China's submarines and the $100,000 aid package to the phillipenes

http://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/china-reveals-fleet-of-nuclear-submarines-in-apparent-show-of-force/
According to China Daily’s Wang Xiaoxuan, China’s improving nuclear capability still can’t compete with that of the other major powers.

China, Soft Power, and the Philippine Crisis | David W. Kearn

These two articles may seem unrelated, but they are actually about the same issues.
Kearn believes that China is taking small steps trying to find it's place in the world, like a child who moves out of the house its parents owned for the first tie.

In the submarine story, the author accepts without question that China just can't compete with the other powers.

Both are wrong and neither understands that China's leaders have more experience leading and a longer history of subterfuge than those of any other modern power.  Even Russia with its long history of totalitarian dictatorship has traded government control for government oversight.  If I may digress, "The President's Analyst"'s prediction has come true.  Russia became more like the USA and the USA became more like Russia and for the moment, they have met in the middle although if the lessons of China's weponized economy (Soon to come out with another name! as a second edition-something like "How to prevent congress from destroying the country using term limits initiated at the state level constitutional convention" or an equally non-bulky name) are not learned, we will be what Russia was in the 1940's before long (war, dictatorship, suffering and all).

What China is actually doing in these articles, is the primary tenant of "Appear weak when you are perceived as strong, appear strong when you are perceived as weak" to confound your enemies.  We in the west think of "poor China" too dumb to lend aid to the Philippines.  That is hardly the case.  China knows the true extent of their wealth and power and they understand that most giving comes in the first few weeks.  They will come in later, when everyone has tired of the temporary aid of the west and use long term funding, more efficiently delivered by virtue of the groundwork laid by the West to get a permanent foothold in this Island neighbor at the expense of the West.  They will, as they have so successfully done to defeat the USA, use their economy as a weapon.

In the meantime, they have to build their army, using the stolen (if truth be told it was theft by deception since the west voluntarily surrendered it as a result of the unbelievable corruption in the US government) manufacturing might of the west.  They have duplicated our most modern helicopter, now they are copying the best parts of our submarines.  At the same time they act so meek.  Only a fool wouldn't see through this, but the general press is full of fools, as much as congress.

One looking to the example of history and world war ii would note that while the US might not have had the biggest army at the outbreak of  hostilities but they became the breadbasket and armory for democracy.  In the next war, China will be the armory for the enemies of the west.