How worried should we be?
How likely is China to start a war? This may be the single-most important question in international affairs today. If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II.
How worried should we be?
Notwithstanding the recent flurry of high-level diplomacy between Washington and Beijing, the warning signs are certainly there. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades. Notwithstanding some recent efforts to lure back skittish foreign investment, China is stockpiling fuel and food and trying to reduce the vulnerability of its economy to sanctions—steps one might take as conflict nears. Xi has said China must prepare for “worst-case and extreme scenarios” and be ready to withstand “high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” All of this comes as Beijing has become increasingly coercive (and occasionally violent) in dealings with its neighbors, including the Philippines, Japan, and India—and as it periodically advertises its ability to batter, blockade, and perhaps invade Taiwan.
Many U.S. officials believe the risk of war is rising. CIA Director William Burns has said Xi seeks the capability to take Taiwan by 2027. And as China’s economy struggles, some observers—including, reportedly, U.S. intelligence analysts—are looking for signs that a peaking China might turn aggressive in order to distract attention from internal problems or to lock in gains while it still can.
Other analysts think the risk of Chinese aggression is overblown. Some scholars say the danger likely can be managed provided Washington doesn’t provoke Beijing—an echo of a longer-standing argument that China won’t upend a status quo that has served it well. Others point out that China has not started a war since its invasion of Vietnam in 1979. Still others dismiss the prospect that China might fight in response to a slowing economy and other domestic problems, claiming that the country has no history of diversionary war. What links these arguments is a belief in the basic continuity of Chinese conduct: the idea that a country that hasn’t launched a disastrous war in more than four decades is unlikely to do so now.
We believe this confidence is dangerously misplaced. A country’s behavior is profoundly shaped by its circumstances, no less than its strategic tradition, and China’s circumstances are changing in explosive ways. Political scientists and historians have identified a range of factors that make great powers more or less inclined to fight. When one considers four such factors, it becomes clear that many of the conditions that once enabled a peaceful rise may now be encouraging a violent descent.
First, the territorial disputes and other issues China is contesting are becoming less susceptible to compromise or peaceful resolution than they once were, making foreign policy a zero-sum game. Second, the military balance in Asia is shifting in ways that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. Third, as China’s short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening—a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past. Fourth, Xi has turned China into a personalist dictatorship of the sort especially prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars.
This isn’t to say China will invade Taiwan in a particular week, month, or year. It is impossible to predict when, exactly, a conflict might occur because the trigger is often an unforeseen crisis. We now know that Europe was primed for war in 1914, but World War I would likely not have happened then had the driver of the car carrying Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand not taken one of history’s most fateful wrong turns. Wars are more like earthquakes: We can’t know precisely when they will happen, but we can recognize factors that lead to higher or lower degrees of risk. Today, China’s risk indicators are blinking red.
The possibility of a U.S.-China war might seem remote at first glance. Beijing has not fought a major war in 44 years, and its military hasn’t killed large numbers of foreigners since 1988, when Chinese frigates machine-gunned 64 Vietnamese sailors in a skirmish over the Spratly Islands. The so-called Asian peace—the lack of interstate wars in East Asia since 1979—has rested on a Chinese peace.
The absence of war has hardly meant the absence of aggression: Beijing has used military and paramilitary capabilities to enlarge its writ in the South and East China seas. In recent years, China has also engaged in bloody scraps with India. Nonetheless, the fact that Beijing has abstained from major wars—while the United States has fought several of them—has allowed Chinese officials to claim that their country is following a uniquely peaceful path to global power. And it compels those who worry about war to explain why China, which has experienced record-breaking growth enabled by two generations of peace, would change course so dramatically.
It wouldn’t be the first time a seemingly peaceful rising power broke bad. Prior to 1914, Germany hadn’t fought a major war for more than 40 years. In the 1920s, Japan looked to many foreign observers like a responsible stakeholder as it signed treaties pledging to limit its navy, share power in Asia, and respect China’s territorial integrity. In the early 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin mused about joining NATO and linking Russia closer to the West. That each of these nations nonetheless launched barbaric wars of conquest underscores a basic truth: Things change. The same country can behave differently, perhaps radically so, depending on the circumstances.
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One such circumstance involves territorial disputes. Most wars are fights about who owns what strip of the Earth; roughly 85 percent of international conflicts waged since 1945 have revolved around territorial claims. Territory is hard to share because it often has symbolic or strategic significance. Even when nations agree to divide an area, they often end up fighting over the most valuable parts, such as cities, oil reserves, holy sites, waterways, or strategic high ground. In addition, securing territory requires physical presence in the form of fences, soldiers, or settlers. Thus, when nations claim the same turf, they come into frequent and unwelcome contact. Territorial disputes are especially likely to escalate when one side fears its claims are eroding precipitously. The belief that hallowed ground is slipping away or that the nation could be dismembered by its enemies can trigger aggression that a country more secure in its borders would avoid.
A second cause of war is a shifting military balance. Wars are waged over various issues but all share a fundamental cause: false optimism. They happen when both sides believe they can use force to achieve objectives—in other words, when both sides think they can win. Of course, few wars are truly win-win affairs, meaning at least one side—and very often both sides—disastrously underestimated the enemy’s strength. In short, competitive or ambiguous military balances cause wars; therefore, anything that makes a given balance more competitive or ambiguous, such as the introduction of new technologies or a massive military buildup by the weaker side, increases the risk of war.
Third, great powers become belligerent when they fear future decline. Geopolitical competition is fierce and unforgiving, so nations nervously guard their relative wealth and power. Even the mightiest countries can spiral into violent insecurity when beset by economic stagnation, strategic encirclement, or other protracted trends that threaten their international position and expose them to predation by their foes. Heavily armed but increasingly anxious, a great power on the precipice of decline will be eager, even desperate, to beat back unfavorable trends by any means necessary. For imperial Germany, imperial Japan, and Putin’s Russia, that ultimately meant war.
Finally, a country’s conduct is shaped by its regime. Personalist dictatorships are more than twice as likely to start wars as democracies or autocracies in which power is held in many hands. Dictators initiate more wars because they are less exposed to the costs of conflict: Over the past 100 years, dictators who lost wars fell from power only 30 percent of the time, whereas other types of leaders who lost wars were voted out or otherwise removed from office nearly 100 percent of the time. Dictators veer into extremism because they are surrounded by sycophants who go all out to meet the dear leader’s demands. Dictators also cultivate real and imagined enemies abroad because blood-and-soil nationalism helps them justify oppressive rule at home. So whereas leaders of limited governments typically rule modestly and fade into obscurity, dictators—including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Russia’s Putin—often butcher their way into the history books.
These four factors—insecure borders, a competitive military balance, negative expectations, and dictatorship—help explain China’s historical use of force, and they have ominous implications today.
A Chinese propaganda poster titled “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!” circa 1966. FINE ART IMAGES/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
The People’s Republic of China was born fighting. After enduring a century of foreign imperialism, China bore the brunt of World War II in Asia after Japan invaded in 1937. At least 14 million Chinese died. Then, from 1945 to 1949, the Chinese Civil War reached its bloody climax, killing at least 2 million more as the Communists fought their way to power.
Forged amid these conflicts, China emerged as a hyper-belligerent state. For several decades, it was one of the world’s most embattled countries, fighting five wars and becoming a chief enemy of both Cold War superpowers. This violent record is unsurprising because China displayed all the risk factors for war.
For starters, China was led by Mao, the apotheosis of one-man rule. He routinely purged his colleagues and made decisions unilaterally, often half-asleep in the middle of night, based on inscrutable and shifting rationales. He also displayed a shocking disregard for human life. Roughly 45 million people were starved, beaten, or shot to death during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s ill-conceived plan to transform China into a superpower within his lifetime. Partly to rally the nation behind this disastrous campaign, Mao instigated an international crisis in 1958 by shelling islands held by the Nationalist government on Taiwan.
Mao may have been sadistic, but even a less ruthless leader would have struggled to keep such a shattered nation at peace. After winning the civil war, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to reimpose central government authority village by village and painstakingly eradicate resistance by ethnic minorities, warlords, and Nationalist sympathizers. To make matters worse, the fall of the Japanese and European empires left China partly surrounded by new countries that were hostile, unstable, or both. Most of China’s borders were contested to some degree; by the 1960s, the boundary with the Soviet Union was the most militarized in the world. Taiwan was the base of a rival Chinese government, backed by the United States, with overt plans to reconquer the mainland. India hosted a Tibetan government in exile and claimed swaths of Chinese territory; and China’s heartland was wedged between two Cold War hot spots, Indochina and the Korean Peninsula.
China considered itself constantly at risk of being torn apart, a historical trauma exacerbated by the economic catastrophes and political upheaval Mao wrought. Yet Beijing always had a viable strategy against each of its land neighbors because China’s huge population enabled it to swallow opponents through what Beijing called “people’s war,” a combination of human wave attacks and guerrilla raids. All told, it was a combustible combination: a brutal dictatorship embroiled in territorial disputes and armed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of manpower.
China thus went from conflict to conflict, getting violent when it felt especially vulnerable or feared an impending decline in its position. In 1950, China mauled U.S. forces that had advanced deep into North Korea, risking nuclear retaliation. Later that decade, China nearly started two additional wars by shelling Nationalist garrisons on offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait. In 1962, Beijing attacked Indian forces after they had built outposts in Chinese-claimed territory in the Himalayas. During the Vietnam War, China sent tens of thousands of troops to fight U.S. forces. In 1969, Beijing again risked nuclear war by ambushing Moscow’s forces along the Ussuri River, following a significant Soviet buildup there. Ten years later, China attacked Vietnam after the latter started hosting Soviet forces and invaded Cambodia, one of Beijing’s only close partners.
After that, China’s guns largely fell silent. There would be exceptions, most notably in 1995 and 1996, when China lobbed missiles near Taiwan. But generally speaking, Beijing became less prickly and aggressive from 1980 to the mid-2000s as its circumstances dramatically changed.
First, the regime mellowed. In 1976, Mao died and was eventually replaced by Deng Xiaoping, who had been purged by Mao and understood the dangers of one-man rule. Under Deng’s guidance, term limits for senior leaders were established. The National People’s Congress and the CCP’s Central Committee began meeting regularly. A professionalized bureaucracy began to take shape. These institutions were far from perfect, but they created checks on power that had been utterly lacking under Mao.
Second, China’s geopolitical position improved, and threats to its territorial integrity diminished. After the U.S. opening to China during the 1970s, the rival government on Taiwan lost most of its diplomatic recognition and its military alliance with the United States. To corner the Soviet Union, the United States formed a quasi-alliance with China and transferred advanced technology to Chinese firms. Taiwan, the Soviet Union, India, and Vietnam could no longer encroach on Chinese territory without potentially triggering a U.S. response. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the major threats to China’s land borders disappeared almost entirely. Without Russia’s support, India, Vietnam, and the newly formed states of Central Asia were in no position to contest China’s borders. Instead, they moved to normalize relations with Beijing.
Third, China’s view of the future brightened. After rapprochement with the United States and other democracies, China gained easy access to the global economy and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, its economy grew at a breakneck pace. Country after country curried favor with Beijing to access its booming market. Britain handed back Hong Kong. Portugal gave up Macau. The United States fast-tracked China into the World Trade Organization. With China’s economy going gangbusters and the world’s most powerful nations welcoming its rise, Beijing had little incentive to upset a status quo that seemed to be getting better by the day.
Finally, China had little opportunity for conquest. Whereas its economic and diplomatic clout was surging, China’s military was clearly incapable of taking territories still under dispute, most of which were at sea. With a pathetic air force and navy prior to the 2000s, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have amounted to a “million-man swim,” and a naval clash with Japan’s advanced forces might have been over in a matter of hours. Most importantly, the United States could be expected to crush Chinese aggression in maritime Asia. Having watched U.S. forces decimate the Iraqi military in the Gulf War, Chinese leaders were inclined to embrace Deng’s maxim to hide their light and bide their time.
Today’s China is done hiding and biding. Instead, it is churning out warships and missiles faster than any country since World War II. Chinese planes and warships simulate attacks on Taiwanese and U.S. targets. Asian sea lanes are dotted with Chinese military outposts and brimming with Chinese coast guard and fishing vessels that brazenly shove neighbors out of areas claimed by Beijing. Meanwhile, China is abetting Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine and massing forces on the Sino-Indian border.
One reason China has become more combative is because it can. China’s inflation-adjusted military budget expanded tenfold between 1990 and 2020. Beijing now outspends every other country in Asia combined. It wields the world’s largest ballistic missile force and navy. By the end of this decade, its nuclear arsenal could rival Washington’s. With conventional missiles capable of pulverizing U.S. bases on Okinawa—the only ones within 500 miles of Taiwan—it is no longer clear that the Pentagon could immediately respond to, let alone defeat, a Chinese assault on Taiwan. Historically, the United States has fallen back on its manufacturing prowess to outproduce adversaries in protracted wars. But now that China is the workshop of the world, Beijing might believe—correctly or not—that the military balance would shift further in its favor the longer a war continues.
China also has growing motives for war as territorial disputes intensify.
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