Federal Newswire:
Joel Wuthnow:
It's been a bit of a long journey for me to get into China and Chinese military subjects. I went to China for the first time 30 years ago now, amazingly as a school student. [I was] just fascinated by the country. It was a puzzle, a mystery, it was exciting, [and] it's so different.
I picked up [my interest] again in college [and] picked up the language a little bit [when I] lived over in China for about two years in the early 2000’s. [I was] fascinated with the country, with the politics, with US-China relations. I went to graduate school [and] focused more on Chinese diplomacy of all things in the United Nations. I wrote a book on that.
I didn't get into Chinese military subjects until about 2012 or so when I came to DC and worked for a place called the Center for Naval Analyses so they were doing a lot of work for the DoD. So [that] had me kind of dig into the PLA, which I thought was fascinating in its own right. In part because it's so opaque. It's hard to understand. It's a puzzle and you never really feel as though you fully resolve the puzzle. It's interesting and they keep throwing you different surprises.
So it's an interesting intellectual exercise to get smarter on this. Then of course, there are the obvious stakes and consequences of the United States for regional stability and so on. Nothing could be more important [than] for us to understand China's strategic direction and the PLA as an institution.
Federal Newswire:
Has China changed?
Joel Wuthnow:
Well, we're now 10 years into Xi Jinping's China and it's almost hard to imagine a time before him. That was really my direct interaction with China back in the 1990s and early 2000’s.
It was a totally different context. You could go there as an American and have frank conversations with Chinese [citizens], both on the street and in the universities and think tanks.
What are they thinking? What is really behind their policy?
It was exciting and it was a different era in China's development in terms of their civil society. The conversations they can have in Xi Jinping's China have changed so much. It's much harder for me now as a scholar, number one to go there at all, and number two, to have real, frank, honest conversations with Chinese face-to-face or in terms of what they're writing.
Federal Newswire:
How has China evolved under Xi Jinping’s leadership?
Joel Wuthnow:
I don't think I was ever so optimistic as to say that contact between China and the West would somehow liberalize China or turn them into a democracy. My experiences with them were after the 1989 Tiananmen [Square event]--that dream was really just sort of snuffed out for the average Chinese [citizen] and they never really look back.
I know there are certain arguable benefits of engagement and having a stable relationship with China, that go beyond liberalization and democratization. The benefits are more ‘what kind of China would we want to have?’ that is integrated into the global economy and international markets.
Maybe it doesn't make them like us, but does it make them less warlike, does it make them less hostile?
I think there is probably some evidence over the last couple decades that at least from their point of view they're trying to balance a couple different things.
Yes they want greater say in the international system, and they want to resolve territorial disputes on their own. But they also still seem to value stability. Not because it's a good thing in its own right, but because that's necessary for their own internal development, for their own economic development, and for the CCP. For the Party, they have to deliver the goods for their people.
They're telling their own people with the party in charge you're going to have a better life. You're going to do better for yourselves. We're going to clean up the environment. We're going to clean up corruption. So they still have to deliver some of the goods for the people, and having a stable regional and global context for them is part of that equation.
They're balancing these two different impulses.
One is to be stronger, more confident, and more in charge. The other is to not rock the boat so much that they're in open conflict or warfare with everyone kind of all at once.
I think from that perspective there's still some value in engagement and not completely decoupling from China or isolating them back to where they were in the 1950’s, when they were in open warfare with the United States. I think engagement has a benefit, but it's not the same as some democratic peace theorists would argue once could have been.
Federal Newswire:
What does stability look like for the Chinese military?
Joel Wuthnow:
What I think they're aiming for is a bit of a balance between stability–in terms of lack of open conflict or warfare at least today–but also making real progress on their territorial and resource interests on the regional and international stage.
If you're in the region you're looking at what China is doing. [It] doesn't necessarily look like a peace-loving or totally benign rising power. A lot of what they're doing looks provocative.
For example, in the last six months or so we've had a couple different mini-crises across the Taiwan strait where the PLA has been very active. They've been sailing and conducting exercises all around the island. They've been flying much closer to Taiwan than they used to, and if you're sitting on that island that looks extremely bellicose.
It makes people ask, “is this the prelude to a wider conflict?”
From the Chinese point of view this is a careful balancing act. They're trying to send signals; trying to intimidate. They're trying to get more of their agenda accomplished, but also not rock the boat so much they're getting into a war they don't think they're ready for. [They] don't really want to pursue [a conflict] right now with the United States, which is in the backdrop of all of these regional disputes.
That balancing act a lot of people describe as Gray Zone Coercion. They're doing things we're not necessarily doing, [neither are the] Europeans, Japanese, or other great powers. They go beyond that, but are also not at the level of the kind of open warfare we had during the Cold War.
So again, it's a bit of a balancing act trying to get as much of their agenda as possible but without stepping over certain thresholds that are going to lead them into real real risks and costs.
Federal Newswire:
How should an everyday person look at China's military strengths and weaknesses?
Joel Wuthnow:
The PLA is a very modern force, and we shouldn't underestimate their capabilities. The way they're talking about it is they think they're still relatively behind, at least behind the gold standard of the United States.
They're on a long-term path to develop what they call world-class forces by the middle of the century. They're often very critical of themselves. They critique themselves for not having good enough people, training, hardware, and so on. But as American military analysts look at them, I think we wouldn't necessarily think of them in such a negative light.
There are a lot of different examples of this in terms of some of the hardware.
Just look at some of their surface ships, they have the world's largest Navy now by tonnage. Some of their more advanced destroyers and cruisers are in my view every bit as capable of what the US navy has to offer.
They're fielding now aircraft carriers, very advanced submarines, the list just goes on and on. So when they talk about a world-class military as a mid-century target, [in] my point of view they're already quite world-class today.
I think the difference is that China's military is really a regional power. This is their posture. This is what they're trying to accomplish, is to intimidate regional rivals like Taiwan.
They're not a global military like the United States has been ever since the end of World War II. They don't really have the same network of overseas bases, forward deployed forces, military alliances, or the architecture of a real global military. I think that's probably the areas where they're weakest.
But it's also a bit of a strength insofar as if you're a regional military you can consolidate all your best stuff within the region. The US is a global military, but if we're going to fight in Asia, we're dispersed globally. It's much harder for us to concentrate our global military to unite [in] the region as China is able to do today.
Federal Newswire:
Since China can use their commercial assets for both political and military means, how does this factor into strategic challenges?
Joel Wuthnow:
When we look at different categories of national power, China is more of a heavyweight in other areas globally. If we talk about manipulation of international information through social media manipulation and so on, the US government doesn't really do that. That's sort of an illicit thing to do to try to go into societies and manipulate their internal discourse, including here in the United States. To try to manipulate our own internal conversations, to drive wedges within our own population, something that they are out and about trying to do.
In terms of economics they're at the start of the Belt and Road Initiative. They funneled massive amounts of state funding into particular projects that US firms would consider boondoggles in some cases, but some of them were strategic. Not to say that all those projects are purely military trojan horses but some of them seem to be leading in that direction or have other intelligence gathering purposes. Things of this nature [are] certainly what I worry about.
A globally deployed PLA is the ability of the Chinese government to reduce our access and our military influence overseas, and that's really more of an economic and diplomatic piece.
When you have governments who we would rely on for basing, access, overfly, and so on in our future military operations, some of those countries are really heavily indebted to the Chinese. They have strong trade relations and it gives China leverage.
After 9/11 when we needed access to a number of central asian countries to go into Afghanistan, we got it. Could we rely on that today, given the fact that China is the dominant trading and investment partner of all of those countries? Probably not.
China's ability and potential willingness to limit our global military operations via those sorts of tools of national power, to me that's the more worrisome thing than to say China is going to open up a new logistics hub in Equatorial Guinea or something like that.
Federal Newswire:
Is the PLA looking for ways to overcome America's deterrent capability without having to actually overcome America's military advantages?
Joel Wuthnow:
For China to succeed in terms of their military strategy they don't need to look exactly like us, and they don't need to do exactly what we're able to do globally.
For example in special operations, we had the famous raid against Osama Bin Laden a dozen years ago. The PLA doesn't need to do that. They're not being tasked to do that, and they can't do that. What they're being tasked to do is to try to make progress on their territorial interests.
Ultimately the main scenario [for China], of course, is one day reunifying one way or another with Taiwan. The main obstacle to that is potential US intervention on behalf of Taiwan.
What you need to do if you're the PLA–and they've been thinking about this for 20 to 30 years now–is determine how you stop the United States from intervening?
What are the key links and centers of gravity in the US? The US is relying on satellites that can be taken down, aircraft carriers that can be targeted, logistics hubs and computer networks to sustain and mobilize those forces.
So if you're China, what you want to have is a very competent cyber force, counter space force, and very good long-range missile forces.
They've built all of that, so that's where they're excelling the most. It's not in terms of deploying exquisite troops overseas to do really high-end joint operations. They're still behind on that.
But if you're talking about defeating and, by means of defeating, potentially deterring the US from wanting to get involved in the fight in the first place, I think that's where they've put a lot of their eggs.
Now recently that's been the conventional side of the picture. More recently what we're seeing from the PLA is a huge nuclear buildup as well.
So you can ask the question “well, what's that about? Why are they building the same number, or in excess, of the number of land-based nuclear warheads that we have? What purpose does that serve for them?”
What I would argue is that it fits hand in hand with a deterrent strategy. They're saying, ‘look, the United States is ultimately deterrable politically.’ We don't really want to get involved in a fight over Taiwan or at least some people in the United States can be warded off of that pretty easily.
Having a large nuclear arsenal gives you options to say “things could get really ugly for you very quickly.”
The US homeland itself could be targeted, not just US military forces in the Western Pacific. I think that's one of the reasons why they're building that, and I think one of the lessons they're taking out of the current conflict in Ukraine, where President Putin did that.
To say “US, NATO, stay out of this, it's not your war.” I think the Chinese are saying that actually might work for us too.
The best bet if you're the PLA is not actually to fight the Americans in the first place. It's to deter–politically–the United States from making the decision to intervene, and you can do that in part through nuclear intimidation. I think that's really what they're doing right now.
Federal Newswire:
What is the benefit of China participating in joint military exercises with Russia, Iran, and others?
Joel Wuthnow:
China is extracting a couple different benefits from these exercises.
With the Russians first of all, they're learning. If you're an advanced military that has combat experience, which the Russians do, you're learning from them, because the United States military right now is not engaging with the PLA. This is not like the 80's and 90's when we did all manner of engagements with the PLA and they were learning from us.
Now they are turning their attention more towards the Russians because they're offering them insight into what a modern military [should look like]. They're gaining lessons learned by means of those exercises but it's not just that, and I don't think it's even primarily just that. I think it's more [about] shaping the international information environment.
I think what this is doing is it shows a kind of solidarity between China and Russia. [It] may actually even overstate the level of cooperation and alignment between the two countries. They do disagree on certain things and their interests are not fully aligned, but when they're militarily exercising it looks scarier to a foreign audience. It looks like these are countries that might actually go to war together at some point in the future on some issue.
When they're exercising with Iran that looks like they're a military ally of Iran, [the same for] Pakistan [and other countries]. What this does is it's regional-shaping and it's shaping perceptions. It's causing other countries to say “China has friends and those friends might come to their aid at some point in the future.”
Now how much of that is real [and] how much of that is really just sort of media manipulation, I would say to some degree it's a bit of the latter, and I don't think we should necessarily put too much stock into this.
I don't think the Russians would help China very much militarily in its Taiwan scenario. Just as the Chinese are really kind of holding off or they're still somewhat holding off in supporting the Russians in Ukraine.
I don't think China would go to war for Iran in Iran given China's other equities in the Middle East, but perceptions matter here. If we think of China as having more friends and more influence than perhaps it actually does, then that may have some dissuasive or even deterrent effect on a foreign audience.
Federal Newswire:
What are the notable differences between the US military’s use of political warfare and messaging and China's military’s use of political warfare?
Joel Wuthnow:
One of the major differences is in terms of their leadership. Half of their officers are political officers. If you look down the structure of the PLA, all the way from the very top [of] the central military commission down through the ranks, in each echelon you have a commander and a political officer making decisions together.
Collectively, political officers have a lot of different functions, but their bread and butter is what you might call political warfare.
This is not only about foreign projection of Chinese strength where perhaps it isn't quite so strong, it's also about internal political work. They are making sure that the rank and file troops are fully on the same page as [the] Party center.
For example, comparing with the Russian military, [they] didn't take political war quite as seriously. They never had the same level of political commissars as the Chinese. Chinese political indoctrination goes on all the time. It's maybe a quarter of troop training time. Politics is really integral to the DNA of the PLA.
Again if it's sort of foreign political work or internal morale work that's something that they take very seriously. I think where we excel is really in terms of operational expertise.
If you consider our four-star Generals, just look at their biographies. They have tremendous amounts of foreign experience. Foreign tours of duty, real combat experience, joint experience, and so on. These are really impressive people who make it up to that level.
In the PLA to make it up to the very top you certainly need to be loyal, and need to be personally compliant to Xi Jinping. You don't need to have combat experience, because no one has combat experience, and you don't need to be joint qualified because they don't have that kind of a system in the PLA. It's all service centric.
In the PLA you're a very good group Army Commander [if] you know the infantry very well but you don't know how to lead a joint campaign, which is the essence of modern warfare. You know the political dimension, morale, propaganda, these sorts of things. They take that stuff really seriously.
Federal Newswire:
What do you think the U.S. generally doesn’t understand about China very well, and what do the Chinese not understand about us very well?
Joel Wuthnow:
I think we get [the best] hardware, we can count things, we can analyze. We do this all the time, looking at the range rings of missiles and things like this. The kinetic piece I think we do that pretty well.
If we're looking at the softer side of things, the more ambiguous qualitative dimensions of military operations, getting the PLA is much harder, and I think it's because they have this byzantine organizational culture.
They talk in ways that don't really make sense to us. They have systems like the political Commissar system that have no cognate in our system. Getting our heads around this kind of stuff, understanding why it matters [and] what implications it would have in a war is very difficult to catalog.
From the PLA, I think they have a similar kind of bias. They get our equipment pretty well. I think they try to understand our organization and doctrine pretty well. They seem to want to copy a lot of it.
But ultimately I don't think that they really fully understand what makes us effective, which is being willing to empower individuals in the military. Being able to say “the Commander has a certain intent but you lower level guys, you're going to have to figure out how to implement it if something awry happens.” You know you're going to be empowered to adapt on the battlefield and make rapid decisions.
The PLA has never been comfortable thinking like that, because what they prize is centralized decision making, collective decision making. It's much more cumbersome and being willing to let go of that legacy of the Red Army, it's something they haven't really been willing to fully embrace.
If they're not willing to do that I think their ability to innovate, adapt, try new things, and respond to risk in creative ways, to get outside of their scripted exercises is really hard for them to be able to do, and I think that's really where the difference lies.
Federal Newswire:
Are China’s military expansion and economic capabilities underestimated, and how should these trends inform our thinking?
Joel Wuthnow:
First of all I don't think that we should underestimate their ability to do impressive things very quickly in their system. I'm not sure why we would be surprised by the pace or the extent of their progress, especially over the last ten years or so.
I personally wouldn't have made those predictions, but I think they are now routinely, year over year, [building] the size of the nuclear forces, and the most modern air and naval assets.
I think the reason for that is because they operate in a system that has less red tape. They're able to cut through some of that stuff, especially in the Xi Jinping era, where there's less ability by the PLA to say “we're going to continue to do business as usual.”
But they don't have the same kind of legislative oversight. They don't have the same level of civil military interactions that we have in our system, where things proceed along this very plotting rate. And that's true of most Western civil military relations, where you have a lot of checks and balances.
It's a good and a bad thing, because you can do bold things. You can also do very bad things, precisely because there's not a lot of oversight. The point remains that they are building a lot of really impressive things very quickly that we shouldn't under-state it.
The other dimension has to do with the negative trends for China's development and how they perceive these situations.
Their economic growth is nowhere near where it was 15 years ago. They're facing a large population of retirees, and so they're going to have to think about some of those guns versus butter kinds of issues. I'm not sure how much that really influences their decision calculus on using force against Taiwan for example. Do they sense they're in some sort of period of opportunity right now?
When the Chinese themselves talk about their own national trajectory, they seem to be very optimistic about the long term. They're building towards national rejuvenation by 2049.
They seem to think their own system of governance is much more coherent and resilient than the West, which seems to be incoherent and declining from their point of view. I'm not sure they [see] themselves in some sort of a peak period where it's now or never with respect to the use of force. I haven't been totally persuaded by that argument.
But from their point of view I think if they are ever going to use force I think it will certainly be conditions based. [It won’t be] some arbitrary period in time when they think “oh now is the time.” No, I think it will depend very much on the political conditions.
Where do they sense Taiwan is? Do they think this is the last and best option to do this? I don't think it's going to be because they think in five or 10 years their demographic picture looks worse. I don't think that's connected very well to the way they think about military decisions, especially on a Taiwan issue.
Federal Newswire:
What is your analysis of China’s reaction to Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last summer and then Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen’s visit with Speaker McCarthy in California recently?
Joel Wuthnow:
In a nutshell what I perceive from the Chinese was calculated risk in terms of their responses.
What I mean by that is they did do new things. They scaled up their response, certainly compared to back in 1995-1996. They were responding to a similar provocation from their point of view by the United States, but their response then was very small-scale exercises. They lobbed a couple missiles near the ports.
In 2022-2023 we saw a much larger effort by the PLA in terms of the number of jets they were sending across the midline of the Taiwan Strait. They were demonstrating the fact they could operate their naval forces all around the island and not just close to their own coast.
They fired missiles not only near but actually over Taiwan. They did things that were designed, I think specifically, to send a message to Taiwan [and] the United States that more will be coming if you go down this road.
On the other hand, the reason I call this [a] calculated risk is because there are also things that they could have done but didn't.
They didn't actually try to force down Nancy Pelosi's jet, they didn't really dust things up kinetically, and in the latest incident what they were talking about initially was maybe we're going to try to inspect and board Taiwan ships in the Taiwan Strait, which would have been extremely provocative.
But they backed away from that, and so they did things that I think they thought they could control.
They were sending jets in certain places, ships, and so on but they weren't really encountering, intercepting, or coming into direct engagement with any foreign forces. So from that perspective I think they were trying to limit the chance that this would really blow up into something that they wouldn't be able to handle. I guess the question is, did it work?
In terms of Kevin Mccarthy's encounter with Tsai, that was in California. It was designed to be relatively low-key; he didn't go to Taiwan. Does that show that the August and September provocations worked? Maybe, maybe not.
I worry in the future if they think this all failed, what's next? What do they think they're going to need to be prepared to do in the next crisis or the next perceived provocation from Taiwan and the United States.
That's where I think we need to worry more.
Federal Newswire:
What should Americans be aware of regarding the consequences of a conflict with China over Taiwan?
Joel Wuthnow:
What a conflict would look like we don't know exactly. There are two different versions of this.
The first is, boil the frog. Ratchet things up until you get the outcome that you want. You may start with some kind of a limited blockade, then go to a higher level full quarantine of the island, then you start lobbing missiles, and then you send the troops across the strait. So that's one alternative. It's problematic for China because it gives the US time to intervene. That's the main problem with that.
The other alternative is strategic surprise. You want to try to get everything all over and done with, all at once. You want to stun and paralyze US decision making, isolate Taiwan very quickly, and get across the strait and in control of the territory.
That's apparently what president Putin was trying to do in Ukraine. Totally failed, and now he's in a protracted war.
I think from the Chinese point of view that it's ideal if you think you can keep the US out of the fight, you can do a very quick sort of fait accompli. Using your amphibious and airborne forces just get it all done. Have it be a very big surprise, and therefore limit the cost of the risk militarily. Which of those alternatives or paths it is I don't know.
I don't think anyone really has a clear concept of what it's going to look like for the PLA [or] for the United States. It depends on our level of engagement, it depends on how much we're involved. I do think that the Chinese are starting to think more about the idea that the US ultimately can be deterred, but how do you do that?
Do you actually have to create nuclear risks of nuclear escalation? Do you have to conduct cyber strikes?
That's something that's been in the press of late. The idea that the Chinese will try to take down our power grid or water supply, are they going to do that? In which case there would be an immediate material impact on our way of life. Is this something where we would restrain ourselves and say “look we'll try to maybe resupply you or supply you with intelligence and that's going to be about it.”
I don't know, but I think it would depend very much on the decision by the President about how much you're willing to do in terms of your intervention on behalf of Taiwan, and for the Chinese, from their point of view too.
This isn't to portray them as a sort of indomitable figure. They have their own risk calculus. They don't want to be in a war with the United States. That would be a strategic blunder of the highest magnitude from an economic point of view, even from a military point of view if they really get into it. Look at Pearl Harbor of all things.
That's not necessarily where they want to be, but in a Taiwan circumstance where they're really boxed into the corner, I think their best bet is to try to do what they can to keep us out of it. That could mean seriously targeting our homeland from the point of view of deterring US intervention. So there are definitely real risks involved for us as well as for them.
Federal Newswire:
Where can our readers follow your work?
Joel Wuthnow:
They can follow me on Twitter @jwuthnow, or Google my name and find me on the National Defense University website.
