Anthony H. Cordesman, Grace Hwang
There is no simple way to address the complex changes that China’s growing strategic presence and military capabilities pose in competing with the United States and other states. It is clear, however, that China’s capabilities to compete have increased radically in virtually every civil and military area since 1980, and that China has set broad goals for achieving strategic parity and superiority in the future – although its timeframes and definitions of such goals are vague.
The end result is that the United States adopted a new National Security Strategy in 2017 and a new National Defense Strategy in 2018 that both focused on China as an emerging peer threat to the U.S. and as a central focus of its strategy. The Biden administration has not issued revised versions of these documents, but its FY2021 budget submission as well as the testimony of senior U.S. officials to Congress on U.S. strategy and force plans make it clear that China is now a central focus of the Biden administration’s national security planning efforts.
This report is Volume One of a two-part e-book that helps to explain these shifts in China’s strategic position and the reasons why major changes are needed in U.S. strategy. It is entitled, China: The Civil-Military Challenge: Volume One of a Graphic Net Assessment and is available for download at https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/211115_Cordesman_Civil_Military.pdf?nBk7u7CTjnEQnuZtPRcTyikt_XcgTrLe
Volume One focuses on the civil-military dimensions of the changes in China’s capabilities and on the fact that China – unlike the U.S. and most other states – integrates its civil and military strategy and development plans. It shows how China’s civil development has greatly increased its capability to compete on a global level in both civil and military terms and to conduct what might be called “white area warfare”: China’s ability to achieve major strategic gains through purely civil means and without the use of force.
This Volume serves as a critical introduction to the more conventional analysis of China’s military development in Volume Two. It draws on excerpts from official U.S. and strategic partner studies to provide a broad overview of China’s growing civil-military capabilities to compete with the United States and other powers. It also provides a wide range of summary data on the trends in China’s development and future plans to show how China’s civil strategy, politics, economics, research activities, manufacturing base, and global role have evolved in ways that interact with its military development and actions on a global level.
It also shows the extent to which the military trends in China’s growing capabilities, that are analyzed in Volume Two, reflect the impact of an integrated civil-military strategy as well as political and economic efforts that go far beyond U.S. and allied efforts. Unlike the U.S. and most of its strategic partners – whose concepts of strategy focus on combat in Clausewitzian terms, China focuses on Sun Tzu’s emphasis of winning without fighting where possible and “battles” where civil maneuvers and the use of military forces with limited or no combat produce a lasting form of victory.
Both volumes provide a wide range of graphs, maps, and tables that show how different the various views are of the key data on a wide range of China’s evolving civil-military capabilities. This volume provides an updated graphic overview of the key developments in China’s growing civil capabilities to compete with the United States and other powers. This volume also warns how quickly China has progressed at the civil level since 1990, and that its civil capabilities should have at least as much attention as its military ones.
Important as recent military developments are, there is an acute danger in focusing on China’s progress in nuclear, missile, and other areas of military technology or the near-term threat in the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea. Planning for the longer-term impact of China’s civil development and finding ways to shape some future structure of international competition at the diplomatic and economic levels that can limit competition, minimize confrontation, avoid war, and create new forms of cooperation is at least – and probably more – important.
Equally important, both Volume One and Volume Two show just how complex the trends in China’s evolving civil-military challenge are. They show how difficult it is to compare them with the trends in the U.S. and other states on a global level, how many different ways these trends can be estimated and compared, and how many conflicting views and uncertainties exist in virtually every key area.
Where possible, the graphics, maps, and trends in each Volume rely on official U.S. and Chinese reporting and official reporting by international sources – including the UN, World Bank, and IMF. At the same time, they draw upon sources like the Congressional Research Service; official reporting by other countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea; and work by RAND, other think tanks, and expert sources to illustrate the range of different official and expert estimates.
It should be stressed that the narrative text in both Volumes does not represent the authors’ views. It instead highlights official U.S. unclassified reporting as of late 2021. It is designed to give the reader as clear of an unclassified picture as possible of how the U.S. government assesses developments in China. Most excerpts come from the narratives in the declassified U.S. studies and intelligence data provided in the Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2021 that was issued in early November 2021.
This annual report is now issued by the U.S. Secretary of Defense as a report to Congress, but it began as an annual report on Chinese Military Power issued by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. It has evolved into a document that comes as close to an authoritative set of judgments by the U.S. intelligence community as an unclassified report can. It provides the user with exceptional insights into how the U.S. judged developments in China from sources with all of the resources and special access of the U.S. intelligence community.
The key areas addressed in the Volume One include:
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