Why Has China Not Gone To War Yet?
Year after year, the wolf fails to show up. Yet, the US Empire’s mass media keeps amplifying this false narrative, day in day out. These tired tropes never die. For good reasons. They vilify China as America’s greatest enemy. They advance the National Security Council’s bellicose agenda. They prompt Congress to boost ever greater defense budgets. They serve to rally American allies. The sweeping China military threat narrative brushes aside a major question: Why has China not gone to war yet, despite enjoying 40 years of dizzying economic boom and rapid military modernization? The US propaganda machine dismisses this pertinent question as it undermines its efforts to frame China as the evil aggressor. The reality is that China has not gone to war and cannot start a war due to overwhelming economic and geopolitical constraints. It will take at least the Chinese government one or two decades to mitigate them. The first constraint is China’s ability to withstand economic warfare if it chooses to use military means to achieve its goals. Should war break out, the US will rally NATO and its partners to unleash massive sanctions against China. Similar to those imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, the West’s economic and financial sanctions will freeze China’s central-bank assets, ban Chinese banks from the international financial message system Swift, compel international companies to exit the Chinese market, and, most of all, place an embargo on the import of Chinese goods and services. These sanctions will cripple the Chinese economy, which is based on the export-reliant growth model. China owes its exponential economic development to its integration into the capitalist world economy, especially after its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and has become the world manufacturing powerhouse churning out low-end and high-tech goods. Though comprising no more than 20% of China’s GDP, exports of goods and services are crucial to keep its companies and factories running. A major war with the West will impact China’s preeminent place in the global value chain. China accounts for 20% of global manufacturing trade and an even larger percentage of intermediate global value chain inputs, which are essential for production. Wartime disruptions to its industry and trade will result in the migration of investments and production to other developing countries, such as India, Mexico, and Vietnam. Deeply integrated into the global supply chains, China may weather the fallout of war as best it can, but its economic development will nonetheless take a major hit. The US will not hesitate to block ocean shipping of commodities that are essential to Chinese manufacturing. It will call on its allies (Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and India) to send naval forces to enforce the maritime blockade in the Strait of Malacca, the Taiwan Strait, the Miyako Strait, the Bashi Channel, and the South China Sea. Such encirclement will deprive China of many crucial strategic resources: crude oil from Saudi Arabia; iron ore and coal from Australia; zinc, copper, and cobalt from Africa; and lithium carbonate from Chile, to name a few. Some may argue that as Russia has fared better than expected in the face of unprecedented sanctions, China may do likewise. Such a comparison is fallacious. Russia has nothing to fear about Europe banning its oil and gas; India, China, and other developing countries rely on Russian natural resources. In contrast, China’s manufactured goods can be produced elsewhere, as shown by the Western strategies of decoupling, derisking, friendshoring, and onshoring, albeit at a higher cost. Devoid of many strategic commodities vital to its industries, China is more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of military conflict than Russia, whose abundant energy, metal, and mineral resources are in demand, no matter what. The second constraint is China’s ability to change the balance of power in East Asia. As discussed in China Is a Geopolitical Dwarf, although the second largest country in Asia, China faces an uphill battle in asserting itself in the region. By all metrics, despite four decades of catching up, China lags behind the US in relative power. Its defense spending is 59% of that of the US, whose military budget is greater than that of the next 10 combined. Although equipped with fifth generation fighters, China’s air force is no match for the USAF’s 5000 warplanes and uncontested technological supremacy. For all its past glory, the Middle Kingdom is literally encircled by a chain of US air bases and military ports that have been entrenched in Asia and the Pacific for at least 74 years. China has to tread carefully in its home region due to the intimidating defense treaties and partnerships the US has forged. The US, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are committed to join forces in the event of an armed attack by an external aggressor. Biden has been adamant that the US will fight China over Taiwan. In case of war, Vietnam will side with its American strategic partner. By joining AUKUS, Australia has made it clear that its future nuclear-powered submarines will target China. The US-led alliance has effectively deterred China from engaging in any forms of direct military conflict. China’s peaceful posture for the last four decades is largely determined by the daunting tasks of challenging the US-dominated status quo. This explains its inability to assert its sovereignty over the nine-dash line in the South China Sea, where it has to compete with the Philippines, its renegade province Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Vietnam. Ironically, Vietnam, whose size is 29 smaller than China and whose population is equivalent to that of China’s Guangdong province, occupies 29 features in the South China Sea while China has only seven. Likewise, China has been unable to impose its sovereignty over the Taiwan island and the Taiwan Strait, where US ships make their presence felt forcefully by conducting so-called freedom of navigation operations. How can China surmount the economic and geopolitical constraints that prevent it from making war? To blunt the US-led economic warfare, China has been attempting to replace its export-oriented growth model with the dual circulation strategy. The new model emphasizes increasing exports (international circulation) and spurring domestic demand (internal circulation), both of which will strengthen China’s manufacturing sector. In wartime, exports to the Global South countries will alleviate the loss of Western markets. It continues to build an alternative, China-centered world economy by investing massively in the Belt and Road Initiative countries. Expanded internal consumption will insulate China’s economy from sanctions to a certain extent. To date, the Chinese government has been unsuccessful in encouraging its citizens to save less and spend more. China will not be capable of conducting a bellicose foreign policy without having a large, domestic consumer market. Just as the US dollar is a pillar of US global supremacy, China needs to internationalize the use of yuan if it aims at defeating the US in Asia. Though China has spearheaded de-dollarization, the yuan’s share of global payments remains negligible (4.61% in November 2023), and its share of global foreign exchange reserves hovers around 2.87%. De-dollarization is very much a work in progress as the Chinese government needs to liberalize capital controls, loosen its control over exchange rate, and make the yuan fully convertible. A great power cannot prevail by relying on its rival’s currency. China will need to develop its military power in several areas before putting its troops on a war footing. As laid out in China Must Bulk Up Its Nuclear Arsenal, China has to preempt US nuclear blackmail or attacks by bolstering its heretofore modest nuclear weapons stockpile and launch capabilities. There is a high probability that the US will resort to nuclear war against China if the latter is about to gain the upper hand in a military conflict. Contrary to US assertions, the Chinese newly minted navy, devoid of combat experience, is far from upsetting the naval balance of power. Numerical superiority notwithstanding, China’s brand-new warships pack twice as less offensive missiles than the US fleet. China plays catchup in producing and deploying quiet attack and ballistic-missile submarines. It has made progress in replacing its older, noisy, and easy-to-track submarines, dubbed derisively as underwater tractors, and remedying its weakness in anti-submarine warfare. However, it is not certain that China can prevent the US and Japanese submarines from sinking as many Chinese warships as they can. As to long-range bombers, China trails behind the US. Based on a Soviet platform, the Chinese H-6 bombers are non-stealthy, short-ranged aircraft with limited ammunition payload. To address the issue, China is developing the H-20 stealth bomber, a flying wing capable of flying 8,500 km, carrying 10 tonnes of munitions, and attacking US bases in Guam and Hawaii. As of this writing, the H-20 has not reached the testing phase. This is a fatal vulnerability in the Chinese air force as the US possesses 141 bombers that can inflict serious damage on its adversary. By crying wolf about a looming Chinese military threat, the US uses a well-worn but highly effective propaganda trope to demonize China. Yet, China does not have the economic and military capabilities to disrupt, let alone upend, the US-led world order, in the short or medium term. It has not started and will not start a war as long as its economy is not insulated enough from economic warfare and the balance of power in East Asia has not shifted in its favor. A war between China and the US will, however, break out once China gains more economic and military leverage in the great power competition.
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