What isn’t China up to these days warrants a shorter response than one which simply lists China’s overseas political, military, and commercial exploits. With the recent conclusion of the CCP’s latest 五年计划 (Wǔnián Jìhuà), or Five-Year Plan, and the celebrations surrounding the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP in July, Beijing reaffirmed its commitment to aggressive adventurism for the foreseeable future. Its policy threatens the stability of the international rules-based system and portends a period of exacerbated conflict on multiple fronts across the world.
The unanswered question on military planners’ minds this summer is not if, but what will Beijing do, where will it do it, and when it will occur. China’s military might now exceeds that of its verbose political rhetoric of the early 2000’s. President Xi Jinping effectively used this two-decade period to take advantage of a so-called “window of opportunity” of Western largess. The doors to advanced Western military and commercial technologies were unlocked and swung wide open after China received permanent Most Favored Nation (MFN) status from the Clinton Administration. China marched through them and openly copied, stole, or reverse engineered what it needed from the West. The communist giant was able to skip three-to-four generations of technical development time and cost.
China’s military, according to senior American defense experts, is on par with that of the United States in many areas and, in some, exceeds US capabilities. Senior leaders at the Pentagon now openly admit that if the US were to go to war with China today it might not win. Forty years ago, that concept was unimaginable. China could not feed its own population during the 1980’s. It was forced to import grain to avoid widespread starvation. Fifty percent of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) was grounded at any given time due to a lack of trained pilots and spare parts. Its navy lacked over-the-horizon radar relegating ships to coastal “brown” waters close to the mainland. Computer chip production facilities a few decades ago contained dust bunnies the size of baseballs and had high failure rate and the country still was manufacturing black and white TV’s. The picture has changed. In 2021, China’s presence is felt in space, on the high seas, and in the corporate board rooms of major corporations. It controls the global market in Rare Earth Elements (REE’s) needed to build everything from military guidance systems to cell phones and hospital equipment.
China today is more politically and economically involved in the Arctic region than in the past, according to “Exploring Gaps in Arctic Governance: Identifying Sources of Conflict and Mitigating Measures,” a major RAND report released this week. The region is emerging as strategically important due to investment in the critical energy, transportation, fishing, and communications sectors. “The sheer scale of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the country’s global ambitions more generally increasingly fuel Arctic states’ concerns over China’s longer-term ambitions in the region,” according to the RAND report.
Over the last couple of years, China has fortified man-made islands in the South China Sea and installed military weapons systems capable of sinking ships. It is continuing to build specialized runways that can handle military aircraft and dredge ports for its military ships. Chinese naval vessels not only patrol vast stretches of water reaching past the “first chain” of islands, but also those well into international blue water. China has intensified its harassment of foreign ships traveling in the South China Sea and invaded the territorial waters of countries across the region. Its PLAAF jets fly dangerous close to those of other nations flying in international air space.
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China is weaponizing the Himalayas with massive dam projects that can control the flow of water for almost the entire Indian subcontinent. Release too much and the cities downstream are flooded. Release too little and the populations suffer from drought. China released Covid on the world – intentionally at first or not. It has not cooperated with scientists investigating the virus. Beijing is weaponizing space with lasers that can take out communications satellites and, perhaps, do other damage. Hong Kong is gone. Taiwan is threatened. China is courting dangerous partners, including Russia and Iran. The list is long and varied and covers the globe.
What the West, and Washington in particular, needs to ascertain is what injury China’s leadership is willing and capable of inflicting on the non-communist world, according its own moral code of behavior. We can no longer afford to assume falsely that China will behave by western standards of human decency and rationality or comport themselves according to the values expressed in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.
Illustration: Pixabay