China Has Drones. Now What?
Andrew Erickson and Austin Strange
Foreign Affairs
May 23, 2013
Drones, able to dispatch death remotely, without human eyes on their targets or a pilot’s life at stake, make people uncomfortable -- even when they belong to democratic governments that presumably have some limits on using them for ill. (On May 23, in a major speech, U.S. President Barack Obama laid out what some of those limits are.) An even more alarming prospect is that unmanned aircraft will be acquired and deployed by authoritarian regimes, with fewer checks on their use of lethal force.
Those worried about exactly that tend to point their fingers at China. In March, after details emerged that China had considered taking out a drug trafficker in Myanmar (also known as Burma) with a drone strike, a CNN blog post warned, “Today, it’s Myanmar. Tomorrow, it could very well be some other place in Asia or beyond.” Around the same time, a National Journal article entitled “When the Whole World Has Drones” teased out some of the consequences of Beijing’s drone program, asking, “What happens if China arms one of its remote-piloted planes and strikes Philippine or Indian trawlers in the South China Sea?”
Indeed, the time to fret about when China and other authoritarian countries will acquire drones is over: they have them.
