There is no simple way to introduce the challenges that China’s strategic presence and growing civil and military capabilities pose in competing with the United States. China’s capability to compete at given levels has increased radically since 1980 in virtually every civil and military area, and China has set broad goals for achieving strategic parity and superiority – although its timeframes and definitions of such goals are vague. Neither China nor the United States has published anything like a credible unclassified net assessment of current and future capabilities or provided details as to how each country’s broad statements about strategic goals would actually be implemented.
This report provides an updated overview of the key developments in China’s growing civil and military capabilities to compete with the United States and other powers. It provides a wide range of graphs, maps, and tables that provide a diverse view of the summary data on a wide range of China’s strategic and military capabilities where these can be summarized in quantitative form or by using maps and selected quotes. It also provides summary comparisons of the civil, economic, and technological trends in China and the U.S., recognizing that the estimates are often different and controversial.
One key goal in developing this briefing is to illustrate the complexity of the various forms of Chinese and U.S. competition and the fact that the competition is both civil and military – and one where China talks about the fusion of military and civil efforts. It also shows that the competition, is global rather than centered in one area like Taiwan or the South China Sea, and it is often a competition for military and civil influence that goes far beyond Asia – and where each nation’s ability to influence and deter may well be more important than its ability to fight.
Another goal is to illustrate the sheer complexity of the competition and its many different dimensions as well as the rapid rate of change in many key areas of military force, economics, and politics – rates of change where it is clear that experts are forced to speculate as to how each side will progress over periods of at least the next two decades to understand these vectors of change.
In many ways, the competition between the U.S. and China is like a game of three-dimensional chess where there are no fixed rules, no limit to the number of boards where the game is played, and no clear limits to the number of state and non-state actors that can join the game and move on their own. It is also a competition where there are strong incentives to cooperate and to limit the level of actual conflict. To paraphrase War Games, the only way that China and the U.S. can “win” at theater levels of conflict and above is to not play. Successful deterrence means playing by Sun Tzu’s rules, not those of Clausewitz.
The briefing relies, where possible, on the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual report on Chinese Military Power. which seems to be the most reliable and balanced official unclassified source available. It also includes reporting by the Congressional Research Service; U.S. combatant commands; and Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean official reporting, plus a wide range of other think tanks and expert sources in an effort to deliberately illustrate the wide range of different official and expert estimates.
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