China Now

source: The Times UK

authors: Michael Evans | Catherine Philp

China now our biggest military threat, says US

Beijing overtakes Russia as top Pentagon priority

The strength of China's forces and other activities by Beijing has thrust it to the top of America’s strategic rivals.

China presents the biggest military threat to the United States, according to a new strategic assessment by the Pentagon. The US has now formally promoted China to the top of a list of its most dangerous rivals.

Mark Esper, the US defence secretary, has ordered military chiefs to recalibrate training and operations to match Beijing’s capabilities. The military must make China “the pacing threat in all our schools, programmes and training,” he said in a message to Pentagon staff marking his first year in the role.

“We are now in an era of great power competition and China, then Russia, constitute our top strategic competitors,” he added. In the 2018 national defence strategy delivered by James Mattis, his predecessor, China and Russia were on equal footing as the “great power rivals” to the US.

The assessment comes as tensions between the US and China gather pace. These have been fuelled by competing narratives over trade, intellectual property theft and hacking, as well as Chinese influence campaigns, counterintelligence and Beijing’s growing military activities in the Pacific.

Congress has also passed sanctions on China over the repression of minority groups in Xinjiang and its crackdown in Hong Kong. The State Department has announced visa bans on Chinese officials involved in abuses in Tibet, prompting reciprocal bans by Beijing.

There are also tensions over China’s growing nuclear arsenal, with the Trump administration demanding Beijing join its talks with Moscow to forge a multilateral arms treaty. Beijing said the demands were a ruse for Washington to abandon the bilateral treaty but suggested it could take part if the US shrank its arsenal to the size of China’s, an offer President Trump would never accept.

In another sign of their growing co-operation, Russia and China announced that they had agreed to boost joint economic enterprises including in energy and civilian aircraft manufacture after President Xi and President Putin spoke by phone.

Christopher Wray, the FBI director, warned on Tuesday that China was “engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary” and presented “the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality”.


The economic damage wreaked by China’s intellectual property theft was “breathtaking”, he said and half of all counterintelligence investigations in the US involved China. “The stakes could not be higher,” he added.

Mr Esper said he had set up a special China strategy group to focus the Pentagon’s efforts on countering the growing threat from the Chinese military.

In the last year all existing Pentagon war plans for countering China have been reviewed and updated after previous simulations judged China to have the upper hand in in the Asia-Pacific because of its huge inventory of anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles.

The build-up of these missiles by the People’s Liberation Army is part of an “anti-access, area-denial” strategy to deter the US Navy from sailing into the region in the event of a crisis.

Two aircraft carriers, USS Nimitz and USS Ronald Reagan, are operating in the South China Sea, flying multiple fighter jet missions to underline America’s strike capabilities. A B-52H nuclear-capable bomber took part in exercises this week.

Mr Esper said the US military was now investing in “game-changing technologies”. These included hypersonic weapons capable of flying to targets at 20 times the speed of sound.

In an address to the Hudson Institute, the FBI’s Mr Wray warned that Chinese agents were using an anti-corruption programme called Operation Fox Hunt to pursue dissidents living overseas including in the US.

“China describes Fox Hunt as some kind of international anti-corruption campaign. It is not. Instead, Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by [President] Xi to target Chinese nationals who he sees as threats and who live outside of China across the world,” Mr Wray said. “We’re talking about political rivals, dissidents and critics seeking to expose China’s extensive human rights violations.”

Mr Wray said that the campaign was active in countries where Chinese dissidents had settled, believing they would be outside of Beijing’s reach. He told of one who was given the choice of returning to China or killing themselves.

He said: “When it couldn’t locate one Fox Hunt target, the Chinese government sent an emissary to visit the target’s family here in the US. The message they said to pass on: the target had two options, returned to China promptly or commit suicide.” Coercive tactics also include threats against family members back in China. “Use your imagination. You’re not going to be far off,” Mr Wray said.

Operation Fox Hunt was launched six years ago by China’s ministry of public security to track down “economic fugitives”, most of whom were corrupt former government officials.