Paper Tigers: China’s Nuclear Posture

by Jeffrey Lewis

China’s nuclear arsenal has long been an enigma. It is a small force, based almost exclusively on land-based ballistic missiles, maintained at a low level of alert and married to a no-first-use doctrine – all choices that would seem to invite attack in a crisis. Chinese leaders, when they have spoken about nuclear weapons, have articulated ideas that sound odd to the Western ear. Mao Zedong’s oft-quoted remark that ‘nuclear weapons are a paper tiger’ seems to be bluster or madness.
China’s nuclear forces are now too important to remain a mystery. Yet Westerners continue to disagree about basic factual information concerning one of the world’s most important nuclear-weapons states. This Adelphi book documents and explains the evolution of China’s nuclear forces in terms of historical, bureaucratic and ideological factors. There is a strategic logic at work, but that logic is mediated through politics, bureaucracy and ideology. The simplest explanation is that Chinese leaders, taken as a whole, have tended to place relatively little emphasis on the sort of technical details that dominated US discussions regarding deterrence. Such profound differences in thinking about nuclear weapons could lead to catastrophic misunderstanding in the event of a military crisis between Beijing and Washington.

An important book which must be read by anyone concerned about the survival of the planet. The author shows that China and the US could drift into a nuclear confrontation unless both sides engage in a serious nuclear dialogue.
Morton H. Halperin

This book systematically explores all the important aspects of China’s nuclear weapons policy and practice. It is a pioneering effort that consciously avoids the bias caused by the US practice of mirroring, which interprets Chinese nuclear policy according to the security outlook and perceptions of the US.
Li Bin, Senior Associate
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Professor, Tsinghua University

Genres: China, Military Fiction, Nonfiction

124 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 4, 2014

About the author

Jeffrey Lewis is a Research Fellow at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy's Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland.

Reviews

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear, concise overview of one the world's least-studied nuclear arsenals in relation to its importance. By putting the PRC's historical and political context front and centre, rather than projecting American or other views on nuclear matters onto China's situation, the author gives us an excellent and stimulating explanation of what, to non-Chinese observers, can seem like a bizarrely small arsenal for China's size or a craftily hypocritical insistence on no-first-use. In both cases, the legacies of Maoist politics, the Cultural Revolution and Sino-American tensions turn out to offer a convincing background: China's priority in the early days of its nuclear programme was to acquire the capability for the sake of great-power status, rather than achieve actual deterrence, which in Chinese thinking blurs into coercion (usually American). This also goes some way towards explaining the stubborn Chinese insistence on mutual no-first-use as a precondition for any substantial arms control talks with the US, where no-first-use is instead seen as fundamentally unviable and therefore necessarily insincere. These are deep chasms of misunderstanding indeed, but it's certainly better than nothing to be aware of their nature and origins.
To top it all off, the conclusion offers constructive recommendations for how American, Russian and Chinese leaders could overcome potentially extremely dangerous misunderstandings about one another and make real progress on arms control. How relevant these still are in the age of Drumpf, though, is anybody's guess.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

one review

"Although a number of interpretations of China policy and actions are possible, the author's conclusions are reasonable if not necessarily definitive."

[Mayank Bawari · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent read to understand the difference between paper tigers and scary paper tigers

[Daniel Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite make-me-sleepy-book