China’s Vulnerabilities Should Not Breed Complacency
The Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army are unquestionably guilty of self-defeating behavior. But American military planners should not push their positive assessment too far.
China-watcher Timothy Heath recently came out with a “RAND Perspective” alleging “The Chinese Military’s Doubtful Combat Readiness.” Read the whole thing.
There is much goodness here, along with a few head-scratchers. Let us start by accentuating the positives. Heath doesn’t say so explicitly, but his basic point is solidly moored in strategic theory and history: the finest weapon is no better than its wielder. Amassing skill at arms is a full-time profession. On that basis, the author deprecates the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) battle proficiency because he says that it is too busy doing other things.
In other words, China has chosen poorly in the zero-sum contest between combat and non-combat duties.
What Clausewitz Said
This lack of focus could have potentially grave consequences for Beijing. Strategic grandmaster Carl von Clausewitz defines martial might as “the product of two inseparable factors”—the “total means” at a combatant’s disposal, and the “strength of his will.” The total means at a modern-day combatant’s disposal would be ordnance guided to its target by an array of sensors, computers, and fire control. China’s armory is increasingly impressive in that material sense. It also boasts the world’s largest inventory of weaponry by raw numerical measures.
By citing the strength of a combatant’s will, Clausewitz spotlights the human factor in warfare. There is no gainsaying his wisdom. Now, admittedly, the sage of Prussia confesses that willpower is tough to gauge. A warrior fired by passion for the cause or thirst for honor can accomplish much even with subpar weaponry, whereas a cowed or lackadaisical warrior is apt to underperform even if he bears arms of matchless quality. The recent civil war in Iraq, in which fanatical ISIS militants repeatedly overcame disheartened government soldiers with far better weaponry, is a striking testament to this fact.
But there’s vastly more to the human factor than resolve, isn’t there? There’s also competence. Take an extreme example. You could present me an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter armed to the teeth, and I could summon indomitable resolve to swoop into the heavens to smite America’s enemies. Still, despite my enthusiasm, somehow I still don’t see a dogfight turning out well. I am no top gun; I am a non-aviator who departed active duty twenty-nine years ago. An incompetent fighter pilot downs few foes.
If PLA soldiers, sailors, and airmen are ill-trained, they may succumb to skilled, resolute foes on the field of battle.
The Power (and Peril) of Institutions
Heath is also making a cultural argument, and it’s a solid one. Institutions are groups of people, and they tend to be set in their ways. Sometimes those institutions’ ingrained habits and practices work against their foremost mission. The author finds that to be the case with the People’s Liberation Army. He grudgingly concedes that China’s defense-industrial base has constructed an imposing arsenal. However, at the same time, he maintains that the culture pervading the PLA demotes its combat readiness to also-ran status. Put simply, the PLA falls short in the human factor because it spends inordinate time and resources on its top priority: keeping the armed forces and the populace unstintingly loyal to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This mania for political loyalty has been baked into the system as long as the Chinese Communist Party has held power. Mao Zedong, who casts a long shadow in China to this day, once proclaimed that “political power grows out of the barrel of the gun.” The Party must always control the gun; the gun must never be allowed to control the Party. Combat readiness is an opportunity cost of the Chinese Communist Party’s obsession with preserving its rule. And it is evident that party magnates such as Xi Jinping are content to pay this cost, despite obvious drawbacks.
What concrete impact does party indoctrination have on the PLA’s preparedness? To use one example, Heath reports that political topics take up some 40 percent of training time for PLA servicemembers. That’s a lot of time not spent making the force battleworthy—especially against the United States, which applies itself to combat readiness full-time.
But the PLA’s troubles go beyond wasting time on indoctrination. Most notably, the party implants a political officer in every unit and endows that overseer with the same authority as its commander. Divided rule is no way to run a military outfit, where speedy decisions are a vital necessity. This is doubly true because political officers are seldom experts in the unit’s functions: they might delay, or even veto, vital decisions on political grounds. Pity the poor skipper of a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine who, during an emergency, sees his orders countermanded by a party commissar lacking knowledge in technical matters but concerned that the commander’s actions could cause the Party to lose face.
The Maoist model of civil-military relations breaks radically with the model championed by Clausewitz, who exhorted statesmen to refrain from meddling in operational and tactical endeavors to the maximum degree possible. Sun Tzu, China’s homegrown strategic theorist from antiquity, likewise cautions sovereigns against excessive micromanagement, insisting that meddlesome sovereigns detract from operational efficacy. For so long as the Chinese civil-military paradigm ignores this advice, it could prove self-defeating against nimbler foes.
Talk is Cheap
Heath’s critique of PLA culture is plausible, but not guaranteed. Foreign armed forces are black boxes in peacetime; it is hard to predict with confidence how they will perform amid the clangor of combat. The only true arbiter of battle proficiency is battle itself. What Heath says makes sense on the whole, but one major and a couple of lesser problems mar his account.
Here’s the major one. Heath marvels at the paucity of unclassified research on how to defeat the U.S. military in a trial of arms. “Why would the PLA be reluctant to do such work?” he asks. “The most plausible answer is politics. The CCP has stated that war with the United States will not happen, so the PLA apparently cannot do research on a topic that the CCP has stated is not possible.”
Whoa! Party leaders have told PLA commanders war is impossible?
I had to check Heath’s footnotes for that one. He references not an official CCP directive to the armed forces, but a November 2023 Asia Times article titled “Xi: China Won’t Fight Hot War with Anyone.” (That title is misleading, as we shall see in a minute.) That month, Xi addressed a gala dinner in San Francisco that brought together some four hundred American government officials, business leaders, and academics. In the course of his remarks, Xi proclaimed that, “Whatever stage of development it may reach, China will never pursue hegemony or expansion, and will never impose its will on others.” Here’s the punchline that Heath takes as authoritative: “China does not seek spheres of influence and will not fight a cold war or a hot war with anyone” (my italics).
Skepticism abounds. Most obviously, Xi would not issue binding guidance to the People’s Liberation Army during a dinner speech to an American audience in California—an audience he has every incentive to lull into complacency, dulling U.S. resistance to aggression.
More fundamentally, the idea that China will never impose its will on others is laughable. Beijing tries to impose its will on its neighbors all day long, every day, by every means short of—so far—open war. Just ask the Philippines, whose offshore exclusive economic zone is under constant siege by China’s Coast Guard, maritime militia, and the PLA Navy. Or ask Vietnam, or Japan, or Australia—all targets of Chinese bullying. If Beijing is not already waging a form of cold war under the guise of gray-zone operations, the phrase “cold war” has no meaning.
Bear in mind that Xi casts himself as a latter-day Mao, heir to the Great Helmsman who insisted there can never be too much deception in war. And war is a 24/7 enterprise for Chinese Communists. Mao even put his own twist on Clausewitz’s famous dictum, declaring that war is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed. Contemporary China wages three types of warfare every day, leveraging lawfare, the media, and psychological manipulation.
In short, no one should take soothing words from CCP emissaries at face value. Remember, Xi is the same guy who a decade ago promised his U.S. counterpart, President Barack Obama, not to militarize the South China Sea following China’s island-building spree—and then promptly militarized it. China may be waging war without gunsmoke, but it is waging war all the same.
And a hot war? Here again, believe Xi at your own peril. Not only does Beijing countenance open war in the Western Pacific, it transcribed its threat to use violent force against Taiwan into domestic law two decades ago, via its “Anti-Secession Law.” The law sketched several redlines that, if crossed, would unleash the mainland’s armed forces against the island. Beijing would doubtless deny such an expedition would qualify as war because it depicts occupying Taiwan as an internal matter. But If Xi opted to deploy force across the Taiwan Strait, and if the United States and its allies kept their informal commitment to the island’s defense, then China would find itself in a war, using the vast military machine it has assembled over the past three decades.
Party leaders in Beijing know that, whatever reassurances they may utter. China has not invested vast effort and national treasure in the world’s largest naval armada, backed it up with a massive strategic rocket force, and fielded accompanying air and ground forces to prosecute operations the party leadership has pronounced unthinkable. Xi Jinping’s San Francisco speech was bunk.
The Threat of War
Toward the end of his missive, Heath offers up an appraisal of PLA armaments development. He admits that the evidence is ambiguous, but he strongly suggests that the PLA’s force structure is geared chiefly to deterrence and non-war missions. Indeed, there is no doubt that party leaders prefer to win without fighting—all sane leaders do. But there is no deterrence without military capability—capability sufficient to persuade opponents that the PLA could fight and win if instructed to. And the non-war missions the PLA conducts in East and Southeast Asia are not just deterrent but intensely coercive in nature. Coercion, too, depends on fielding fighting forces that rivals fear could overcome them in battle.
Combat readiness, then, is of prime importance to warlike diplomacy in peacetime. If China makes believers out of its rivals, they will desist from actions Beijing forbids while taking actions Beijing demands. But for this to work, the PLA must have the means, doctrine, and operational design to prevail in a shooting war, or else the threats underlying efforts at deterrence and coercion will ring hollow, and China will discredit itself as a practitioner of big-stick diplomacy.
Lastly, Heath maintains that China has tipped over into decline by many metrics, such as demographics and economic health. He prophesies that decline will unsettle the CCP regime, amplifying the party’s obsession with staying in power and setting in motion a vicious cycle that further debilitates combat readiness within the PLA. Prospects of war would recede further than they already have.
Maybe. American war planners can hope this thesis will prove true over the long run. But Clausewitz points out that if national leaders see the need to achieve their goals by force of arms, and if they perceive trendlines turning against them, they will be tempted to use force now. If today is as good it gets, today might be a good day for Xi to fling the dice.
Moreover, even if China’s economic, military, and diplomatic fortunes have crested, the armaments and defense infrastructure Beijing has built up since the 1990s will be around for decades to come. CCP chieftains are not about to dismantle it because of concerns about political loyalty. Indeed, capabilities sometimes generate intentions. The existence of powerful fighting forces will introduce an unstable element into relations with China—even a China whose best days lie behind it.
Beware of claims that an antagonist in decline is a cautious, conservative, or incapable antagonist. And, if it needs saying again, beware of words meant to placate you against all evidence. Believe your own eyes, not Xi & co.
In short, Timothy Heath has done an admirable job of showing that the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army are guilty of self-defeating behavior and unlikely to amend practices likely to impair combat performance. They are swimming upstream from the standpoint of political and military culture. We and our regional allies, partners, and friends should welcome China’s self-inflicted harm in the military demesne.
But let’s not push the upbeat assessment too far. This is no time for complacency.
About the Author: James Holmes
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
Image: Shutterstock.