Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

In 2007, at the height of a years-long economic boom, Premier Wen Jiabao warned that China’s growth model had become “unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.”82 His successor, Li Keqiang, echoed that assessment in 2021.83 And Xi Jinping, the ultimate Chinese triumphalist, has given multiple internal speeches warning of the potential for a Soviet-style collapse triggered by “black swans” and “gray rhinos”—investor jargon for system-crippling economic crises.

Under Xi’s rule, the government has essentially outlawed negative economic news, including unofficial data showing slowing growth, rising local government debt, or signs of declining consumer confidence.85 Objective economic analysis is being replaced by government propaganda. And technocrats are being replaced by political hacks:

Many Chinese citizens know that their government’s economic story doesn’t add up, and they are voting with their feet. The rich are moving their money and children out of the country en masse. In any given year, 30–60 percent of Chinese millionaires and billionaires say they are leaving China or have plans to do so.87 In the decade after 2008, Chinese nationals received at least 68 percent of all of the “golden visas” in the world, which refer to residence permits obtained by investing large sums in a host nation.”

Chinese laborers have been staging thousands of protests every year demanding compensation for their “blood and sweat.”89 It is never a good sign when a country’s elite flee and its workers rise up. As one Chinese tycoon explained after emigrating to Malta, “China’s economy is like a giant ship heading to the precipice . . . without fundamental changes, it’s inevitable that the ship will be wrecked and the passengers will die.”

China’s internal security budget doubled between 2008 and 2014—surpassing military spending in 2010—and has grown a third faster than overall government spending ever since.91 Half of China’s major cities have been put under grid-style management, a system in which every block is patrolled by a team of security officers and surveilled 24 hours a day by cameras.92 Now the government is rolling out a social credit registry that uses speech- and facial-recognition technologies to monitor each of China’s citizens constantly and punish them instantly. That system, the CCP says, will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

Building an Orwellian police state is hardly the hallmark of a vibrant economic superpower. Neither is the fact that Xi’s top priority since assuming power has been to imprison, execute, or disappear anyone that could conceivably become a political rival.

Where others see rapid Chinese growth, we see massive debt and Soviet-level inefficiency. Where others see gleaming infrastructure, we see ghost cities and bridges to nowhere. Where others see the world’s largest population, we see a looming demographic catastrophe. Where others see an ocean of Chinese exports, we see vulnerable supply lines and a dearth of domestic consumption. And where others see an enlightened leadership confidently carrying out a master plan for economic supremacy, we see a decadent elite that views China a lot like we do, which is why it is building the most advanced internal security machine the world has ever seen.

In late 1962, while the world was preoccupied with the Cuban Missile Crisis, China and India fought a major war resulting in a resounding Indian defeat. Since then, New Delhi and Beijing have continued to jockey for advantage, both in the eastern section of the border region, between Burma and Nepal, and in the western section between Nepal and Pakistan. In the years before 2020, the intensity of the dispute gradually ratcheted upward.

after dark on June 15, the skirmishing turned deadly. Chinese soldiers attacked an Indian patrol using primitive but brutal weapons, such as sticks studded with rusty nails. According to reports, PLA personnel even tried to crush Indian soldiers by pushing boulders down on top of them.2 A pitched battle ensued, lasting six hours and involving up to 600 troops. What exactly happened in the darkness remains unclear; the governments told sharply contrasting stories in the aftermath. Yet some twenty Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops ended up dead, many of them killed when they fell or were pushed off a mountain ridge into the river valley below.

After Galwan, the backlash was sharp. Indian crowds destroyed Chinese smartphones and burned effigies of Xi Jinping. The nationalist press called for revenge. Modi warned that “the entire country is hurt and angry. . . . No one can even dare look towards an inch of our land.”3 It wasn’t just rhetoric. To shore up its defenses, India sought emergency purchases of Russian fighter jets and other military assets. To limit digital dependence on a rival, the Indian government banned dozens of Chinese mobile applications, including TikTok and WeChat, and barred Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network trials. Most important, India’s long, slow move toward America accelerated. The year after June 2020 saw a flurry of diplomacy around the Quad, a U.S.-Australia-India-Japan partnership that looks a lot like an anti-China alliance of Indo-Pacific democracies.

Experts on Sino-Indian relations speculated that Beijing’s motive in escalating the border dispute a year earlier may have been to punish New Delhi for working with America.7 If so, Xi miscalculated—and it wasn’t the first time. The deadly struggle at Galwan was just one example of how China’s aggressive behavior has begun to backfire.

The strategic holiday that China enjoyed for decades is over. A strategic vise is tightening as the CCP’s rivals close in on all sides.

nations with fish and friends as neighbors have the best chance of claiming global power without provoking global resistance. Those ringed by rivals must constantly fear that expansion will result in their own isolation and defeat. In world politics as in real estate, location matters: Countries that sit comfortably outside the geopolitical cauldron of Eurasia are far better positioned for primacy than those trapped within it.

By the late nineteenth century, no combination of countries in the Western Hemisphere could meaningfully threaten America’s security. The one European power—Britain—that might have challenged the United States in its own backyard was menaced by Germany and chose to appease the Americans instead.9 The United States was the sole great power in its hemisphere, which allowed it to project that power around the world. America could build an ocean-going navy rather than heavily fortifying its frontiers. It could enter the world wars of the twentieth century late and allow countries in Europe and Asia to bear the brunt of the fighting and dying. And because the United States was so far away from Europe and Asia, the countries of those regions were less likely to fear being conquered by America than to try to enlist it as an ally against predators closer to home. This was what the countries of Western Europe did in dragging the United States into NATO in the 1940s. It was what China itself did in the 1970s: Mao explained his pivot to America as a way of using the “far barbarians” to keep the “near barbarians” in check.10 By dint of not being located in the Old World, the United States found itself invited to exercise vast influence there.

The combination of geography and democracy made America a fairly benign superpower, which gave other countries an interest in supporting its hegemony.

This is what spelled doom for every Eurasian country that tried to become a global superpower in the modern era. Napoleon’s France conquered much of Europe but fell victim to a combination of rivals led by Great Britain. In the twentieth century, Germany was destroyed (twice) when its European enemies made common cause with the United States. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was thwarted by a ring of rivals from Northeast Asia to Western Europe, all backed by Washington. Hegemonic ambitions have long been the ruin of countries situated within Eurasia: The odds of being cornered and killed by a pack of enemies are high indeed.

America has land borders with two friendly countries. China is surrounded by twenty nations and faces historical rivals in every direction: Russia to the north, Japan to the east, Vietnam to the south, and India to the west. China’s neighbors include seven of the world’s fifteen most populous countries, four countries armed with nuclear weapons, five countries that have waged wars against China in the past eighty years, and ten that still claim parts of Chinese territory. Additionally, China has America as a neighbor, due to the U.S. alliances, strategic partnerships, and military deployments that dot Asia’s map. China may once have been a Eurasian empire. But today, one Chinese scholar writes, it “suffers from the harshest global geopolitical security situation among the great powers.”

because the CCP exercises power so ruthlessly at home, it faces an inherent challenge in convincing other countries that it would use preeminent power responsibly abroad.

One reason for this complacency was greed. In the early 1990s, an engagement policy seemed logical because China was a minor military threat and a massive money-making opportunity. With 1.3 billion people, a long coastline in the heart of East Asia, and an authoritarian regime that was willing to repress dissent and trash the environment to make way for big business, China was simply too good to pass up as a consumer market and a low-wage production platform. So Western multinational companies and financiers pressed their governments to integrate China further into global supply chains. Those governments happily obliged, arguing—when they talked about the CCP’s grotesque human rights violations at all—that a more economically open China would eventually become more politically open. “Trade freely with China,” George W. Bush explained, “and time is on our side.”16

Given that China was still relatively poor and technologically weak—the joke in the 1990s was that it would take a “million-man swim” for the PLA to reach Taiwan—there was no need to suppress its growth. Given that the American-led global economy was making China wealthier, surely Beijing would come to see the value in supporting that system. And given that so many authoritarian regimes had recently fallen to the global march of democracy, surely China would eventually do likewise. America would transform China—turning it into a “responsible stakeholder” or perhaps even a liberal democracy—long before China had a chance to transform the American-led order.

The 9/11 attacks diverted U.S. attention for a decade, while making Washington more dependent on Chinese diplomatic support in the war on terror. The Obama administration then sought to recoup lost ground with its “pivot to Asia,” only to be whipsawed by the rise of ISIS and another multiyear war in the Middle East. China remained the problem of tomorrow, or perhaps a generation hence, because today’s problems were so consuming. “China is like that long book you’ve always been meaning to read,” a U.S. intelligence official commented, “but you always end up waiting until next summer.”

The strategy worked remarkably well, and the CCP exploited its twenty-year grace period to the fullest. China sucked up Western technology and capital, dumped its products in foreign markets while keeping its own market relatively closed, installed Chinese officials atop international organizations, and proclaimed its peaceful intentions while building up its military. It was a master class in how to use the illusion of win-win diplomacy to conceal a ruthlessly win-lose approach to global politics.22 Yet it couldn’t go on forever.

Chinese cyberattacks and intellectual property theft were robbing American firms of tens of billions of dollars annually in what recently retired National Security Agency director Keith Alexander called “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

If engagement had been meant to produce a mellower, freer China, it seemed to have created a more belligerent, mightier autocracy instead.

The percentage of Americans who saw China unfavorably rose from 47 percent in 2017 to 73 percent in 2020.36 The 2020 presidential election became a contest in China-bashing. And when Trump lost that election, the basic thrust of U.S. policy hardly changed. President Joe Biden, who had once bragged about his close relationship with Xi Jinping, now pledged to prosecute “extreme competition” against the CCP.

Biden also threw down the ideological gauntlet, declaring that an epochal struggle between democracy and authoritarianism was under way. Washington must link arms with fellow democracies—on tech, trade, defense, and other issues—to defeat Beijing’s repressive model.

China has lost any chance of reclaiming Taiwan without a fight. For decades, Beijing thought that it could buy reunification by forging economic links with Taiwan while bribing countries to cut diplomatic relations with the island. But prospects for peaceful reunification are fading fast: It turns out most Taiwanese don’t want to live in a belligerent, neo-totalitarian state.

In 2020, a record 64 percent of the island’s population identified solely as Taiwanese and not Chinese, up from 55 percent in 2018.42 Popular support for unification with China has plunged during the past decade; the Kuomintang political party, seen to favor cozy ties with Beijing, has been repeatedly punished at the polls.

after watching China swallow Hong Kong, Taiwan’s government approved a 10 percent hike in military spending and a bold new defense strategy.43 Under this plan, Taiwan would acquire huge arsenals of mobile missile launchers, armed drones, and mines; prepare its army to surge tens of thousands of troops to any beach in an hour; back those regular forces with a million-strong reserve force trained to fight guerrilla-style in Taiwan’s cities, mountains, and jungles; and set up a huge network of shelters and massive stockpiles of fuel, medical supplies, food, and water for a population psychologically prepared to ride out a bloody conflict for months. “We will defend ourselves to the very last day,” Taiwan’s foreign ...

America increasingly treats Taiwan as an independent nation in all but name, and the U.S. government is backing up this stance by helping Taiwan’s military.

the Trump administration sold nearly $20 billion worth of weapons to Taipei, including missile launchers, mines, and drones that could help an island country repel an amphibious attack.

U.S. officials have called their support for the island “rock solid” and hinted ever-less-subtly that America would respond to a Chinese invasion with force.

The overall balance of naval tonnage now favors Beijing, but Japan still has more large surface combatants than China, including amphibious ships that have been repurposed as carriers for Japan’s rapidly expanding arsenal of stealth F-35 fighters armed with long-range anti-ship missiles.

Japan, for its part, has reinterpreted its constitution to allow the Self-Defense Forces to play a more active role in fighting alongside the United States.

Most alarming for China, Japan agreed in 2021 to cooperate closely with America in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Japan’s deputy prime minister declared that such an attack would constitute a threat to the survival of Japan itself, and Washington and Tokyo began drawing up a joint battle plan that reportedly involves U.S. Marines deploying deadly long-range artillery on the southernmost Ryukyu Islands, just 90 miles from Taiwan.

Australia weathered an economic coercion campaign China unleashed upon it in 2020, coming away more determined to harden its society against foreign interference. Its leaders have largely abandoned the pleasant illusion of not having to choose between America and China, in recognition that the alternative to aligning with Washington is subordination to Beijing. Australia is now engaged in its biggest defense overhaul in generations, expanding northern bases to better accommodate U.S. ships and aircraft, investing in long-range conventional missiles, and fighting Chinese influence in the strategically located islands of the South Pacific.

Canberra concluded a landmark deal with Washington and London to build nuclear-powered attack submarines with U.S. technology. That pact would make the Royal Australian Navy a force to be reckoned with in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea; it would also bind the three English-speaking nations together in an anti-China entente. “Panda huggers” have become an endangered species in Australian politics, while “panda sluggers” roam freely.

In 2019, the European Union labeled Beijing a “systemic rival,” while many member states have banned or quietly excluded Chinese technology from their 5G networks.

Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a diplomatic representative’s office (a step short of an embassy) in Vilnius,

This is “how China loses,” one scholar has perceptively written—through high-handed, reflexive pugnacity that reminds so many countries how much they will hate living in a CCP-led world.

Counter-China cooperation has remained imperfect and halting, mostly because so many countries are still hooked on trade with Beijing. China’s economic presence is pervasive in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and other developing regions.

Moreover, what governments want is one thing and what businesses want is another: As Washington and Tokyo sought to limit dependence on China in 2020–2021, U.S. and Japanese investment flowed into that country.

China, for its part, has been pursuing hedges against strategic isolation. It has built an entente with Putin’s Russia, another angry, revisionist autocracy with a penchant for aggression and a talent for making enemies. That partnership features deepening economic, technological, diplomatic, and military cooperation beyond what most Western observers would have predicted a decade ago. It features a tacit agreement that Beijing and Moscow won’t make trouble for each other along their once-contested border, so that they can maximize the trouble they make for the United States and its allies across Eurasia and beyond. On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared that their friendship had “no limits”; Moscow’s subsequent attack, and the global security crisis it precipitated, underscored that the balance of power is under strain in Europe and Asia simultaneously. If China and Russia have traditionally struggled to tame their historical rivalry for long, for now their anti-U.S., anti-democracy agendas are binding them together.

Sino-Russian ties could get even tighter in the coming years. If Russia faces prolonged isolation thanks to its assault on Ukraine, it will become more dependent, economically and strategically, on China. If Beijing experiences a more energetic form of containment at the hands of Washington and its allies, then calm, productive relations with Russia will become all the more valuable. It is no longer absurd to imagine a scenario in which America’s parallel great-power rivalries, against China and Russia, merge into a single contest against a more coherent autocratic axis spanning a large part of Eurasia.

Yet even here, not all is well for Beijing. Perhaps Putin is Tojo to Xi’s Hitler—or perhaps he is Mussolini, the weaker but truculent ally whose missteps blow back on the stronger.72 The Russian invasion of Ukraine created problems for China, bringing down international scrutiny and suspicion on Xi for his close relationship with Putin.73 A China that stays close to Russia will be a China that grows more estranged from much of the world.

China may have passed the United States by some measures of GDP, but by other crucial indices it is still quite weak. Per capita GDP is a crucial measure of how much wealth a country can extract from its population to pursue global power: By this standard, the United States was six times richer than China in 2019.75

Dai Xu, a senior PLA officer, explained how deadly it could be to provoke the hostility of a superpower with dozens of allies. “Don’t think that the U.S. imperialist is a ‘paper tiger,’ ” he wrote. “It’s a ‘real tiger’ that ‘kills people.’ ” “Once Imperial America considers you as their ‘enemy,’ ” he added, “you’re in big trouble.”

“having enemies on all sides” is a recipe for disaster.

it is hard to see how a country with so many metastasizing cancers, and so many wary rivals, can forever outrun all the resistance its behavior has begun to provoke.

That may seem like good news, from an American perspective. But it’s not entirely reassuring. As China’s problems really take hold in the coming years, the future will come to look darker and darker for Beijing. The twin specters of economic decay and geopolitical encirclement will stalk CCP officials remorselessly. And that’s when we should get really worried. What happens when a country that wants the world concludes that it might not be able to get it peacefully? The answer, history suggests, is nothing good.