China’s Getting Ready to Throw Its Weight Around
The latest edition of an annual Pentagon report details how China is bulking up its military budget and its nuclear stockpile.
IN 1981, THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION rolled out the first edition of what would become an annual publication: Soviet Military Power. Written under the aegis of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the 100-page assessment was chock full of vivid paintings of Soviet military hardware and installations and jam-packed with charts and graphs, all presented in a lurid, fire-engine-red design scheme. Thirty-six thousand copies were printed.
As a propaganda (pardon me, “public diplomacy”) tool, Soviet Military Power was enormously successful. It prompted the Kremlin to counter with two limp publications, mostly aimed at Western arms-control enthusiasts and the German public amid the deployment of Pershing medium-range missiles, Whence the Threat to Peace? and Disarmament: Who’s Against? And Soviet Military Power did more than help tip the scales toward bolstering nuclear deterrence; it also did much to rally American opinion behind the Reagan defense buildup, creating the long-lived systems that remain the backbone of America’s armed forces. The final, 1991 edition was retitled Military Forces in Transition to reflect the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Nearly a decade later, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, frustrated by continued and deep reductions in U.S. defense budgets and the resulting effects on the armed forces, copied the Reagan playbook by inserting a provision into the defense authorization bill calling for an “Annual Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China.” The Clinton administration, in the throes of shepherding Beijing into the World Trade Organization and securing “most favored nation” status, threatened to veto the defense law, and a cautious Senate prevaricated. If not for the steel will of the late Rep. Tillie Fowler (R-Fla.), Congress may well have caved to Clinton.
This week, the Department of Defense published the twenty-fourth edition of the China report, now titled Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China. Over the decades, the assessment has metastasized from a cursory summary of the People’s Liberation Army’s order of battle into a nearly 170-page almanac that has played an important role in understanding China as the “pacing threat”—as the 2022 National Defense Strategy puts it—for the U.S. military.1
The growth in the size and sophistication of the report reflects changes in both American domestic political attitudes and Pentagon thinking, beginning with a clear-eyed reckoning of Beijing’s strategic goals. To the Chinese, international politics is not simply a competition among great powers but a “clash of opposing ideological systems.” Beijing wants a “leading position” in creating a new, less liberal international order. To that end, the PLA is increasingly capable of long-range power projection not just in the Western Pacific but on a global scale, particularly in key locations such as the Gulf of Aden, conducting combined military exercises not only with Russia and Iran but also Saudi Arabia, and developing overseas bases and access agreements.
Over time, the Pentagon has developed a better understanding of Chinese defense spending, particularly in accounting for “purchasing power parity”—that is, how much the PLA can actually buy for the nominal amount of money it spends. The report concedes that China’s announced annual defense spending of $230 billion in 2022 was probably about half of the true amount, roughly $450 billion per year. Even this estimate is likely very low. A comprehensive analysis done by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Mackenzie Eaglen, using those 2022 figures and analyzing Chinese labor costs as well as purchasing power, put Beijing’s defense spending at $711 billion. In 2022, that nearly matched the U.S. defense budget of $742 billion.
A second long-term trend tracked by the China report is the growth in the size and capability of Beijing’s nuclear forces. As recently as 2020, the Pentagon estimated that the PLA’s stockpile of nuclear weapons was just 200 warheads—a “minimally deterrent” posture. The current estimate is 600 warheads, and that is expected to grow to 1,000 by the end of the decade and 1,500 by the mid-2030s. The PLA and its rocket forces are also modernizing and diversifying delivery systems, with bombers, missile submarines, and both fixed-silo and road-mobile land-based missiles. The Chinese are also developing difficult-to-defend advanced hypersonic systems to rival similar U.S. efforts. The upshot is that China is apparently seeking rough nuclear parity with the United States and Russia, which would make it the third nuclear superpower. All of China’s 400 nuclear-capable ballistic missiles can range the United States. And, perhaps most worrisome, long-time China analyst Andrew Erickson believes that Beijing is moving toward a “launch-on warning” counterstrike doctrine, effectively putting their arsenal on a hair trigger and greatly compounding the risk of a catastrophic accident. This is Dr. Strangelove with Chinese characteristics.
FRUSTRATINGLY, THE CHINA REPORT raises but does not answer the ultimate question about China’s buildup: Is the stockpiling of capabilities at all matched by a growing professional operational and tactical competence? To be fair, this is a hard question to answer about a military that hasn’t fought a war since 1979. Squirreled away at the end of the report is a brief bit of reporting on the recent corruption scandals that have wracked the PLA’s senior leadership (and Chinese society and government more broadly). “The extent of the current wave of corruption cases,” speculates the report, “touching every service in the PLA, may have shaken Beijing’s confidence in high-ranking PLA officials because rooting out corruption in the military had been a major focus” of Xi Jinping’s regime. And the report was completed well before the sacking of Xi’s protégé, Adm. Miao Hua, from the Central Military Commission.
Indeed, this past March, CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong threatened to crack down on “fake combat capabilities” in the PLA. Is his target corruption in weapons procurement or logistics systems, or something that directly diminishes the fighting qualities of the PLA akin to the corruption that has frustrated the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine? The report does not provide answers. It does note that, in traditional Communist style, the PLA is permeated with political officers, a system often at odds with military professionalism. Likewise, while it comprehensively catalogues the growing frequency, size, and apparent complexity of PLA military exercises, it does not judge the level of wartime realism or “friction” in what may be highly scripted affairs.
A final long-term characteristic of these reports is that they have eschewed the hyperbole that permeated its Soviet Military Power predecessor. But what is an analytical and intellectual feature may be a political bug. Rep. Fowler would be steaming mad to learn that decades of reporting on the country’s “pacing threat” had yet to result in any sort of Reaganesque reinvestment in the American military.
Giselle Donnelly is a senior fellow in defense and national security policy at the American Enterprise Institute. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee staff, she drafted the initial legislation mandating the Pentagon’s annual China military power report.
DIA has in recent years also published reports on the Russian, Iranian, and North Korean militaries, as well as specific “functional” reports on technological or military developments.
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