UPDATE: A version of my post last week, “Money talks: Why China is beating America in Asia”, has just been published in The Hill in Washington DC. Read the article here. Meanwhile I have updated my post from Tuesday about China and its ambitions for Taiwan, see below.
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COMING THIS TUESDAY: True or false: China tricked Sweden into accidentally hosting a military site in the Arctic Circle?
Does China want to go to war with America? You might think so from recent remarks by President Xi in a speech to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Korean War, when Chinese and US-led forces last fought. “Any country and any army, no matter how powerful they used to be” – a clear jab at the US – would see their actions “battered” if they stood against the international community, and China would “fight war with war”.
This has not been the only example of China ratcheting up the military pressure in recent months. In September its air force released a video purportedly showing their bombers attacking the US island of Guam. Unfortunately it quickly became apparent that many of the action sequences had been “borrowed” from Hollywood films like "The Rock", and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, but the message, like Xi’s speech, was clear. China will not avert from a war with America if push comes to shove.
But how likely is war with America? And is China about to embark on a worldwide conquering spree with Xi as a twenty-first century Napoleon?
China is certainly upgrading its military under President Xi. With a budget that could be as much as $652 billion (roughly the same as Switzerland’s total GDP), the People’s Liberation Army is almost as well funded as the US military.
The money has been well spent. The army and the air force have been upgraded, there is a new space force, and combat drones aplenty, but the money spent on the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has been the most eye catching. It has allowed the PLAN to rapidly expand, and now for the first time since the Second World War the US Navy is no longer the world’s biggest.
As the US Department of Defense notes, the official reason for this heavy spending is for the PLA “to become a ‘world‐class’ military by the end of 2049…[one which is] equal to—or in some cases superior to—the US military”.
Yet in terms of its international reach, the PLA has a long way to go to match the West. It currently has just one confirmed extra-territorial base (not including the South China Seas), in the African country of Djibouti. Although there is talk of China wanting to open more, including in Western allies like Israel and the UAE, it will still be a long way behind the West. Britain and France have a few dozen foreign bases between them; America, on the other hand, has up to 800 bases across 80 countries.
China simply doesn’t have much experience fighting outside of its immediate neighbourhood. Although Chinese troops have mounted expeditions across maritime Asia over the centuries, from Japan to Java and Johor, a Chinese army has never been further west than the borders of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, when it fought the Battle of Talas in AD751.
Instead, by far the PLA’s most important role is to defend China’s territorial integrity. This is a demanding task given how many land and sea boundaries the country has – and how many of these boundaries are in contention. China currently has border disputes with countries including Japan, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Korea (North and South), Russia, Bhutan, and India.
However, none of these are as important as the main “domestic” challenge for the PLA: Taiwan. This is also where China and America are most likely to go to war, if they ever do.
President Xi is determined to force the reunification between the Mainland and what the Communist Party considers to be a rogue island province, at a time no later than 2049 when China will be celebrating the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic.
For a long time, Beijing sought to reclaim ownership through diplomacy, but this may have now changed: earlier this year Chinese Premier Li Keqiang left out the word “peaceful” when referring to Beijing’s desire to “reunify” with the island.
On the face of it this should be worrying for Taiwan, whose armed forces are dwarfed by those on the mainland (see the infographic above).
Yet for all China’s bluster, invading Taiwan would make D-Day look like an afternoon regatta. As this analysis shows, Chinese forces would have to make it across a hundred mile stretch of sea and successfully invade a mountainous island that’s had seventy years to prepare. Given the hundreds of thousands of troops needed to make a success of it, a build-up to any invasion would also be easy to spot.
Far more likely would be for China to seize some of the outlying Taiwanese islands and see what happened next. Would, for instance, the US intervene?
Whilst America doesn’t have a legal requirement to come to Taiwan’s aid, it has recently re-committed its support to the island nation, sentiments backed up by arms sales. If the US did want to fight on Taiwan’s behalf, then it has enough assets in the region (including submarines) to make it very tough indeed for a Chinese invasion force to even reach Taiwan, let alone conquer it.
Whether the PLA is able to launch a full invasion of a Taiwan under US protection is hard to tell. What is for sure is that Beijing is investing in its armed forces to signal its ability to try, and that may be enough to persuade future American Presidents that Taiwan isn’t worth the effort. As Sun Tzu once said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Avoiding a war would be handy for China given the questions over its military proficiency. Almost all the China watchers that I have spoken to agree that the PLA is not yet strong enough to challenge America and its allies in open warfare. Years of combat inactivity take a long time to correct, especially against Western forces that have been more at constant war for decades in various parts of the world. Their equipment also heavily lags behind in capability, despite years of investment: a third of China’s fighters are second generation planes, which were phased out by the US years ago.
This is not to say there might not be skirmishes between the two sides. US and Chinese forces have already clashed in the past (like the spy plane incident of 2001), and with a lack of naval protocols in the South China Sea, there may be more to come. A Chinese vessel ramming a Western naval ship is not an unimaginable scenario, and something to consider for those countries intent on performing Freedom of Navigation patrols there, like the UK and Australia.
However, the one realistic location for actual war to start is around Taiwan. With Beijing having put so much store into reuniting the two sides of the Straits, it is hard to see how there won’t be a military push to retake the island if diplomacy breaks down. If China does invade, then all eyes will be on America and its allies to see how they respond.
Until such a day, however, it is more than likely that the only US-Chinese combat on display will be on intellectual property-defying propaganda videos.