China’s increase in military exercises helps aid diplomacy efforts
- The number of PLA exercises with other countries has more than doubled as military diplomacy becomes a more prominent part of foreign policy
- As tensions with the West rise, China’s military exercises with ally Russia have increased in number and scope
Military officials in the Central Military Commission, China’s top military command, have also visited more foreign counterparts.
“This external agenda is very robust.”
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But in terms of Beijing’s ties with other countries that the PLA seeks to court, China still lags far behind in the substance and depth of joint military drills, experts say.
China is also interacting less regularly with its top geopolitical rival, the US.
As tensions have risen with the West, military exercises between China and Russia have had the greatest range of areas being trained, with live fire drills and joint rescue missions most common, according to the Post analysis. China has taken part in at least 45 exercises that also involved Russia, with 20 of them bilateral exercises, since the 18th party congress in 2012.
The two countries also continued their exercises during the Covid-19 pandemic, including the Zapad/Interaction-2021 and Joint Sea 2021 drills. That was despite a sharp drop of diplomatic outreach from China during its three years of closed borders.
In recent years, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that includes China and Russia has been also holding larger combined exercises on counterterrorism.
As the US and China woo with military drills, who will Southeast Asia choose?
The bloc of Central Asian nations plus India, Pakistan and Iran identifies combating terrorism, extremism and separatism as a core tenet of its security policy.
More than 4,000 troops took part in the SCO Peace Mission 2021 drills, held in Russia – the most in the series of exercises. The focus was on combined command and “mixed formations” of personnel of different militaries.
“The drills with the SCO are much more substantive in scale and in the weapons and equipment sent than those that China holds with Asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries,” said Jackie Wong Siu-hei, a predoctoral fellow at George Washington University who has compiled data on China’s military diplomatic outreach from 2000 to 2023.
The only Asean member that China has held military exercises with which involved more sophisticated arms – including armoured vehicles and live-fire drills – is Laos, a country that relies heavily on Chinese infrastructural investment, Wong said.
But those drills still pale in comparison to SCO exercises. Wong said the size of the drills and the weaponry China sends reveal its varying military diplomatic goals with other nations.
A reason behind the limited engagement between Asean countries and China could lie in America’s long history of working with nations in the Asia-Pacific.
US military outreach has included giving Asian military leaders executive education, as well as the American arms that have made their way to many Asian countries’ arsenals. Many aspects of US training have been embedded into the military training of Asean countries – a result of using American arms such as F-16 fighter jets and complying with the confidentiality conditions that come with using these weapons.
By contrast, SCO countries use few US arms.
Wong said that meant Asian countries are less inclined to hold in-depth combined training with China.
“China might be thinking that it has consolidated its identity that contrasts with the US,” he said. “The US is shooting missiles and holding more live-fire drills. China is perhaps saying that its military cooperation is oriented around peace, unlike the US.”
Zenobia Chan, a PhD candidate at Princeton University’s politics department and one of Wong’s co-authors in the research, said the vast difference in the level of participation meant military exercises of Asean countries that China takes part in are largely symbolic, with a low level of participation by PLA personnel and the main activity being search and rescue exercises.
China’s military diplomacy is becoming a more prominent component of its overall foreign policy
Asean countries still participate in them because they wish to maintain good ties with both the US and China, she said, citing interviews with officials from Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.
“For them, China’s a very important economic partner, whereas the US is more the military partner or guarantor. They don’t want to make either side unhappy. So it means that they are constrained by US factors in that they can’t work too closely with China, but they also don’t want to offend China, if you will.”
Chan said in countries that receive a lot of arms deliveries from the US, the number of Chinese infrastructure projects correlated with the number of combined military exercises. That correlation does not exist with countries that do not use many American arms.
“Our theory is that because a lot of countries rely a lot on trade with China and also these infrastructure projects, they want to preserve that economic relationship with China. On the other hand, those countries that actually receive lots of American arms deliveries, they also rely on the US for security.
“And to please both sides, they do these more symbolic exercises with China in order to placate China while still getting US arms deliveries or security guarantees in some cases,” she said.
Some of those symbolic acts of diplomatic outreach also include port visits and senior level meetings, such as those between defence ministers and more senior officials including the vice-chairmen of China’s Central Military Commission (CMC), the country’s highest military command.
Senior-level meetings are part of the key performance indicators of military diplomacy, Chan said.
“The upper level, they want you to do military diplomacy. And how do you show that you have done your military diplomacy, then? You visit. That’s just how the incentive structure is set up within [China],” she said.
Many of the port visits were performed in Africa by fleets on missions in the Gulf of Aden to protect ships from pirates. In 2023, the fleet visited Nigeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Ghana, and held combined exercises with their militaries, the review of Xinhua articles shows.
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Though the US and China once held bilateral military exercises, these stopped in 2019. The last one was a humanitarian assistance and disaster management drill in Hawaii involving more than 200 Chinese troops and as many American troops.
“China’s military diplomacy is becoming a more prominent component of its overall foreign policy,” said Anna Ashton, director of China corporate affairs and US-China relations at risk consultancy Eurasia Group. “With regard to security issues, China is asserting an alternative vision for maintaining international peace and security.”
Xi’s vision for world safety is encapsulated in his Global Security Initiative (GSI), which confronts some foreign policy principles of the West. It criticises sanctions that have not been authorised by the UN Security Council and supports regional groupings in the Global South, which aligns with Beijing’s long-time opposition against non-Asian countries weighing in on contentious issues such as the territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
“The GSI is China’s concept for maintaining global peace and security in the 21st century,” Ashton said. “It is still fairly abstract, but it clearly supports China’s vision of the ideal global architecture in contrast to the existing, US-dominated architecture.”
