China is preparing for war

OPINION:

China is preparing for war, and the United States is running out of time to deter Beijing’s ambition to seize Taiwan and turn the island democracy into the next Hong Kong. For many close observers, alarms are blinking red.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to conquer Taiwan by 2027. Last March, U.S. Adm. John Aquilino, who was then serving as the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, said the PLA was on track to fulfill Mr. Xi’s wishes. A growing body of evidence indicates that he was right.

On Jan. 30, the Financial Times revealed, “China’s military is building a massive complex in Western Beijing that U.S. intelligence believes will serve as a wartime command center far larger than the Pentagon.” Once completed, the facility will be the largest military command center in the world — 10 times the size of the Pentagon. Satellite imagery indicates that construction began around mid-2024. This comes on the heels of other alarming revelations.

A few weeks prior, Naval News published satellite photos revealing the construction of D-Day-style landing barges at the Guangzhou Shipyard in southern China. The PLA is already testing the barges, which naval analyst H.I. Sutton warned have “unusually long road bridges extending from their bows,” making “them particularly relevant to any future landing forces on Taiwanese islands.”

This is merely the latest expansion in Chinese naval capabilities. According to leaked U.S. naval estimates, China already has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. This effort signals Beijing’s intention to carry out an amphibious invasion — a notoriously difficult operation. It must be noted that industrial capacity was key to the Allied victory in World War II.

The same week the Naval News published its expose, a report by the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank, warned that China has “built hundreds of hardened shelters in the past decade or so to protect its air force on the ground in the Western Pacific.”

The report’s authors, Timothy Walton and Tom Shugart, noted that “the amount of concrete used by China to improve the resilience of its air base network could pave a four-lane interstate highway from Washington, D.C., to Chicago. As a result, China now has 134 air bases within 1,000 nautical miles of the Taiwan Strait — airfields that boast more than 650 hardened aircraft shelters and almost 2,000 unhardened individual aircraft shelters.” China has added 20 runways and more than 40 runway-length taxiways, increasing its ramp area nationwide by almost 75%.

By contrast, the United States has largely failed to harden its air bases, making them more vulnerable to attack. There are other signs that the CCP is plotting war.

In December, the United States confirmed that China’s Salt Typhoon Hack into American telecommunication systems was more extensive than acknowledged. H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser to President Trump, said the hack indicates that “China wants nuclear first-strike capabilities.” This, too, is worrying, as China has been massively expanding its nuclear capabilities.

Indeed, Beijing has been engaged in the largest military buildup in modern history. The Pentagon has acknowledged that China is the “sole pacing challenge,” possessing military and economic might that surpasses previous U.S. foes such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In short, China represents an unprecedented threat, and the CCP is signaling its intentions.

In a landmark March 2023 essay in Foreign Affairs, China expert John Pomfret and former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger pointed out that the CCP has opened national defense mobilization offices — “recruitment centers” — across the country while building and upgrading air-raid shelters and at least one “wartime emergency hospital” in Fujian province, across the strait from Taiwan.

In a series of writings, Messrs. Pomfret, Pottinger, and David Feith, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, closely examined China’s actions and Mr. Xi’s words and reached an alarming conclusion. They highlighted Mr. Xi’s growing insistence on “‘breaking technological dependence on foreign economies” — meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies.” They observe that Mr. Xi wants China to “end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods.” In some respects, this harks back to the rhetoric used by CCP founder Mao Zedong and another era, but along with Mr. Xi’s growing belligerence toward the West, it signals something more.

China is working to shore up its food security and has been hoarding grain for years — contributing to rising food prices and sparking a public rebuke from the Biden administration in 2022.

Indeed, China is stockpiling key resources, including fuel and metals. As The Economist observed in July, the hoarding “does not reflect public consumption.” Notably, China is energy-dependent and has been plagued by famine throughout its history. China seems to be safeguarding in anticipation of a future event.

Mr. Xi has also purged elements of the PLA, perhaps eliminating dissenters or spies — or maybe both. Such purges are not uncommon in totalitarian systems preparing for war. Josef Stalin did them, as did Adolf Hitler.

One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to guess what Beijing is planning. All signs are blinking red.

Adding to concerns, Mr. Xi is the most powerful Chinese ruler since Mao. The China that he presides over is far more powerful than the impoverished nation that Mao controlled. To be sure, Mr. Xi faces constraints, but he isn’t answerable to other branches of government and he has worked assiduously to eliminate rival power centers. To a large extent, his rule is absolute, and he thinks of himself as a man of destiny. Few things are more dangerous. History is clear: Such men can make the world, or they can break it.

• Sean Durns is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.