On Wednesday, we talked about the Israel Hamas war and the intense negotiations for the release of more hostages. Meanwhile, Russia's war in Ukraine is heading toward another brutal winter with no end in sight. Behind the scenes in Washington, though, it's China's military that's increasingly on the minds of leaders at the Pentagon and State Department. Of particular concern to the US the possibility that China might one day launch a military invasion of Taiwan.
China has carried out what it says is a mock air blockade of Taiwan using jets carrying live ammunition, in the latest escalation of tensions in the South China.
Sea by Bloomberg's Peter Martin reports that despite the billions of dollars China has spent building advanced weapons and modernizing its forces, there are doubts at the most senior levels of China's military and government that the People's Liberation Army is ready for battle.
Skimping has undertaken an extraordinarily wide ranging set of reforms aims at modernizing the PLA, but there's every sign that he's dissatisfied with how far the effort has gotten.
I'm West Kasova today on the big take just how mighty is China's military Peter. The world's attention lately has been on the war between Israel and Hamas and at the same time the long ongoing or in Ukraine. Why are you taking this deep close look at China's military capability now?
Well, I think there are a couple of things. I think one is that you get the sense when you talk to senior US officials that they know the long game is in East Asia. I think the other thing that emerges from both of those conflicts is that these things can come out of nowhere. So the war in the Middle East at the moment was something which took Israeli intelligence by surprise and took the US government by surprise.
Putin's decision to invade Ukraine is something that the intelligence agencies did know before, but certainly that the Biden administration wasn't planning or having to deal with.
And so, as you say, inside the US military and intelligence establishment, this is something that they're concentrating on.
If it was up to them, this is all they will concentrate on. So Pentagon leaders walk around saying that the PLA the People's Liberation Army. China's military is what they say is the pacing challenge. That phrase is a little bit sort of stodgy and uncomfortable, but it does really relay the sense of urgency that they have about
China's rising threat. I think the issue that worries Pentagon planners most is a Taiwan scenario, the possibility that China could at some point try to invade the democratically governed island of Taiwan. And for Chinese leaders this is their top priority. They've described this as something that's central to their plan for national rejuvenation.
And Pete remind us what is the nature of the conflict between China and Taiwan.
So, Taiwan is a democratically governed island of about twenty million people off the coast of China. It's been ruled by parties other than Beijing for most of the last century. But the Communist Party leadership in China believes very firmly that it is a breakaway province and should once again return to the fold of the motherland.
And of course Taiwan's government is opposed to reuniting.
Yeah very much though and increasingly the Taiwanese public doesn't want to reunify with China.
And over the years, we've seen any number of times when tension between China and Taiwan, and tension between China and the US about Taiwan has risen sharply and then fallen in And there seems to be a concern right now that it's on the uptick again.
That's exactly right, partly because I think Beijing believes that their chances of persuading the Taiwan these people that they should quote unquote return to China is diminishing, and their confidence in their own military abilities is at the same time increasing.
And your story really takes a look at this possibility, no matter how remote, at the moment, that China may choose to take military action against Taiwan, And which you look at in the story is how capable is China's military? So maybe tell us about China's military capability.
So this is really one of the big unknown questions when it comes to the US's competition with China. I don't think anyone doubts that the People's Liberation Army has made incredible progress over the last two or three decades. So if you look at the raw numbers, the PLA looks almost invincible. China has two million active duty troops compared to about one point three million in the US.
It has a three hundred and fifty ship navy, giving it the biggest navy in the world, and it has the third largest aviation force in the world with about two eight hundred planes. What's even more concerning from Washington's perspective is that China's military capability is increasingly modernized. They have an extraordinarily well equipped rocket force, which is capable
of taking out US ships and surface vessels. They have a capable fourth generation aircraft, and they have a space force and cyber capability which is growing day by day. The question comes when you look at whether China would be able to use all of these things together to achieve something like an amphibious landing on Taiwan or a peer to peer war with the US.
But you kind of asked this basic question, is China actually prepared to fight? Can they effectively use all of these assets if the time came right?
And I think the truth is that they don't know, and leaders in Washington don't know. The Chinese military hasn't fought a major conflict since nineteen seventy nine, when it fought a brief and largely unknown and pretty punishing war against Vietnam. Since then, most of the officers who took part in that campaign, or even the junior people, have retired, which means that virtually no one in the senior ranks
of Chinese military has combat experience. So that's one of the big worries that kind of gets the Chinese leaders.
Pete, You right, that the US is conducting wargames where they try to imagine various scenarios of how a China invasion of Taiwan might play out. What exactly are they looking at?
They're trying to assess what are the PLA and the US military's relative strengths and weaknesses. So if China were to invade, for example, would it be able to land troops on the beach, would it then be able to supply them with the logistics that they need for a sustained campaign on the island. How well would its air force hold up overhead? How capable would its submarines be
of deterring US involvement. All of these things go together in an incredibly complex picture which is very very challenging to pull off.
And when they're doing these war games, what are the scenarios? How do they think China might choose to go about taking over Taiwan with military force.
There are a few different scenarios that worry US planners. I think the most ambitious effort that China could undertake would be an amphibious landing on the island, which is where you use landing vessels kind of like DDA to put troops ashore and then to push on and conquer a territory. That's extremely difficult. There are others which fall short of that, which are in some ways more worrying. A naval blockade of the island, for example, could be
very very difficult. And then there are scenarios outside of Taiwan which worry US military leaders. There's the possibility of a clash with the US in the South China Sea, where China has extremely expansive claims to territory, or that's the possibility of an unintended clash when interset between two aircraft, for example, leading to an inadvertent, unintended war.
And we've seen those sorts of close calls happen over the years in the South China Sea. Now we're starting to see a rising conflict between China and the US over the Philippines.
Yeah, that's exactly right. These incidents have been on the rise. It's something that Pentagon leaders have been warning about publicly and especially during attention to the fact that the communication channels between the two militaries are very very weak, which means that there's the possibility that an inadvertent clash could spiral into something much larger at very short notice.
During the Cold War and even for many years after, the US and the Soviet Union and then Russia had what they called these deconfliction lines, which allowed the two countries to communicate quickly in a time of christ.
Right, and that's something that's really lacking at the moment in US China relations. China has tended to view any contact between the two militaries as kind of a goody that it can happen out or rescind according to whether it's happy with the US or not. The US says that that's a dangerous stance, but it's nevertheless one that
Beijing's taken. It's kind of interesting. If you talk to Pentagon leaders, they say they'd like to get to the stage where the US was with the Soviet Union after the Keep and Missile crisis, but ideally without a scare threatens to destroy mankind in the meantime.
When we come back, why Hi Jinping is the toughest critic of China's military readiness peep you spell out how the US military and intelligence establishment is assessing China's military capability, but you write that within China there is a very deep concern about its own military capabilities.
One of the best ways to look at this from China's perspective is to delve into the speeches of Chinese leaders, especially She Jinping, but also into people's liberation army publications. They're turgid, their hard work, they're sleep inducing, but they're incredibly rich and rewarding. If you take the time to go through them, and She's speeches, I think give the
clearest picture of all. And you know, it tends out that actually the harshest and most unforgiving critic of China's military is China's President she Jinping, who is at the same time head of the country's armed forces.
And when you look at these criticisms that she has issued of the military, is he actually saying.
I'll give you a sample from twenty fifteen, a phrase that he called the five cannots. She Jimping said that PLA officers are unable to effectively judge situations. They're incapable of understanding authorities intentions, they struggle to make operational decisions, they have difficulty deploying troops, and they experience problems when dealing with unexpected situations. So that's effectively everything you would
need to perform effectively in combat. Xi Jinping says that his officers are lacking in pete.
These five cannot like, they cannot do these things. According to Xi Jinping, is just one of the many sort of catchphrases that he's used in leveling criticisms at the military. What are some of the others.
Yeah, so this is like a favorite way that she uses to communicate with the Chinese bureaucracy, these sort of damning indictments of what it's not capable of doing. So you've got the five connats, you have the two big gaps, the five excesses, the four bad styles. All of these
things have been directed toward China's military. One that particularly concerns him, I think is what he dubs the peace disease, which is this idea that China's military has not fought in combat for a long long time and may prove incapable of doing so.
And why does he think that the military isn't capable? Do they conduct war exercises the way most armies do to test their readiness.
I think that there are a few different things. One of them centers on the ability to conduct what are called joint operations, which is where you have different parts of a military working together. It's something that the US spent decades working on after the failures of the Vietnam War and didn't really perfect until maybe the mid nineties or even early two thousands. She is acutely aware that
China's forces struggle to do this. It's only recently introduced the joint command structure, but it's very early on in the implementation of that process. But it's absolutely something that would be necessary if you were to do something like, say, invade Taiwan with amphibious forces, using naval vessels, using cyber capabilities and air force overhead. That's one of the really pressing challenges.
And pte Jijinpink's criticism of the military isn't justin speeches in on paper. He's actually taken action to shake up the top ranks of China's military.
Right Chikimpink has undertaken an extraordinarily wide ranging set of reforms aimed at modernizing the PLA. He has purged top offices from its ranks. He's ordered the military to continue its exit of for profit businesses. He's reduced the number of PLA ground forces in large part because he doesn't think they would be very useful in any scenario that China's actually likely to find itself in. And he's also brought on board a whole range of new capabilities, from
cyber warfare to outer space capabilities. So he's undertaken this wide ranging set of reforms to modernize the PLA, but there's every sign that he's dissatisfied with how far the effort has gotten. So the suorrest sign of that is the mysterious disappearance of China's Defense Minister Leishalloo over the summer, someone who was handpicked by Shejinping to lead the country's defense ministry and shortly after taking office found himself purged.
We've also seen in the last year turmoil inside the PLA Rocket Forces, which in some ways are the crown jewel of China's military, and a continued anti corruption campaign right through the ranks of China's military, which is an effort that she Jinping began a decade ago, where he still clearly is unhappy with the progress that's been made. So I think those things speak to the degree of
his concern about the state of the PLA. I think it's also really important to put yourselves in the shoes of a Chinese military officer or an enlisted member of the Chinese military and think about what does it mean to have your boss removed, purges through the ranks above you absolutely no idea who you're supposed to be loyal to, whether your current or past associations could get you in trouble,
land you in jail. These things are absolutely lethal to the effectiveness of bureaucracies, and it's something that at the moment is endemic to China's political system and especially to its military. You also have this shortcoming which in many ways is baked into the way that China's political system works. It's an incredibly top down political system, and the PLA is an incredibly top down institution even for a military and that's something which is kind of a necessary part
of the way that it's designed. It is not China's national army. It is technically the armed branch of the Chinese Communist Party, and that's who it answers to, So that makes it very, very different to most military forces in the world. It's something that puts Si Jinping in
an incredible position of authority. But it's also something which means that the Communist Party, which always has an eye on whether or not it's going to be able to stay in power for the long term, is constantly looking at its troops and thinking how loyal are they to our system? And it has a bunch of ways that it enforces that which I think that US service members,
for example, would find pretty alien. One of them is the political commissar system, which means that all military commanders are kind of shadowed by a Communist Party boss who kind of second guesses and has a say in all military decisions. And you can imagine how on the battlefield that might be something that was really disorientating and confusing.
You also have the fact that all service members have a political dossier written about them to evaluate their loyalty to the system, and this is something which has not really played out in combat for a long long time. But when you talk to some of the dozens of experts who exist in Washington, it's something that they think
would be really, really crucial. So I talked to Andrew Scobell, for example, from the US Institute of Peace, and he said that when it comes to command and control, China is very much focused more on the control aspect rather than the command, and that's something which could really hamper it in battle.
I'll add here that officials at China's defense industry didn't respond to Bloomberg's request for comment on the PLA's readiness and its capabilities. And while China has repeatedly said it isn't planning to invade Taiwan, the government doesn't rule it out. Pete.
You report that these questions about China's military readiness have taken on new urgency in Beijing as China sees what's happening to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which the Russians and even the US thought would probably end pretty quickly and yet has gone on for many, many months with no end in sight.
This is something that US intelligence leaders have addressed very directly. CIA Director Bill Burns has talked about how Xi Jinping has probably looked at the performance of Russian troops in Ukraine and it's given him pause about his own ability to conduct operations in Taiwana against the US. And it is really important actually to remember the psychologically for the Chinese military, the Soviet Union and then Russia has always been there is kind of this big, powerful figure that
has more advanced technology and needs to be emulated. The Russian military has experience fighting in Syria, in Chechnya, in Ukraine, something that Chinese troops lack, as we've talked about, and yet they found themselves caught short when it came to their ability to combine to operations in Ukraine.
Also, the structure of China's military, as you described as being very top down, this has also been one of the big Achilles heels for Russia, which is a top down structure and didn't have the ability to respond quickly on the battlefield, whereas Ukraine's army has been very innovative in trying to fight off a superior force. Right.
One of the things which US military leaders believe is critical to modern warfare is the ability for lower levels of military command to take decisions on the fly. There was talk in the two thousands about something called the strategic corporal, the idea that someone at that lower level would really be able to take the initiative. That is absolutely antithetical to the way that the Chinese and Russian political systems work. They have a built in preference for
not trusting their own people. They know that they need to overcome that, but at the same time, there's almost no sign that they're going to be able to do it.
After the break, would the US come to Taiwan's defense? You've spelled out all the different ways that China's president is dissatisfied with the military. Are they now taking steps to fix all of these problems that tap down culture the questions about their inability to fight?
I think that China's leadership since the beginning of Si Jimping's term as president, has been focused on doing this, and they are making progress on all of these fronts. Question is has it gone far enough and do they have the capabilities to achieve the goals that they're looking to achieve. I think the truth is that they have made progress on almost all of these fronts. The PLA is continuing to modernize at a very impressive pace. It's
hardware continues to get better. They're trying to address things like their ability to do joint warfare and combined operations, and they're getting there slowly and surely. But the truth is, and I talked to John Culver, who spent thirty five years as the CIA's lead analyst of the People's liberation at ME and he said, no one knows how ready they are or how capable they are. It's a huge unknown.
And Pete, what about Taiwan's capability? Would they be able to withstand a military attack from China for any length of time?
Yeah, so I think it's fair to say it would be a pretty substantial mismatch in capabilities. Taiwan has been moving in a direction that the US has been pushing for a long time, which is to acquire what they call asymmetric abilities, are kind of things like sea mines or defenses on beaches that would keep the PLA out. That's been a slow process, and Taiwan is not where it needs to be. In short, the US would need to get involved if the island stood a chance of
defending itself. Taiwan has fewer than two hundred thousand full time troops, so that's obviously a far smaller numbered in China, and I think it's fair to say they would be very unmatched in a fight.
And of course that's what Russia thought about Ukraine, and yet just resolve and ingenuity seems to have been able to beat them back. Is that irrelevant comparison.
I think it's relevant in so far as an invasion would be incredibly challenging for China. But I think that the really difficult part for them would be landing on Taiwanese beaches and then maintaining and supplying those beachheads, which is where a naval battle would come in.
In Washington, a lot of people are talking about the possibility of a military invasion happening in twenty seven, But is there a reason to put a lot of faith in that date.
I think that there are really important reasons to be cautious about any number like that. What's really important to understand is that there are a lot of people who would like more of the US defense budget, and as a result of that, there's an incentive for folks to put dates out there which allow them to justify getting more money or different types of equipment to galvanize Congress into action. So there's a lot of politics behind any
number that's put out there. The twenty twenty seven date has kind of taken on a life of its own. It's something which has now been clarified by the intelligence community, and they say that they have information that she Jimping wants his forces to be capable of taking Taiwan in twenty twenty seven, but they don't have evidence that he
has a plan to do that. I think the thing that really worries leaders here, though, is less a specific piece of intelligence which talks about this or that date, but a general sense that She Jimping's appetite for risk is vastly greater than his predecessors, and that makes it very difficult to predict the way that he might act
next year, five years out, or a decade out. And it's something which makes Washington's leaders very self conscious when they think of how they're performing in Ukraine, or in the Middle East, or with a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Is this something that she jinping is going to look at and assess how likely the US would be to intervene and say a Taiwan crisis and PTE.
That really is the big question. Is there an appetite in the US for a military confrontation with China.
This is something where US officials tie themselves in not trying to answer because President Biden's words in many ways conflict with the official policy. The ofvisual policy is that there is one China, that Taiwan is not an independent nation, and that whether or not the US would intervene to aid Taiwan is something that's going to remain ambiguous, deliberately ambiguous. President Biden, on the other hand, has talked multiple times in public about how the US would come to Taiwan's aid.
Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that, Yes, you are. That's a commitment we made.
So this is something which remains kind of unanswered.
You know.
I think that as Xi Jinping looks at that question, he's likely to judge that there's very low appetite. The US withdrew from Afghanistan. It has supported Ukraine with security assistance, but has been absolutely clear that it's going to put no troops on the ground. Partly because Putin has nuclear weapons, and Xi Jinping therefore has decided to continue increasing his
own force of nuclear weapons. I think that when Chi Jinping looks at the United States, and I've talked to senior US officials about this, there's this belief that he probably has, which is that this is a tired power which is risk averse and doesn't want to put its
troops in harm's way. I think he looks at things like Obama's failure to deliver on the Red Line in Syria, the actions taken by the West after Putin's partial invasion of Ukraine in twenty fourteen, the response of Western countries to his encroachments in Hong Kong, which in many ways took the world by surprise. He looks at all of these things as signs that America doesn't have the stomach for the kind of fight that it would need to
engage with China over the Taiwan question. And all of that begs the question, maybe the PLA will never get to a stage where it's the equal of the US military, But if it can get to a point where it can deliver enough damage, enough lethality that it deters the US from fighting, then maybe that'll never be put to the test.
And this is something that we've seen for years that in Washington there was this very loud in public concern about a possible invasion of Taiwan, but China experts always said there's a very remote possibility because it would be such a costly war.
Yeah, that's exactly right. You'd be thinking of potentially tens of thousands of young Chinese people sent into combat, risking their lives, a huge impact on China's economy and on the global economy that would have the potential to imperil Chinese growth. I think that a full scale invasion of Taiwan is something that we would likely see coming for quite a long time. It would involve massive mobilization of China's economy, a build up of troops off the coast
of Taiwan. It's not something that could happen overnight. I think what worries people in Washington more is something short of that, say, an invasion of one of the offshore islands that Taiwan administers but are closer to China. Something like preemptive air strikes or the initiation of a blockade. None of those things are easy, but they could happen much more quickly and arguably could be pulled off more easily by the PLA, and so I think those things
are likely front of mind for people here. I think the thing that really gives China analysts and senior US officials pause is the idea that she Jimping is a risk taker and you never quite know what he's going to do next. I think very few people thought at the outset of his term that he would end up abolishing term limits for the Chinese presidency, that he would respond to the situation in Shinjag in the way that he has, that he would take the kind of action
against Hong Kong that he has. So he's someone who has an appetite for risk, and so the idea that maybe maybe he'll take that chance here it gives great cause for concern. And that's exactly why there is so much attention on what China is doing and on what the US is doing to prepare for any eventuality.
Pete, thank you always great to tag to you.
Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to.
Us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio for more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Sam Gabauer produced this episode. Filde Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by
Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back on Monday with another Big Take. Have a great weekend.