tibet belie the lip service American officials pay to the notion of “one China.” The message China’s civilian and military elite get from these interactions is that the United States wants “one China in name but not in fact – not now, and perhaps never, if America has anything to say about it.” The Chinese don’t think we should have anything to say about it.

The kind of long-term relationship of friendship and cooperation China and America want with each other is incompatible with our emotionally fraught differences over the Taiwan issue. These differences propel mutual hostility and the sort of ruinous military rivalry between the two countries that has already begun. We are coming to a point at which we can no longer finesse our differences over Taiwan. We must either resolve them or live with the increasingly adverse consequences of our failure to do so.

For Chinese, the Taiwan issue presents an increasingly stark choice between national pride commensurate with rising prestige and continuing deference to America’s waning power. With Taiwan and the mainland integrating in practice, China sees the policies of the United States as the last effective barrier to the arrival of a ripe moment for the achievement of national unity under a single, internationally respected sovereignty. Dignity and unity have been and remain the core ambitions of the Chinese revolution. China may, for now, continue to emphasize the avoidance of conflict with the United States. But the political dynamics of national honor will sooner or later force Beijing to adopt less risk-averse policies than it now espouses.

For Americans, the Taiwan issue presents an unwelcome choice between potential long-term military antagonism with China and the perpetuation, despite rapid cross-Strait economic and social integration, of Taiwan’s de facto political separation from the mainland. So far, the United States has in practice given priority to Taiwan, in what is now best described as an effort to retard the speeding tilt of the cross-Strait military balance against Taiwan. Given the huge stakes for the United States in our strategic interaction with China, this choice might well strike someone looking afresh at the situation as oddly misguided.

American priorities look all the more inverted when one considers that Beijing has offered to negotiate what amounts to purely symbolic reunification with Taiwan, forgoing any political or military presence of its own on the island. This offer cannot be dismissed as incredible. China’s willingness to tolerate amazingly different politico-economic orders on what is nominally its territory has been amply demonstrated in both Hong Kong and Macau. Its proposal to Taipei offers far greater autonomy than either of these city-states enjoy. Is it worth a war with China to prevent such an outcome? If not, why are we behaving as if it were?

Both our global military posture and our approach to China seem unlikely to work out well for us. Perhaps it’s once again time to throw off the intellectual shackles imposed by longstanding policy and address the imperatives of long-term strategic interests. Just something to think about as you plot a course for the U.S. Navy in China’s near seas.

China is harnessing renewable energy resources in an effort to bolster economic growth, accommodate rural-to-urban migration, and promote environmental sustainability. Among bold initiatives is the State Council’s encouragement for the “energetic establishment of eco-provinces, eco-cities, eco-counties and eco-townships.” Eco-cities are new urban development models that aim to balance environmental sustainability and urban life. As of 2009, China had 40 eco-city projects proposed or under development and by 2010, there were as many as 168 projects at various stages of development. Among these is the joint Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city project, launched in late-2007, which allows China to capitalize on the expertise of Asia’s greenest city.

The Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city, located 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Tianjin city center, covers about 30 square kilometers (11.6 square miles), and will consist of 100,000 homes for a population of 350,000 upon its projected completion in 2020. The city would utilize solar and geothermal energy, water desalination and recycling, and several modes of public transportation. Project designers have outlined 26 key performance indicators to measure progress and development on the eco-city. The ambitious project has attracted billions in funding from commercial entities, as well as a US$6.16 million grant from the World Bank.

If successfully implemented, China’s efforts at constructing eco-cities would not only revamp the urban landscape and improve high-density living conditions, but also reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. China’s eco-construction sector is an attractive, profitable investment opportunity despite the existence ofbureaucratic boundaries, but such projects are at risk of failure due to abandonment, unaffordability, poor management, and lack of local expertise. While collaborations with external experts hold great potential, track record shows that joint projects do not always guarantee success: Dongtan, a UK engineering consultancy-designed eco-city, has yet to break any ground despite being proposed and approved in 2005.

Even with prime conditions for eco-cities in China, it is still uncertain whether the process of demolition and construction is equally (if not more) ecologically detrimental to the earth and local community. Also worth considering is the failure of Huangbaiyu eco-village designers to scrutinize cultural conventions and demographic trends. Execution deviated so far from original plans because residents could not adapt to the new lifestyle that eco-cities offered.

The variety and scope of eco-cities in China illustrate that the design and implementation of eco-cities are still in its experimental stages. If the Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city considers these concerns, and successfully addresses them, the eco-city could serve as a model of sustainable development for other cities in China. The proliferation of functional Chinese eco-cities could effectively address pressing issues such as increased energy efficiency, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, improvement in consumption patterns, and an important step towards long-term energy policy change.

John Witte, via The New Yorker

I recently stumbled upon this video of my grandparents’ 80th birthday celebration from May 2009. At the time, I was based in Beijing on my Fulbright, and my parents were visiting China from the U.S. to visit my mother’s side of the family in Nanjing. We had an elaborate dinner at a nice hotel by 玄武湖，Xuanwu Lake, several blocks from my grandparent’s home on 中央路, Zhongyang Lu, one of the main thoroughfares of the (now rapidly expanding and increasingly unfamiliar) city. It was the second time in my lifetime my entire mom’s side of the family had congregated under one roof.

The atmosphere was festive: it was loud; there was storytelling and laughter; there was an overabundance of food, drink, and cake (most of which had to be taken home, as pictured below). The dinner also featured the typical birthday customs for celebrating longevity and honoring elders: long life noodles, peaches, and a gold thread hand-embroidered character for “longevity,” 寿 (shòu). It was the classic Chinese dinner party.

While the birthday celebration brought everyone physically together, and despite having visited Nanjing numerous times over the years, I had never felt close to my China-based family. Tried as I might, I could not relate to them. I cannot remember a single time that I’ve hugged any of my Nanjing relatives. Sometimes, I would get a handshake. Two of my male cousins were obsessed with video games that consumed their after-work lives (how they have girlfriends is beyond me), thus hindering any chance of human-to-human interaction. My younger (also male) cousin, who tested into a university in Hainan, dropped out because he couldn’t bear to be so far away from home. Now he’s studying logistics at a vocational college in Nanjing and going through the typical middle-class urban teenager angst-against-the-world phase, albeit a several years later than the average Western boy. I rarely saw most of my aunts and uncles, who had moved to the suburbs to be closer to work. Bottom line: I didn’t know them well enough, and they didn’t know me either. I was an elusive presence, related by blood but completely different in demeanor and outlook. While I don’t know them well, Nanjing has and will always be associated with them, as if their presence were a constant.

It came as a surprise to me when my grandfather passed away on February 23 of this year. How could he be gone? Every time I visited, we went through the same routine. He was always sticking his head out the window or pacing around the neighborhood as he awaited my arrival from the train station or airport (or my return if I had stepped out to wander the streets). Upon reuniting with my grandfather, we would reenter the gate of their apartment complex and bump into neighbors lounging in an old La-Z-Boy or preparing vegetables for dinner. Every time, my grandfather would smile at them, point to me, and say, with his chin proudly cocked towards the air, “This is my granddaughter. She is from the U.S.” Upon climbing the three flights of stairs to their home, his usual routine would be to point at photographs of me as a young child that were placed under the glass tabletop, and tell me that was me, as a young child. Then he would ask me if I remember sitting on the back of his bicycle as he navigated the complex and intertwining neighborhoods when I first visited in 1990. Unfortunately, the conversation never veered too far from that.

Now, upon rediscovering and watching the video, I was reminded of each of my relatives’ unique personalities—however vibrant or dull—and I wished that I had been able to experience more, so that I had a deeper impression than my extremely superficial knowledge of their lives. With three out of four of my grandparents gone, I feel immense regret to have failed to hear and understand their stories, opinions, and points of view. I hope this is the last time I let memories and stories slip away before I have a chance to hear them, remember them.

Rest in Peace, 公公.

Now that I have moved back to the U.S., I am often overcome with cravings for hand-pulled noodles or spicy dongpo pork knee (trust me, it’s delicious) or bitter melon.

Sichuan pulled noodles (拉面), the perfect way to start your morning (Meishan, Sichuan)

A true Sichuanese feast (Meishan, Sichuan)

The best mapo tofu I’ve ever had (Chengdu, Sichuan)

Despite having a Chinatown, Washington D.C. is not a hub for quality Chinese food. Nevertheless, I scoured the interwebs for anything to tingle my tongue.

A friend and I visited Sichuan Pavilion, and we ordered Mapo tofu (麻婆豆腐), garlic paste chicken, and dandan mian (担担面). We ordered in Chinese, and the waiter followed up, “Chinese style or American style?” We answered in sync, “Chinese please.” Followed by the clichéd phrase, “不怕辣怕不辣 (bú pà là, pà bù là, not scared of spicy, scared not spicy enough).”

Mapo tofu at Sichuan Pavilion

Garlic chicken at Sichuan Pavilion

Dandan mian at Sichuan Pavilion

It was definitely spicy, but it still wasn’t the same. There was flavor, but it didn’t burst out at you like in China. I’ve always wondered, what is it exactly that’s missing in American-style Chinese cuisine?

While my stomach was on fire and I was so happy with that warm, burning sensation, my wallet was not so happy. The whole meal cost us about $36 (including tax and tip).

My insatiable stomach convinced me to return that very night and ordered two meat buns and Kung Pao Chicken, which, if done right, can be fantastic. However, the dish failed to please as the chicken pieces were pre-fried, and lacked both spice and cucumbers. Upon taking it home I poured the dish onto a frying pan and doused it with chili sauce, chopped up some cucumbers, and stir fried it for a few minutes.

Luckily, I have a ZipCar registration, and can now plan excursions to the predominantly Chinese suburbs in search of satiating my hunger for MSG + salt +  oil.

Already starting a “To Eat” list for my next trip to China.