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2 December 2022

Pentagon warns of China’s plans for dominance in Taiwan and beyond

Karoun Demirjian

China conducted more ballistic missile tests last year than the rest of the world combined and is on course to possess 1,500 nuclear weapons within the next decade, the Pentagon warns in a new assessment of Beijing’s rapidly expanding military posture.

The findings are detailed in a report for Congress released publicly in unclassified format Tuesday. It outlines China’s broad desires to pursue global dominance but comes as the Chinese Communist Party faces perhaps the most serious internal challenge to its authority in decades, with audacious demonstrations against President Xi Jinping’s harsh covid lockdowns having included, in some cities, demands for his ouster.

Pentagon officials, in detailing the report, were careful not to draw any links between the protests — which overnight brought a crackdown from police — and China’s military planning. But at the very least, the uprising represents a complication for Xi as he attempts to exert authority over other unwilling subjects in the region, including in Taiwan, where U.S. officials remain doubtful he can achieve his goal of uncontested dominance.

Many have pointed to 2027 — the 100-year anniversary of China’s People’s Liberation Army and a target date Xi has set for modernizing its military capabilities — as the point when Taiwan needs to worry about being attacked. That date, however, “is not a timeline for action,” said a senior U.S. defense official, who described the benchmarks China had set for itself to achieve by then as “ambitious.”

“We know what they want to accomplish, which is really to have more credible military capabilities for a Taiwan scenario,” this official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the new report before its release. “In terms of what they’ll actually be able to accomplish by 2027, I think that remains to be seen.”

Instead, the Pentagon believes that China has been trying to establish a “new normal” when it comes to Taiwan, with more missile launches, more naval activity, and more “centerline crossings” over the Taiwan Strait by Chinese military aircraft. Those activities intensified dramatically after of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan earlier this year and have “not gone down to the level that we were accustomed to,” the official said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said he is committed to maintaining the “status quo” surrounding Taiwan’s status, warning his Chinese counterpart last week against taking “destabilizing” actions. The United States has taken umbrage at China’s pattern of menacing U.S. vessels and those of U.S. allies navigating the South China Sea, calling the close encounters “unsafe and unprofessional,” and warning they could lead to catastrophic accidents. Austin and others have told their Chinese counterparts that if the measures are designed to prevent Western powers from exercising their rights to freedom of navigation, they won’t work.

An executive summary of the Pentagon’s report, shared with reporters ahead of the full document’s release, emphasizes Washington’s alarm over Beijing’s missile tests and the geopolitical implications of its nuclear ambitions. China has more than 400 nuclear weapons, it notes, and the 135 ballistic missile tests it conducted in 2021 “was more than the rest of the world combined.” Those numbers sharpen what’s known publicly about its nuclear development program, long a subject of close scrutiny as other research has detailed the country’s construction of missile silos and other infrastructure to support its expansion.

China’s nuclear arsenal is still far smaller than that of the United States, which has about 5,500 warheads, or Russia, which has almost 6,000, according to the Federation of American Scientists. But China’s advancements — and its plans to increase production — puts the communist regime on a footing where the Pentagon believes its leaders need to come to the arms-control negotiating table. Its reluctance to do so, the report states, is “negatively impacting global strategic stability — an area of increasing global concern.”

“I don’t see any clear indication that they’re looking for a first strike kind of capability here, but certainly they’re developing a set of capabilities that would give them a range of options for sort of deterrence signaling,” the senior defense official said. That capability, the official added, “does raise some questions about what their intent will be in the longer term.”

Further threatening the global balance, the Pentagon says, are the relationships China is pursuing outside its direct geographic sphere of influence to expand a more conventional military footprint. The report notes how China and Russia, for example, continue to hold joint exercises. Such cooperation — even if China has not given Russia military supplies for its Ukraine war effort — demonstrates that Beijing “still seems to see a lot of value in their partnership,” according to the defense official.

The report provides a list of countries in which the Pentagon believes China has “likely considered” establishing military logistics facilities “to support naval, air and ground forces projection,” in a style similar to the Chinese military’s support base in Djibouti, which sits just a few miles away from a U.S. base, Camp Lemonnier.

Those countries include: Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles, Tanzania, Angola, and Tajikistan, the report says. But the senior defense official cautioned that the list should be read as an indication of the areas in which China was “trying to make progress,” and not a warning that a second base like the one in Djibouti was imminent.

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