China’s Military Is Nowhere Near as Strong as the CCP Wants You to Think

The Pentagon is “freaking out” because the U.S. could lose a war to China, Politico reported last week. War games suggest the People’s Liberation Army can take Taiwan after defeating American and Japanese forces. Losses will be horrific, everyone seems to be believe, and it’s not just the Pentagon foreseeing dire outcomes. In When China Attacks: A Warning to America, Grant Newsham predicts China is capable of humiliating U.S. forces. His chilling scenario, contained in a chapter called “China Pulls the Trigger,” is sobering reading.

There are indeed many reasons to worry. The U.S. military may not yet be the “hollow force” of the Carter years, but it has been scarred by both neglect and poor leadership in the three decades following the Cold War.

For example, the Navy, which would lead American forces against China, is, among other things, unable to repair the U.S.S. Connecticut—a submarine that hit an underwater mount in the South China Sea in 2021—until 2026. The U.S. Air Force is not in much better shape. “Unfortunately, the more you dig under the hood the more problems you see,” a senior Democratic defense expert in the Senate told Politico.

Both branches are making themselves even less capable to mount a defense with misguided “divest to invest” programs, which seek to pay for the military of the 2040s by taking ships and planes out of service now. And yet, it is now that the risk of war is exceedingly high.

At the West 2023 conference in San Diego this year, Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, the commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, spoke of a “China blindness”—an inability to perceive an obvious threat. “It’s very unsettling to see how much the U.S. is not connecting the dots on our number one challenge,” he said.

Some have gone so far as to argue that the United States should not even try to defend Taiwan, because China’s military is too formidable. Yet that is a mistake. “U.S. military and political leaders have gone from irrational complacency about their military capabilities to deal with the People’s Republic of China to irrational panic,” Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, tells Newsweek.

China has some critical vulnerabilities. The People’s Liberation Army remains corrupt, despite repeated campaigns by ruler Xi Jinping to eliminate the scourge. Xi’s efforts have been political in nature, targeting officers loyal to former leaders. Moreover, Xi has further damaged the professionalism of the People’s Liberation Army by beginning a Cultural Revolution-style purge of officers opposed to war. For example, the regime handed down a death sentence to former Air Force General Liu Yazhou due to his continued opposition to an invasion of Taiwan.

The effect of these campaigns appears to have further politicized the military, which already suffered from a lack of professionalism, largely because it is an arm of a political institution. The PLA reports to the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, not to the Chinese central government, so it effectively has two lines of command, a Party line and a military one.

“The finest weapon is no better than its user,” James Holmes, the first holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, told me. “When politics permeates everything, as it does in a totalitarian society like Communist China, that detracts from the human element of military performance. Commanders and Party officials are control freaks enforcing a party line, which imposes a damper on more junior people’s liberty to innovate in combat, a highly fluid environment where innovation by people on the scene is at a premium.”

That means the Chinese military is probably not as effective as it appears. As Holmes said, “Even if China has made a leap to parity on the material side, I still like our chances on the whole because of the human side.”

Politics will be especially important if Xi Jinping gives the order to invade Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, or some other target. China in that case will attempt something it has never done before: launch a combined air-land-sea operation. That means Xi will have to give a general or admiral control of all or most of the People’s Liberation Army. That officer will immediately become the most powerful person in China as he or she will then have the means to take over China itself.

Xi will pick that officer not for competence but loyalty, and the selection of officers for loyalty will further undermine the PLA’s ability to fight.

China’s military has not distinguished itself in battle in recent times. India’s outgunned army twice got the best of the PLA in 2020 in Ladakh, even when the Chinese army launched a surprise attack in June of that year.

Of course, the Chinese army will have a lesser role in a Taiwan invasion, but the political control that apparently has undermined the army’s effectiveness will also undermine the effectiveness of the navy and air force as well.

C.I.A. chief William Burns told Politico that Xi Jinping was “surprised and unsettled” by the “very poor performance” of the Russian military in Ukraine. Perhaps Xi should also be worried about the effectiveness of his People’s Liberation Army.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.