Top Quotes: “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China” — Hal Brands & Michael Beckley
Introduction
“The core argument in this book is that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Americans urgently need to start seeing the Sino-American rivalry less as a 100-year marathon and more as a blistering, decade-long sprint. That’s because China will be a falling power far sooner than most people think.”
“Both history and China’s current trajectory suggest that the Sino-American competition will hit its moment of maximum danger during this decade, the 2020s.
The reason for this is China has reached the most treacherous stage in the life cycle of a rising power — the point where it is strong enough to aggressively disrupt the existing order but is losing confidence that time is on its side.”
“For more than a decade, China has been concealing a serious economic slowdown that existentially threatens the ruling regime. Within a few years, a slow-motion demographic catastrophe will create severe economic and political strains. Through its “wolf-warrior” diplomacy and its confrontational behavior in hot spots from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, China has sprung a strategic trap on itself, scaring — and beginning to unite — potential rivals throughout Eurasia. Not least, the CC has now violated the first rule of global politics for the past century: Don’t make an enemy of the United States.
We live in an age of “peak China,” not a forever rising China. Beijing is a revisionist power that wants to reorder the world, but its time to do so is already running out.”
“China’s predicament offers good news and bad news for America. The good news is that, over the long run, the Chinese challenge may prove more manageable than many pessimists now believe. An unhealthy, totalitarian China won’t effortlessly surge past America as the world’s leading power. We may one day look back on China as we now view the Soviet Union — as a formidable foe whose evident strengths obscured fatal vulnerabilities. The bad news is that getting to the long run won’t be easy. During the 2020s, the pace of rivalry will be torrid, and the prospect of war will be frighteningly real.”
“China’s economy is ten times larger than Russia’s, and Beijing’s military budget is quadruple the size of Moscow’s.”
“Real gross domestic product grew 37-fold between 1978 and 2018.”
“China’s inflation-adjusted military spending spending grew 10-fold between 1990 and 2020, a rate of sustained expansion unparalleled in modern history.”
“The PLA, meanwhile, has also begun rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and developing more sophisticated means of delivering it; Beijing is on pace to become a full-fledged nuclear peer of the United States by the 2030s.”
“Through its Digital Silk Road project, Beijing is now trying to position companies such as Huawei and ZTE as the world’s chief providers of telecommunications infrastructure and advanced surveillance equipment. In 2018, Huawei alone claimed to be running upwards of 700 high-tech “safe city” projects in more than 100 countries. Through some of the same firms, China is seeking to build or buy the fiber-optic cables and data centers that make up the physical wiring of the Internet — a modern version of the power Great Britain once wielded through its network of undersea telegraph cables — and to vacuum up the world’s data for exploitation by Beijing.”
China Today
“America isn’t the only menace the CP worries about. In 2021, the party took aim at another lethal enemy of China’s rejuvenation: divorce.
Beijing mandated a thirty-day cooling-off period for married couples seeking a divorce, during which either party could call off the split. Women’s rights advocates warned that the new policy would make it harder for battered wives to leave abusive husbands and pointed out that the measure was part of a larger trend. In 2018, Chinese judges granted divorces in just 38 percent of cases brought before the courts, the lowest percentage on record. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese officials openly hoped that prolonged lockdowns would lead to vigorous patriotic baby-making and proposed special taxes on childless couples. The CCP has even cracked down on vasectomies.
Beijing explains these measures as efforts to promote family values. But what’s really at issue is an acute fear of demographic decline. For decades, China’s birthrate has been far below the level required to maintain current population size. A shrinking, aging population cannot deliver robust economic growth. Without robust economic growth, the Chinese dream is an illusion.”
“Most of China’s freshwater and harbors are located in the south, where they are separated from the rest of the country by thick jungles and rolling highlands. Many major southern coastal cities have had extended periods where they did more business with foreign merchants than with their ostensible compatriots in the north.”
“For much of modern history, China’s punishing environment condemned it to conflict and hardship. From the first Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the country was torn apart by foreign powers, wracked by internal rebellion, and plagued by poverty and famine. China was forced to fight more than a dozen wars on its home soil during this “Century of Humiliation, resulting in devastation and territorial dismemberment. China also suffered two of the deadliest civil wars in history: the Taping Rebellion (1850–1864, 20–30 million dead) and the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949, 7–8 million dead).
Even after China unified in 1949, its security situation remained terrible. U.S. intervention against Japan had allowed China to escape World War I with its territory mostly intact. But after Mao’s Communists won the civil war and leaned toward the Soviet Union, Washington responded with a “policy of pressure” designed to subvert the CCP, surround it with military bases, and rupture its relationship with Moscow. The United States armed and allied with Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist government on Taiwan. It imposed harsh sanctions on China, effectively cutting it off from the global economy. During crises in the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s, the United States threatened nuclear strikes against the PRC. Matters worsened when the Sino-Soviet alliance fell apart over ideological disputes and the inevitable frictions bètween giant authoritarian neighbors. By the late 1960s, the Sino-Soviet border was the most militarized boundary on the planet, and China was surrounded by hostile forces on all sides.
Yet Soviet hostility proved to be a valuable asset for China, because it made possible Mao’s opening to America. That strategic masterstroke did three things that enabled the rise of the China we know today.
First, it turned the United States from a mortal enemy into a quasi-ally. The United States began withdrawing its forces from Vietnam and Taiwan; it started backing China as a Cold War counterweight to the Soviet Union. Henry Kissinger shared sensitive intelligence on Soviet troop movements and warned Moscow that an attack on China would be an attack on America’s vital interests. When China invaded Soviet ally Vietnam in 1979, the United States again warned Moscow not to interfere. Thanks to the quirks of Cold War geopolitics, Beijing now had a superpower on its side.
Second, the opening to America fast-tracked China’s integration with the wider world. The United Nations made Beijing, not Taipei, the holder of China’s seats in the General Assembly and Security Council. The PRC began its entry into institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Country after country switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing; Japan, China’s historical enemy, became its largest aid donor. With these new diplomatic connections, China was able to counter-encircle the Soviet Union, forging partnerships with Soviet neighbors stretching from Japan through Iran to West Germany.
Third, rapprochement allowed a breakout from economic purgatory. For the first time, the PRC was able to reduce military spending and focus on economic development. The end of hostility with the West meant access to global commerce and safety for Chinese shipping.”
“China was perfectly positioned for success in a world economy that was changing rapidly. Between 1970 and 2007, world trade surged sixfold. China, with its low production costs, rode the wave of hyperglobalization. China’s trade grew 30-fold between 1984 and 2005. Trade as a share of GDP reached 65 percent, an astoundingly high ratio for a large economy.”
“Chinese demographics were an economist’s dream.
In the 2000s, China had a remarkable ten working-age adults for every senior citizen aged 65 or older. For most major economies, the average is closer to five. China’s extreme demographic advantage was the happy upshot of wild policy fluctuations.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the CP encouraged Chinese women to bear many children as a way of boosting the working-age population, which had been decimated by years of warfare and famine. Chinese families dutifully obliged, and the population exploded 80 percent in thirty years. In the late 1970s, the Chinese government, now worried about runaway population growth, instituted its policy limiting each family to one child.
As a result, by the 1990s, China had a huge baby-boom generation entering the prime of their working lives with relatively few elderly parents or young children to care for. No population has ever been more primed for productivity. Demographers think this imbalance alone explains a quarter of China’s rapid growth during the 1990s and 2000s.”
“Having just recently benefited from an unprecedented demographic dividend, China is now about to suffer one of history’s worst peacetime demographic crises.
Blame the One-Child policy. When China first implemented that policy, it provided powerful economic stimulus by creating a generation of upwardly mobile, relatively unencumbered parents. But the bill is coming due because now there are no children to take the places of those parents. By 2050, the country will only have two workers available to support every retiree (compared to ten workers for every retiree in the early 2000s), and nearly one-third of the country will be over the age of sixty. China’s population will be just half its current size by the end of the century and perhaps as soon as the 2060s. The economic consequences will be dire.
Current projections suggest China’s age-related spending will need to triple as a share of GDP, from 10 percent to 30 percent, over the next thirty years to provide a basic level of elder care-to prevent senior citizens from dying in the streets. To put that in perspective, consider that all of China’s government spending currently totals about 30 percent of GDP. China will somehow have to raise this astronomical amount of revenue from a collapsing tax base and a less productive workforce, as it loses nearly 200 million working-age adults while gaining nearly 200 million senior citizens.”
“In 2016, China started allowing parents to have two children; the limit was later raised to three. Yet birthrates fell by nearly 50 percent from 2016 to 2020. Fewer Chinese babies were born in 2020 than in any year since 1961, when China suffered the largest famine in history and its population was less than half its current size, and the Chinese government expects the birthrate to decline for the foreseeable future. (By 2025, according to some projections, sales of adult diapers may outpace sales of baby diapers in China.) One reason for this slump is an acute shortage of women of childbearing age. The One-Child policy incentivized parents to abort daughters in hopes of having sons. Now China is paying the price: China’s population of women in their twenties dropped by 35 million from 2010 to 2021. There are roughly 40 million more bachelors than single women of similar age. To make matters worse, fewer women are choosing to get married or raise families. Marriage rates fell nearly a third and divorce rates rose by a quarter between 2014 and 2019.”
“Political tensions within China will rise, as an aging population places more demands on a government that is ill-equipped to meet them. Internal violence may surge — a common outcome in societies where there are too many men competing for too few women. The Chinese government might even become more willing to start wars, if for no other reason than to throw surplus men into a meatgrinder.”
“China’s impressive economic performance was the very definition of unsustainable growth because the country trashed its environment in the process. As a result, Beijing now has to pay premiums for basic resources, and economic growth is becoming very expensive.
To see what we mean, look at China’s capital-output ratio, which measures the amount of spending required to produce every dollar of output. Countries where raw materials are cheap tend to have low ratios; countries where inputs are pricey have higher ones. China’s capital-output ratio has tripled since 2007, meaning that it now takes three times as much economic investment to generate the same amount of economic output. China’s ratio recently surpassed the average ratio in rich countries such as America, a remarkable development given that untapped investment opportunities are usually more abundant in developing than developed countries.
China’s environmental crisis can be captured by many statistics. But it is only when one breathes its air and drinks its water that the sheer volume of destruction becomes apparent. Half of China’s river water and nearly 90 percent of its groundwater is unfit to drink. A quarter of China’s river water and 60 percent of its groundwater is so contaminated that the government has declared it “unfit for human contact” and unusable even for agriculture or industry. China’s availability of water per person is roughly half that of the world median, and more than half of China’s major cities suffer from extreme water scarcity. Beijing has roughly the same amount of water per person as Saudi Arabia. This crisis is exacerbated because China remains one of the least efficient users of water on the planet — and because its geography forces it to divert water from the Yangtze in the south to parched cities and fields in the north. Dealing with water scarcity costs China at least $140 billion per year in government expenditures and reduced productivity, a price that will rise with time.
China’s food security is also deteriorating, the consequence of increasing consumption (a good thing) and the resulting devastation of arable land (a bad thing). In 2008, China became a net importer of grain, breaking its traditional policy of self-sufficiency. In 2011, China became the world’s largest importer of agricultural products. The government is trying to regain self-sufficiency by heavily subsidizing farmers, but doing so is simply accelerating the depletion of agricultural land. In 2014, Xinhua reported that more than 40 percent of China’s arable land was suffering “degradation” from overuse. According to official studies, pollution has destroyed nearly 20 percent of China’s arable land, an area the size of Belgium. An additional 1 million square miles of farmland have become desert, forcing the resettlement of 24,000 villages and pushing the edge of the Gobi Desert to within fifty miles of Beijing. With few options for increasing the food supply, Beijing has turned to belt tightening. In 2021, the government banned binge eating and lavish feasts and started requiring caterers to encourage customers to order smaller servings. Rationing is on the rise.
Finally, breakneck development has made China the world’s largest net energy importer. Just a decade ago, Americans fretted about their own dependence on foreign oil. Today, Beijing imports nearly 75 percent of its oil and 45 percent of its natural gas, while the United States — thanks to the fracking revolution — has become a net energy exporter. China’s energy imports cost the country half a trillion dollars each year. They are also forcing China to take expensive energy security measures such as building overland pipelines through Central Asia and an ocean-going navy that can patrol the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Any interruption in Persian Gulf oil flows would plunge China into an energy crisis far worse than what hit the United States in the late 1970s.”
“China clearly has become more patrimonial and repressive during the past decade. Since taking power in 2012, Xi has appointed himself “chairman of everything,” helming all important committees and doing away with any semblance of collective rule. At the 2017 Party Congress, Xi Jining Thought — a conscious echo of Mao Zedong Thought — was made part of the country’s guiding ideology. Indoctrination has become more pervasive at all levels of education and in nearly all facets of everyday life; individuals — even business titans and movie stars — who get crosswise with the great leader are simply disappeared from public view. Taking no chances, Xi has packed the highest levels of government with lackeys and has abolished presidential term limits. In effect, he has systematically stripped away the post-Mao safeguards against one-man rule. Now China is a rigid oligarchy ruled by a dictator for life.
This might not be so bad if Xi was an enlightened economic reformer. But he consistently prioritizes political control over economic efficiency. For example, private firms generate most of China’s wealth, yet under Xi, politically connected state-owned enterprises have received 80 percent of the loans and subsidies doled out by Chinese banks. State zombie firms have been propped up while private firms have been starved of capital and forced to bribe party members for protection.
To take another example, innovation by local governments spearheaded China’s economic development. But Xi, in what one insider-turned-dissident calls a “great leap backward” has accelerated a return to Maoist centralization. His brutal and far-reaching anti-corruption campaign has scared local leaders from engaging in economic experimentation, lest they disrupt the wrong patronage networks and end up accused of malfeasance. Meanwhile, censorship has silenced independent economists and journalists, making sensible reform and adjustment almost impossible. And Xi’s political work campaign has stifled entrepreneurship. Every company with more than fifty employees is required to have a Communist Party political commissar on staff.
Under Xi, the CCP is crushing dissent and strengthening its grip on nearly all aspects of society. In 2021, his government released a five-year plan imposing severe regulations on every Internet and technology-related sector of the economy, including seemingly nonstrategic industries such as health care, education, transportation, meal delivery, video gaming, and insurance. Companies must hand over their data to the state and can’t get a loan, list overseas, merge, or make any moves related to data security or consumer privacy without Beijing’s blessing and guidance. By the fall of 2021, the country’s largest tech firms had already lost more than $1 trillion in market capitalization as a result of these regulations. This is a formula for tight political control-and economic stagnation.”
“The countries making up the Group of 20 — the world’s largest economies — hit Chinese companies with more than 2,000 trade restrictions between 2008 and 2019. Overall, China faced nearly 11,000 new trade barriers from foreign countries between 2008 and 2021. By late 2020, nearly a dozen countries had dropped out of BRI and another sixteen — mostly Western economic powerhouses — were walling off their telecommunications networks from Chinese influence. The United States and many of its allies imposed severe technology bans on major Chinese companies, denying them critical inputs (for example, semiconductors) and threatening their long-term survival. Today, many countries are actively looking to cut China out of their supply chains. Some, such as Japan, are paying their companies to exit China.
China is losing the easy access it used to enjoy to foreign markets, technology, and capital. The era of hyperglobalization that facilitated China’s rise is coming to an end. And it couldn’t be happening at a worse time.”
“Consider one telling statistic: China’s official gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate dropped from 15 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2019. That was already the slowest rate in thirty years, and then the COVID-19 pandemic pushed China’s economy into the red.
A growth rate of 6 percent would still be spectacular, but only if it were true. Rigorous studies based on objectively observable data — such as electricity use, construction, tax revenues, and railway freight — show that China’s true growth rate is roughly half the official figure and China’s economy is 20 percent smaller than reported. Senior officials, including the former head of the National Bureau of Statistics of China and the current Chinese premier, have confirmed that the government cooks its economic books.
To make matters worse, practically all of China’s GDP growth since 2008 has resulted from the government pumping capital through the economy. Take away government stimulus spending, some economists argue, and China’s economy may not have grown at all. Total factor productivity, the vital ingredient for wealth creation, declined 1.3 percent every year on average between 2008 and 2019, meaning that China is spending more to produce less each year.
The signs of this extended era of unproductive growth are easy to spot. China has built more than fifty ghost cities — sprawling metropolises of empty offices, apartments, malls, and airports. Nationwide, more than 20 percent of homes stand vacant, and there are enough empty properties for some 90 million people — a number greater than the entire population of Germany. Excess capacity in major industries tops 30 percent, with factories sitting idle and goods rotting in warehouses. Nearly two-thirds of China’s infrastructure projects cost more to build than they will ever generate in economic returns.
Total losses from all this waste are difficult to calculate, but China’s government estimates that it blew at least $6 trillion on “ineffective investment” between 2009 and 2014 alone. The world hasn’t seen such a plunge in productivity from a great power since the Soviet Union in the 1980s.”
“We know how this story ends: with investment-led bubbles that collapse into prolonged economic slumps. As every country that has followed a similar growth-over-productivity model has discovered, throwing more money into an inefficient system yields diminishing returns. In Japan, it resulted in three lost decades of deflation and near-zero growth. In the United States, excessive lending created the Great Recession. The heavily indebted Indonesian economy crashed in the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis. China’s bust could be even worse. Beijing’s debt mountain is easily an order of magnitude larger than Indonesia’s was, and it has been relying on an expansion-at-all-cost development model longer than anyone since the Soviet Union.”
“In high-technology industries, meaning those that involve the commercial application of advanced scientific research (for example, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and semiconductors) or the engineering and integration of complex parts (for example, aviation, medical devices, and system software), the story is different.
Here, China generally accounts for small shares of global markets compared to the United States, Japan, or major European powers. The main reason is that China’s top-down R&D system, though excellent at mobilizing resources, stifles the open flows of information and willingness to challenge conventional wisdom necessary for sustained cutting-edge innovation.”
“As if these dilemmas weren’t vexing enough, China’s leaders also have to worry about their personal fortunes, which are invested in the heart of China’s economy. The party owns almost all of China’s land and roughly two-thirds of its assets, including all of the largest banks and industrial firms. In addition, party members hold executive positions in 95 percent of China’s largest private companies. A slowing economy threatens not only the CP’s domestic legitimacy and international clout but also the livelihoods of its 80 million members.”
“Many Chinese citizens know that their government’s economic story doesn’t add up, and they are voting with their feet. The rich are moving their money and children out of the country en masse. In any given year, 30–60 percent of Chinese millionaires and billionaires say they are leaving China or have plans to do so.
Chinese laborers have been staging thousands of protests every year demanding compensation for their “blood and sweat.” It is never a good sign when a country’s elite flee and its workers rise up.”
“China’s internal security budget doubled between 2008 and 2014 — surpassing military spending in 2010 — and has grown a third faster than overall government spending ever since. Half of China’s major cities have been put under grid-style man-agement, a system in which every block is patrolled by a team of security officers and surveilled 24 hours a day by cameras. Now the government is rolling out a social credit registry that uses speech- and facial-recognition technologies to monitor each of China’s citizens constantly and punish them instantly.”
Conflict
“In 2017, there was a prolonged military standoff after the PLA began building a strategically located road in territory claimed by Bhutan, which India views as a friendly buffer state. Even more brazenly, China surreptitiously constructed, on land globally recognized as Bhutanese, entire villages with an accompanying PLA presence. In 2019, there was a marked increase in Chinese violations of the de facto border with India. Throughout this period, there were also periodic clashes between Indian and Chinese patrols, governed by a long-standing set of implicit rules — no guns, no killing — that kept simmering tensions below a boil. It was that code of conduct that gave way in 2020, with ramifications reaching far beyond the Himalayan frontier.
The fireworks began in May, with Chinese forces briefly occupying swaths of Indian-claimed territory. When Indian forces pushed back, the resulting scrapes were initially conducted according to the familiar rituals. But after dark on June 15, the skirmishing turned deadly. Chinese soldiers attacked an Indian patrol using primitive but brutal weapons, such as sticks studded with rusty nails. According to reports, PLA personnel even tried to crush Indian soldiers by pushing boulders down on top of them. A pitched battle ensued, lasting six hours and involving up to 600 troops. What exactly happened in the darkness remains unclear; the governments told sharply contrasting stories in the aftermath.
Yet some twenty Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops ended up dead, many of them killed when they fell or were pushed off a mountain ridge into the river valley below.
Viewed narrowly, the episode was a victory for China. It showed how easily the PLA could grab chunks of territory claimed by India and how hard it was for New Delhi to respond without touching off a larger war against a stronger power. Nonetheless, China lost more than it gained.
Indian officials had long been concerned about China’s ambitions. Narendra Modi’s nationalist government had more recently worried that Beijing was using BRI projects in Sri Lanka and Pakistan to pressure India from all sides. After Galwan, the backlash was sharp. Indian crowds destroyed Chinese smartphones and burned effigies of Xi Jinping. The nationalist press called for revenge.
It wasn’t just rhetoric. To shore up its defenses, India sought emergency purchases of Russian fighter jets and other military assets. To limit digital dependence on a rival, the Indian government banned dozens of Chinese mobile applications, including TikTok and WeChat, and barred Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network trials. Most important, India’s long, slow move toward America accelerated.
The year after June 2020 saw a flurry of diplomacy around the Quad, a U.S.-Australia-India-Japan partnership that looks a lot like an anti-China alliance of Indo-Pacific democracies. In March 2021, New Delhi agreed to be the manufacturing hub for a COVID-19 vaccine initiative aimed at rolling back Chinese influence in Southeast Asia by distributing 1 billion jabs there. At a virtual Quad summit, Modi and his counterparts effectively announced that they would frustrate China’s geopolitical ambitions — by cooperating to preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific — even as they never publicly mentioned China by name. In the summer of 2021, India moved tens of thousands of additional troops to the border, while also studying how it might help Washington choke off China’s maritime supply lines in a war. U.S. officials began publicly referring to India as a keystone of their counter-China strategy.
Experts on Sino-Indian relations speculated that Beijing’s motive in escalating the border dispute a year earlier may have been to punish New Delhi for working with America. If so, Xi miscalculated.”
“In 2020, after watching China swallow Hong Kong, Taiwan’s government approved a 10 percent hike in military spending and a bold new defense strategy. Under this plan, Taiwan would acquire huge arsenals of mobile missile launchers, armed drones, and mines; prepare its army to surge tens of thousands of troops to any beach in an hour; back those regular forces with a million-strong reserve force trained to fight guerrilla-style in Taiwan’s cities, mountains, and jungles; and set up a huge network of shelters and massive stockpiles of fuel, medical supplies, food, and water for a population psychologically prepared to ride out a bloody conflict for months. “We will defend ourselves to the very last day,” Taiwan’s foreign minister declared. If this plan, which was bolstered by another supplemental defense spending package in 2021, is fully executed, it would make Taiwan extremely difficult to conquer.”
“Japan agreed in 2021 to cooperate closely with America in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Japan’s deputy prime minister declared that such an attack would constitute a threat to the survival of Japan itself, and Washington and Tokyo began drawing up a joint battle plan that reportedly involves U.S. Marines deploying deadly long-range artillery on the southernmost Ryukyu Islands, just 90 miles from Taiwan.”
“After the global financial crisis and a crash in oil prices ended a run of hydrocarbon-propelled growth, Putin needed new ways of strengthening Russia’s position, propping up its resource-dependent economy, and averting challenges to his rule.”
Past Wars
“America was bulking up its defenses in the Philippines with B-17 bombers and P-40 fighters. Military staff talks with the British and Dutch, and economic sanctions coordinated with them, made the Japanese fear that their encirclement was nearly complete. And with American rearmament accelerating, the U.S. Navy would, by 1942–1943, have “four times the tonnage and four times the air power of Japan’s.” At that point, Japan would have no hope of hegemony in Asia. Its leaders would be totally discredited: All the blood the nation had shed, all the privations it had endured, would be for naught. America would “demand more and more concessions,” Japanese leaders concluded, “and ultimately our empire will lie prostrate at the feet of the United States.”In the fall of 1941, the Japanese government decided to seize the Dutch East Indies, Philippines, and other possessions from Singapore to the central Pacific, even though this meant war with Britain and America. Few Japanese officials believed that the country could win an all-out struggle. “We can give you a wild show for six months to a year, but if the war drags on to two and three years, I cannot be confident of the outcome,” Yamamoto predicted. But they feared that the alternative was a sharp decline that would leave Japan impotent before its enemies. And they hoped that a series of lightning blows could so demoralize the United States that it might sue for peace rather than continue the fight.”
“At the darkest moment of World War II, there were perhaps a dozen democracies in the world. As late as 1989, there were twice as many autocratic governments as democracies. Twenty years later, however, democracies outnumbered autocracies 100 to 78, and the share of the world’s population living under autocracy had fallen by half.”
Strategies
“Xi believes that the CCP’s domestic power will be enhanced if authoritarianism is prevalent and democracies are dysfunctional, because fellow despots won’t punish China for human rights abuses, and the Chinese people won’t want to emulate chaotic liberal systems. He thinks that preventing anti-authoritarian revolts in other countries will reduce the possibility that they might erupt in China. And he believes that silencing critics abroad will limit the challenges the CC faces at home. So Xi is moving to secure his regime by rolling back democracy overseas.
China has gone on the ideological offensive in recent years and taken its repression global. Beijing now spends billions of dollars annually on an “anti-democratic toolkit” of NGOs, media outlets, diplomats, advisers, hackers, and bribes all designed to prop up autocrats and sow discord in democracies. Whereas China once worried about insulating itself from foreign popular unrest, it now aims to prevent that unrest from breaking out in the first place. The CCP provides fellow autocracies with guns, money, and protection from UN sanctions. Chinese officials offer their authoritarian brethren riot-control gear and pointers in how to build a surveillance state.”
“Just look at Xinjiang, where smart cities exist side-by-side with concentration camps. Chinese security officers man the camps and handle the “reeducation” and forced sterilization, while cameras, biometric scanners, and mandatory cell-phone apps feed data into computers that keep tabs on everything that happens in the province. Algorithms match camera footage with snapshots, blood samples, and DNA swabs taken by police at “health checks.” When Uighurs reach the edge of their neighborhood, their cell phones automatically alert authorities. When they pump gas, the system checks whether they are the car’s owner. If they try to flee the province, police are dispatched to the doorsteps of their family and friends. If they somehow make it abroad, they aren’t guaranteed an escape: China’s authoritarian allies, even those in Muslim-majority countries such as Egypt, are starting to use Chinese surveillance technology to track down and deport Uighurs back into Beijing’s clutches.”
“By flaunting its vast market, China wrested territory from foreign rivals without firing a shot. The British handed back Hong Kong in 1997. Portugal gave up Macao in 1999. Half a dozen countries settled their territorial disputes with China between 1991 and 2019, and two dozen other countries cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan to secure relations with Beijing. China carried out a “peaceful rise” strategy, and it worked well.”
Attacking Taiwan
“Grabbing Taiwan is China’s top foreign policy goal, and preparations to reclaim the island reportedly consume roughly one-third of the PLA’s budget. If China subdued Taiwan, it would gain access to its world-class semiconductor industry and free up dozens of ships, hundreds of missile launchers and combat aircraft, and billions of defense dollars to wreak havoc farther afield. China could use Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to project power into the Pacific, blockade Japan and the Philippines, and fracture U.S. alliances in East Asia. Not least, successful aggression would eliminate the world’s only Chinese democracy, removing a persistent threat to the CP’s legitimacy. Taiwan is the center of gravity in East Asia — and the epitome of a place where China’s leaders might think that near-term aggression could radically improve their country’s long-term trajectory vis-à-vis the United States.”
“Could a military attack succeed? Until recently, the answer was no. In the 1990s, Taiwan’s geographic and technological advantages over China made it virtually unconquerable. The Taiwan Strait is perilous — typhoons and twenty-foot waves are common — and the island is a natural fortress. Its east coast consists of steep cliffs, and its west coast is dominated by mud flats that extend miles out to sea and are buffeted by severe tides. There are only a dozen beaches on Taiwan where an invading force could even land — and U.S. and Taiwanese fighter aircraft and naval armadas could have made sure that China’s army never got close.
Since then, however, China has outspent Taiwan 25-to-1 on defense. It has churned out new warships, combat aircraft, and missiles, along with amphibious craft that can ferry thousands of troops. China’s military is now ten times larger than Taiwan’s. China’s long-range air-defense systems can shoot down aircraft over Taiwan. China’s land-based missiles and combat aircraft could potentially wipe out Taiwan’s air force and navy and destroy U.S. bases in East Asia. China’s cyber and anti-satellite capabilities threaten to render U.S. forces deaf, blind, and dumb by crippling their vital sensors and satellites. Chinese anti-ship missiles can make the western Pacific a very dangerous place for any large U.S. surface combatant. For a quarter-century, the PLA has focused relentlessly on preparing to conquer Taiwan.
The U.S. military, by contrast, spent most of this period fighting terrorists in the Middle East. More recently, it has funneled troops and weapons into Europe to shore up NATO’s eastern flank. The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations all hoped to pivot U.S. forces to Asia to counter China. But those plans were overtaken by events in other regions, including the rise of ISIS and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a global power, the United States hasn’t had the luxury of preparing for a single military contingency. Consequently, its air force and navy haven’t kept pace with China’s military modernization.
America’s armed forces in Asia still consist predominantly of small numbers of large warships and short-range combat aircraft operating from exposed bases — precisely the kind of forces China could destroy in a surprise missile attack. The United States only has two air bases within 500 miles of Taiwan — the maximum distance unrefueled fighter aircraft can fly before they run out of gas. If China disables those bases, U.S. forces would have to operate from aircraft carriers and from Guam, located 1,800 miles from Taiwan. The extra distance and midair refueling would cut the number of U.S. air sorties in half, giving China an opportunity to dominate the skies over Taiwan. Worse, China now has bombers and ballistic missiles that can strike Guam and potentially hit moving aircraft carriers more than 1,000 miles from the mainland. If these “Guam-killer” and “carrier-killer” missiles work as advertised, China could cripple U.S. military power in East Asia.
Taiwan isn’t ready to pick up the slack. As part of its transition from a conscript army to a more professional all-volunteer military, Taiwan has cut its active-duty force from 275,000 to 175,000 troops and reduced the length of conscription from one year to four months. Recruits receive only a few weeks of basic training, and training for reservists is infrequent and inadequate. Taiwan also has gutted its logistics force, which now routinely fails to resupply combat units or perform basic maintenance. Consequently, soldiers avoid training with their weapons for fear of accidents or wasting precious ammunition; Taiwan’s pilots fly for less than ten hours per month. More than half of Taiwan’s tanks and attack helicopters are dysfunctional, and many Taiwanese soldiers suffer low morale.”
“Between now and the early 2030s — when U.S. and Taiwanese defense reforms will begin to make a major impact — China has its chance.”
“In the most likely contingency, the war would start with thousands of ground- and air-launched Chinese missiles raining down on Taiwan, American military bases on Okinawa and Guam, and the U.S. carrier strike group that has its home port in Japan. All over Taiwan, undercover Chinese special forces and intelligence operatives would emerge, detonating bombs at military facilities and assassinating Taiwanese leaders. Chinese cyberattacks would cripple Taiwan’s critical infrastructure. The PLA would also use cyberattacks and, potentially, ground-launched missiles to destroy the satellites that allow U.S. forces to communicate wit each other and with Washington — thereby rendering America unable to respond or even reliably know what is happening for days or weeks. The PLA’s cyber unit would simultaneously stirup trouble on the American home front, unleashing disinformation campaigns to sow confusion and exacerbate political disputes in the United States.
Meanwhile, a Chinese flotilla previously engaged in military exercises in the Taiwan Strait would dash for Taiwan’s beaches while hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops on the mainland start piling into ships and helicopters in preparation for the main assault. Small amphibious assault craft could emerge from civilian ferries in the strait and try to seize á key port or beach before Taiwanese forces can respond. The United States, having lost many of its forward-deployed forces in China’s surprise attack, would have to surge aircraft and warships from thousands of miles away and fight through a hail of missiles, smart mines, and electromagnetic interference to get anywhere close to Taiwan. Summoning those assets, moreover, might require wrenching them away from other important priorities, such as protecting NATO’s Eastern flank from an aggressive Russia. The United States might find itself facing dire security challenges against two-nuclear armed great powers — with a military resourced to cope only with one.
America would confront agonizing global trade-offs, and U.S. forces in the Pacific would incur losses unlike anything since the Vietnam War or possibly World War II. American leaders might even find themselves up against an awful dilemma — whether to accept a humiliating military setback or threaten to use nuclear weapons if China doesn’t stand down. The United States, a blue-ribbon commission of defense experts concluded in 2018, could suffer “a decisive military defeat” unless it resorts to strategies that risk nuclear apocalypse.”
Th
“For Moscow to gain the upper hand, it would have to control countries where most people preferred to remain free of Communist domination. For the United States to preserve its position, it had only to deny the Soviets that control. Washington could work with “local forces of resistance” to maintain their independence, as Kennan put it, whereas the Soviets had to work against them to snuff it out. This dynamic created a tremendous force-multiplier for America — an ability to capitalize on the exertions of free, friendly nations — that the Soviets never enjoyed.”
“By the 1980s, per capita income in the West was nine times greater than in the Soviet bloc. The balance of power remained fluid; the Soviet Union could still menace the free world. But Moscow’s odds of decisively winning the contest were mostly decreasing over time.”
“America also has an unparalleled ability to cajole allied cooperation. The U.S. consumer market is as large as that of the next five nations combined; half of world trade and 90 percent of international financial transactions are conducted in dollars and pass through institutions under the thumb of the U.S. Treasury Department.
American firms create one-third of the value in global high-tech industries. No country has more carrots and sticks. In addition, the globalized nature of tech supply chains has increased the number of choke points under U.S. control by virtually guaranteeing that an American firm occupies at least one critical node in the chain. These advantages bestow massive convening power on the United States. The semiconductor example is illustrative. Washington was able to persuade allies to cut China off from high-end chips and manufacturing machines because U.S. firms produce critical components for those machines, allies increasingly fear China, and allies depend more on America’s market (and America’s protection) than they do on China’s.”
What The US Can Do
“Step one is for America and its allies to aggressively hack digital authoritarian systems, thereby undermining their effectiveness. One redeeming quality of high-tech police states is that they have myriad points of failure. Any government computer or goon is a potential entry point for malware. Hackers can stealthily feed “adversarial inputs” into Al-enabled surveillance systems by changing a few pixels in certain images. They can “poison the data” authoritarian regimes use to train their algorithms with fake inputs; they can enter malicious code into the patches authoritarian technicians use to fix faulty systems. Basic hacks can spring leaks in censorship systems, allowing prohibited news stories to go viral; they also can trick surveillance systems or social credit schemes into overlooking dissident activity or misclassifying regime loyalists as enemies of the state.
Democratic governments don’t even need to attack authoritarian states directly; they can post spoofs online and let dissidents around the world weaponize them. And defenders of democracy need not disrupt every digital authoritarian regime – just a few high-profile flubs might be enough to dampen demand for Beijing’s products. Think of this as ideological cost-imposition: The more time, energy, and money China spends fixing bugs in its surveillance state at home, the less it has to manipulate democratic politics abroad.
Autocrats constantly seek to enhance their internal security systems, so another vital task is to slow the spread of repression-relevant technology. In part, that means producing affordable alternatives to Chinese telecom and smart-city products, such as low-earth-orbit satellites that provide global broadband. More important, it means barring U.S. and allied firms from transferring certain technologies – such as advanced speech- and facial-recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing technologies – to authoritarian regimes, as well as barring foreign firms involved in authoritarian repression from raising capital in democratic financial markets. The export control coalitions we discussed previously could make that happen, while also generating leverage to prevent democratic backsliding by tenuous members of the free world. If Hungary’s increasingly thuggish government wants continued access to U.S. and Western European markets, for example, it would have to dispense with digital systems provided by Beijing.”
“Most audaciously, the United States and its allies could preemptively split the Internet by creating a digital bloc in which data and products flow freely, while excluding China and other countries that do not respect freedom of expression or privacy rights. The CCP currently enjoys the best of both worlds. It runs a closed network at home that prevents Chinese citizens from reaching foreign websites and limits Western companies from entering China’s digital market. Yet it also selectively accesses the global Internet to steal intellectual property, meddle in democratic elections, spread propaganda, and hack critical infrastructure.
To counter this exploitation, Richard Clarke and Rob Knake have proposed forming an “Internet Freedom League.” Under this system, countries that adhere to the vision of a free and open Internet would stay mutually connected, while countries opposed to that vision would face restricted access or be shut out. In essence, the league would be a digital version of the Schengen Agreement, which provides for the free movement of people, goods, and services within the European Union. The league would not block all Internet traffic from nonmembers, just companies and organizations that aid and abet digital authoritarianism and cybercrime. Of course, the CCP is one of those bad actors, so China would be cut off.”
“America and its allies should try to buy New Delhi’s cooperation by incentivizing companies to move telecommunications production from China to India. As of 2020, the United States sourced 73 percent of its cell phones and 93 percent of its laptops from China. If Washington and other advanced democracies could shift even a fraction of their telecommunications supply chains, it would strengthen India’s manufacturing sector, potentially enabling it to produce affordable alternatives to Chinese products that could be exported throughout the developing world. India has already announced its willingness to pay for the privilege; in 2021, its government allocated $1 billion in subsidies to entice the world’s top computer manufacturers to relocate their China-based operations to India.”
“The Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces – and it can do so simply by buying tools that are ready or nearly ready today. The most straightforward solution would be to position hordes of missile launchers, armed drones, electronic jammers, smart mines, and sensors at sea and on allied territory near the strait. Instead of waiting for a Chinese invasion to start and then surging missile-magnet aircraft carriers into the region, the Pentagon could use what is, in essence, a high-tech minefield to decimate China’s invasion forces and cut their communications links as they load in mainland ports or putter across more than 100 miles of open water. These diffuse networks of loitering munitions and jammers would be difficult for China to eliminate without starting a region-wide war. They would not require large crews, logistics tails, or the procurement of fancy platforms. Instead, they could be installed on virtually anything that floats or flies, including legacy platforms and repurposed cargo ships, barges, and aircraft.
This approach would capitalize on a key U.S. advantage: China’s war aims are more ambitious, and harder to achieve, than America’s. Whereas China needs to seize control of Taiwan and its surrounding waters to win the war, the United States just needs to deny Chinese forces that control, a mission that modern missiles, mines, drones, and jammers are well suited to perform. This strategy would also enhance deterrence by denying China the possibility of a swift victory. China’s leaders might be willing to start a short war over Taiwan, even one that kills millions. They will be less keen to fight a war that seems likely to spiral out of their control and drag on interminably, with no opportunity to declare victory. Such a messy, uncontrolled conflict could derail the economy while spurring domestic discontent and instability. It is this prospect of chaos, not the prospect of casualties, that has deterred China from fighting in the past.”
“If China tried and failed to invade Taiwan, it would have strong reasons to fight on. Xi would surely fear that conceding defeat to Taiwanese renegades and American imperialists would hobble China geopolitically, imperil the CCP’s legitimacy, and lead to his overthrow. He might keep the war machine running, in hopes of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat or simply saving some face.”
The Future
“As the technological world splinters, the consequences for ordinary people will be profound. When people travel from one bloc to another – assuming they can even get a visa – they’ll enter a different digital world. Their phones won’t work and their favorite websites, including their email server and precious social media apps, won’t be available. Sending files from one bloc to another will be a nightmare.”
“This dire situation – a population that is rapidly aging and shrinking – effectively rules out both investment-driven growth (China’s current model) and consumption-driven growth (America’s current model that China aspires to adopt). That leaves export-driven growth – a strategy that worked wonders for China during the globalizing 1990s but is poorly suited for a balkanized world of severe trade barriers and militarized sea lanes.
Xi hopes to short-circuit this problem by showering money on emerging markets now to spur future demand for Chinese exports. But those hopes will be dashed by a second inconvenient fact: Most of China’s overseas loans will mature around 2030, and many won’t be paid back.
In the 2010s, the Chinese government doled out roughly $1 trillion in loans and trade credits to more than 150 countries, including 80 percent of the world’s developing countries. Most of those loans were scheduled to be repaid within fifteen years. But many won’t be, because they were used to fund financially dubious projects in unstable countries. More than half of China’s Belt and Road partners have credit ratings below investment grade. The Chinese government itself has estimated that it will lose 80 percent of the value of its investments in South Asia, 50 percent in Southeast Asia, and 30 percent in Central Asia.
When the bulk of these overseas loans comes due around 2030, Beijing either will have to write off hundreds of billions of dollars in losses – a move sure to infuriate Chinese taxpayers, who will be suffering a. severe economic slowdown – or seize assets in partner countries, many of which can barely afford to feed their people. The CCP has set itself up to be despised at home and abroad.”
“Xi Jinping is an obese smoker with a stressful job and will turn 80 years old in 2033. While he might rule for years hence, actuarial tables suggest otherwise. At the very least, CCP officials will be thinking about a post-Xi era and start jockeying for position in the early 2030s, if not before. Nobody knows how the power struggle will play out, not even Xi, because he demolished the CCP’s few norms of succession and power-sharing when he appointed himself president of everything for life in 2018.
The makeup of China’s post-danger-zone government is therefore a known unknown. It will definitely be in flux. All of the current members of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo standing committee, will be past retirement age by 2027. No young leader has the cachet to fill Xi’s enormous shoes, and time is fading fast for anyone to prove otherwise.”
“Xi’s authority is formidable, but never forget that he had to purge more than a million senior CCP members to get it. As a result, there is no shortage of ambitious and aggrieved capos scheming to replace him.
China’s history provides little comfort to those hoping for a seamless transfer of power. The PRC has had only one completely formalized and orderly leadership succession in its history: when Xi himself took office in 2012. The pre-PRC period isn’t any more reassuring: Half of China’s 282 emperors across 49 dynasties were murdered, overthrown, forced to abdicate, or compelled to commit suicide. Less than half of them chose a successor, the majority only in the last years of their reign, and these successors were typically murdered by political rivals. In short, violent chaos is common, and anything is possible.”
“Perhaps the best-case possibility is that Xi is replaced by a Chinese Gorbachev – a reformer who eventually proves willing to liberalize at home and retrench abroad. The Soviets initially raged against the dying of the light when they realized they were falling behind the West in the early 1980s. But after mid-decade, the geopolitical pressure and domestic stagnation became unbearable, and the Soviet leadership reluctantly called off the Cold War. Gorbachev’s government slashed aid and loans to allies, withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan, opened up economic sectors to Western corporations, cut defense spending, demobilized half a million troops, and accepted onerous arms-control agreements. Even hardliners signed off on this full-spectrum retreat. As the USSR’s highest-ranking military officer, Dmitry Yazov, later explained: “We simply lacked the power to oppose the USA, England, Germany, France, Italy – all the flourishing states that were united in the NATO bloc. We had to seek a dénouement. We had to continually negotiate and reduce, reduce, reduce.”
With its superpower dreams in tatters, China, too, might seek détente by easing up in the Taiwan Strait, abiding by international law in the South China Sea, forswearing political meddling in democratic governments, and playing by the rules of an open global economy. The CCP might undertake some political and economic reforms at home, undoing the worst repression of the Xi years in an effort to rejuvenate the system and recharge the CCP’s legitimacy. America and China would still be competitors, of a sort; Xi’s portrait might still hang next to Mao’s in Tiananmen Square. But the CCP would have moved on from his hyper-revisionist agenda.
Yet an alternative, and more likely, outcome is that Xi is replaced by a Chinese Putin, a vengeful streetfighter who oversees China’s transition from aspiring superpower to prickly spoiler. The threat of China as a peer-competitor will be fading rapidly. But in its place will emerge a giant rogue state aiming to defend itself by subverting an international order it can no longer hope to dominate. Instead of forging its own empire, China will wage guerrilla warfare on the U.S.-led order. Where China once threatened outright military conquest, it will engage in rampant “gray zone” aggression, sending paramilitaries and coast guard and fishing vessels to park themselves on small bits of contested territory, thereby creating facts on the ground without firing a shot.”
“China will practice political warfare proxy, hiring cyber mercenaries on the sly to disrupt U.S. and allied networks and sow chaos in liberal societies And Beijing will continue to crack down hard on dissent at home. The Uighurs and Tibetans will be detained and sterilized out of existence, and the CC panopticon will be upgraded and expanded continually. Rather than giving up as its prospects for hegemony dwindle, a post-Xi China would buckle down for a long battle with a superiorcoalition.
These two scenarios may be the most likely, but they are not the only possibilities. Maybe China will collapse into civil war. Maybe some of its technological moon-shots, meant to rescue the country from decline, will pay off. Maybe something totally unexpected will happen.”
