China takes aim at the US for the first time in its defence white paper

Beijing acknowledges the rivalry with the US military, attacks its presence in the Asia-Pacific as destabilising and provocative, and clearly outlines China’s long-term aim to challenge US dominance

Cary Huang

Published: 1:00am, 7 Aug 2019

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China’s official documents are renowned for being lengthy, lacking content, with repetitive rhetoric, orthodox ideology and ambiguous policy. This has largely been the case for China’s defence white papers, released once every two years since 1998.

However, the 10th defence white paper, published on July 24, deserves attention, given that it contains significant updates and fresh ideas. The 51-page document, titled “China’s National Defence in the New Era”, is the first detailed response to a host of US defence policy statements.

Washington has thrown down the gauntlet to Beijing, with several key policy statements – its 2017 national security strategy, the 2018 national defence strategy and the 2019 report on Chinese military power – having effectively made China its primary strategic competitor.

The new Chinese defence paper describes the United States military in Asia as destabilising, as the US recasts its security architecture in the Asia-Pacific and hews its strategic horizons to the Indo-Pacific concept.

For the first time, Beijing acknowledges the US strategic shift from the “war on terror” to its rivalry with China and Russia. It acknowledges the competition between the world’s sole superpower and the fast-rising one. The paper points out that the US is building and relocating its military assets in the Western Pacific, with multilateral naval exercises with Japan, Australia, India and European navies.

“The US has adjusted its national security and defence strategies. It has provoked and intensified competition among major countries,” the white paper states.

In a significant update on the 2010 white paper’s explanation of China’s defence spending, the latest document suggests that each of the three categories – personnel, training and maintenance, and equipment – accounts for roughly a third of total expenditure. It documents an unprecedented emphasis on maritime defence, with a call to “build a combined, multifunctional and efficient marine combat force structure”.

It also emphasised China’s growing power projection capabilities and suggested a significant military strategy shift from “near seas defence” to “the combination of near seas defence and far seas protection”.

The “far seas” strategy is to help China become a maritime power. At the Communist Party’s 18th congress in 2012, the leadership took on board the ideas of American historian Alfred Thayer Mahan to declare China’s ambition to “build itself into a maritime power”.

Since he came to power, President Xi Jinping, who is also commander-in-chief of the People’s Liberation Army, has spared no effort in speeding up the building of a world-class military with a focus on expanding its blue-water fleet.

From 2014-2018, Beijing launched naval vessels with a total weight of 678,000 tonnes, more than the French, German, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Spanish and Taiwanese navies combined, according to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

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Last year, the Chinese navy overtook the US Navy to become the world’s largest, with more than 300 ships, compared with the 287 vessels comprising the deployable battle force of the US Navy. China will have at least six aircraft carrier battle groups by 2035, which might provide the first real challenge to the dominance of US carrier strike groups in the world.

The white paper repeats the rhetoric that China will never seek to become a hegemonic power, but also reflects an unabashed party-led effort to build a world-class military with formidable and advanced capabilities. It delivers the message that Beijing would brook no domestic or foreign challenge to its self-assigned historic mission.

Obviously, Beijing’s short-term strategic objective is to become a pre-eminent power in the Asia-Pacific, and in the longer term, a global one, to challenge the decades-long US dominance. As the PLA works to transform itself into a world-class force by the mid-century, the US military may find itself facing a challenge unprecedented since the sinking of the imperial Japanese supercarrier Shinano in 1944.

Cary Huang is a veteran China affairs columnist, having written on this topic since the early 1990s

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