Earlier this month, the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had travelled over a large swath of North America. According to the Biden Administration, the balloon was “part of a larger Chinese surveillance-balloon program,” which the White House argued had violated the sovereignty of nations all over the world. The Chinese government accused the U.S. of overreacting, and signalled that it views the response as a sign of American decline. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled a diplomatic trip to China that was to include meetings with high-level officials, including President Xi Jinping, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader in a generation. (U.S. and Canadian authorities have shot down several more objects flying over the two countries in recent days, but there is no evidence of any connection between those objects and the Chinese balloon.)
To talk about China’s military strategy, and the future of U.S.-China relations, I recently spoke by phone with M. Taylor Fravel, a professor of political science at M.I.T. and the director of its Security Studies Program. He is also the author of “Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy Since 1949.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how China has modernized its military during the past twenty-five years, how Xi has taken control of military policy, and why the diplomatic fallout from the balloon incident may be much more dangerous than the usual spy games.
There has been a lot of analysis indicating that Xi has brought about a new era in Chinese politics. Has China also entered a new military era?
In the past decade, the Chinese military has definitely entered a new era, but it reflects a series of decisions made earlier. In the late nineties, in the aftermath of the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy [in Belgrade], during the air war there, a decision was made to modernize the Chinese military and completely reinvest in all platforms, across all systems. That kicked off well before Xi Jinping became General Secretary and chairman of the Central Military Commission. That dedication to building a modern military preceded Xi, but it has manifested on Xi’s watch, so to speak. We’re seeing how the ground forces, the rocket forces, the Navy, the Air Force, etc., are now, by and large, field-modern, capable platforms that simply didn’t exist two decades ago.
Moreover, halfway through Xi Jinping’s tenure, an effort was made to significantly reorganize the People’s Liberation Army (P.L.A.). It was the most significant organizational change to the P.L.A. since the nineteen-fifties. It basically shattered the general-staff system, which was anchored around four main departments, and set up a bunch of smaller departments and offices under the Central Military Commission itself. That was intended to better enable the P.L.A. to use all this hardware that had been developed, and principally to enhance its ability to be able to execute complex front operations that would combine elements from the different services.
Why do you think the bombing in Kosovo had this effect? Are the changes that you’re describing more circumstantial or ideological?
I guess I’m wondering what you mean by ideological. Not to be a pedantic professor . . .
I’m wondering whether the changes were brought about defensively, because of something that happened, or whether it was part of an ideological push to have a more forward-leaning posture—that it was going to occur regardless of circumstances.
It’s a bit of both. The air war on Kosovo was a real turning point for the P.L.A., because it led them to debate whether China would still exist in an era of peace and development, in which it would not have to prepare for the possibility of major armed conflict, and how hostile the United States might be to Chinese interests, given that this was an attack on a piece of sovereign Chinese territory. Even though the strike was unintentional and accidental, it nevertheless sparked this debate. But there’s an even broader context here.
China has always seen itself as a great power, and great powers want great militaries. Having a modern, capable military has been a long-standing ambition of multiple Chinese leaders, arguably going back even to the fifties, but certainly in the post-Cold War period. If we look at Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao (perhaps to a lesser extent), and Xi Jinping, they’ve all been strong advocates for modernizing the P.L.A., but that’s been a real challenge. At the end of the Cold War, the P.L.A. used very outdated equipment—technology from the sixties and seventies. It had a fairly low degree of mechanization of its ground forces. It did not have any fourth-generation fighter aircraft. It did not really have a great surface fleet. And, when the Gulf War happened, I think Chinese military leaders, as well as Chinese civilian leaders, realized that something quite profound was changing in how states were going to fight in the future.
That led them to change their strategy, in 1993, which meant pursuing this ability to be able to conduct joint operations, because they realized that’s what the United States was doing in the Gulf War. You also had a Taiwan Strait crisis in the mid-nineties, which I think many people focus on, or emphasize as the turning point in P.L.A. modernization. [In 1995 and 1996, China fired missiles around Taiwan in response to concerns that the island might declare independence; the United States responded by sending warships to the area.] Certainly, it was a very important event. I focus on the air war in Kosovo only because I think it helps clarify whatever concerns China might have had in the mid-nineties about the need to have a strong and independent military, in order to defend what China views as its interests.
By that point, of course, the United States was seen as potentially more hostile to China than it was at the end of the Cold War. That further reinforced this need to have a strong military, not because China is warlike and wants to go out and fight lots of wars but, rather, because it would backstop China’s diplomacy. It would allow China to use the threat of military force to advance its political interests, such as using a threat of an invasion or attack on Taiwan in order to deter Taiwanese independence, and so forth. And so the pieces fell in place by the late nineties. By then, China was even wealthier than it was at the beginning of that decade, and was thus able to devote even more resources to modernizing its armed forces. I wouldn’t call that ideological, necessarily. I think it’s a long-term secular trend across different generations of leaders in China to pursue this goal.
You mentioned that the military could be used to serve political objectives, but has the modernization of the P.L.A. driven Chinese international behavior in some way? I’m curious how you see the cause and effect there.
In the last five years, China, with a much more modern military, has many more options that it can draw from when it’s thinking about how to advance its interests. It can use displays of force to much greater effect than before. Ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, I don’t think we would see China run almost daily incursions into the air-defense-identification zone around Taiwan, which clearly are intended largely to have a political effect, in terms of underscoring China’s commitment to unification and efforts to deter independence. You see Chinese naval vessels circumnavigate the Japanese home islands as a way of demonstrating the country’s place in the region. And then you see more direct uses of force, such as the deployments along the border of India in the spring and summer of 2020.
When you have a more capable military, there’s a lot more you can do. You can also use it to elevate your status by conducting port calls on all continents around the world, by conducting joint exercises with not only countries in your home region, in East Asia, but also in other regions around the world. You can use it to signify a closer relationship with Russia by conducting joint exercises with them. Military modernization gives policymakers and decision-makers more tools with which to pursue their state’s interest.
That’s an interesting answer. Does that also come back to my first question about Xi—
Yes.
It seems that he’s using the tools of modernization to support a more expansive foreign policy.
Yeah. He’s using the P.L.A. more frequently, in more places, at the same time, than any other Chinese leader.
How do you understand the Chinese military as a political actor within China? The word we often hear about Xi is “centralization.” How does the military fit with that notion, and is that a change from the way that the Chinese military has operated with the country’s previous leaders?
Mao and Deng were veterans of the Chinese Civil War that brought the Chinese Communist Party [C.C.P.] to power. And so they had a great deal of credibility with the military and had basically pretty good relations, and a pretty high level of control—with the caveat that, in China, it’s a huge bureaucracy, so there’s always going to be a lack of control. It’s a difficult country to govern and control.
Now, the successor leaders, who were not veterans of the Civil War, have had to work harder to establish a working relationship with the high command of the P.L.A. But it’s very important to stress that the P.L.A. is a Party Army, not a national Army, which means that it’s governed by the Central Military Commission. The Central Military Commission is chaired by the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. A Party Army is completely different from a military that you would find in any democracy, which would be beholden to the constitution of the country and whatever governance procedures a particular constitution puts in place. Its structure is also different. It’s penetrated by the Party at many levels.
In China, you have Party committees within ministries, within state-owned enterprises, and of course throughout the entire system of governance for provinces, all the way down to cities and townships. You also have Party committees within military organizations. This means that, whenever there is a political campaign, it will usually play out in the military, too. In the first five years of Xi’s rule, the so-called anti-corruption period, the military did not come out unscathed. Two former vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission—in other words, the two highest-ranking officers of the P.L.A. [other than Xi]—were caught up in that anti-corruption drive and thrown out of the Party, which was very rare.
There’s a fair amount of delegation to the P.L.A. in “normal” times, because, after all, the Party wants to have a good military. But, whenever it might appear that the P.L.A. could pose a challenge to top Party leaders in any way, there has often been a move to bring it under control. And, certainly, Xi Jinping came into office wanting to increase his control over the military. Of course, there were rumors that were related to Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang, and everything around Xi Jinping’s accession to office in 2012. That may have also made him want to really bring the military leadership under his control.
Just to be clear, Bo Xilai was once considered Xi’s top rival in the Party, and Xi got rid of him in the anti-corruption drive. What’s the connection to the military, though?
Zhou Yongkang was an outgoing member of the Politburo Standing Committee, in charge of law and order. He had reported links to Bo Xilai, and they had links to members of the P.L.A. The main point is that there was concern about the potential loyalty of the P.L.A, and Xi wanted to remove any doubt that it was very much a Party Army, and ultimately loyal to the Party and loyal to him as the General Secretary of the Party. And another reflection of the power he was able to generate over the P.L.A. were these reforms that I mentioned earlier. Going back to 1949, and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the P.L.A. has always been dominated by the ground forces, because they achieved the victory in the Civil War that brought the C.C.P. to power. They were the main fighting force in the Korean War, against the United States. And so they’ve always exerted a tremendous amount of influence over the way that the P.L.A. was organized.
And what Xi Jinping did in 2015 and 2016 was significantly downgrade the role of the ground forces, such that organizationally they were equivalent to all of the other services. These reforms placed the ground forces at the same level bureaucratically and organizationally as the Navy, the Air Force, and the Rocket Force. Given how much resistance there had been to reorganizing the P.L.A. to conduct joint operations, dating back to the early nineties, the fact that Xi Jinping was able to do this against presumed resistance from the largest vested-interest group within the P.L.A., the ground force, demonstrates the degree to which Xi has been able to gain control or to exercise control over the P.L.A.
Well, we’ve talked for more than twenty minutes now without mentioning this balloon, and that was intentional, but—
Good.
I should just ask what you’ve made of this story.
Intelligence collection and surveillance is something that states do, but usually when they’re over another country they do it from outer space, from satellites, and not from something that would violate national airspace, as this balloon did. I was struck by the fact that China did conduct a surveillance-and-reconnaissance operation, or some other kind of intelligence-gathering operation, over American airspace, because of the implications that it would have for U.S. perceptions of China and China’s future intentions. We all know that surveillance is going on overhead by satellite. There’s no surprise there. We all know that countries spy on each other. The spying itself is not a surprise.
But what was really was surprising, or what caused me to scratch my head, is: wow, that is violating the principle of sovereignty that underpins so much of China’s security concerns in East Asia, whether it’s Taiwan, the South China Sea, American navigation operations in the South China Sea, and so forth. No. 2, my gut instinct was that this was no doubt part of a potentially long-standing Chinese intelligence-collection program, but that the program itself was probably very poorly coördinated, perhaps not just within the P.L.A. but between the P.L.A. and other parts of the Party state.
That poor coördination probably extends to the Foreign Ministry, and essentially the senior leadership, in that it’s not clear to me that Xi Jinping would’ve wanted this balloon to fly over the United States at precisely the moment when he was seeking to lower the temperature in ties with the United States, which would’ve taken place had Secretary of State Blinken gone ahead with his visit. Although we don’t know, because China has not been terribly transparent about this, the incident seems to reflect these coördination problems one has in large bureaucracies. China’s certainly not immune to that problem, like so many other states.
What have you made of the various responses?
On the American side, it reflects how domestic politics and concerns about China may outweigh the single significance of the incident. It’s going to attract a great deal of attention from the United States, certainly: highlighting China’s transgressions in terms of sovereignty, focussing on a broader challenge that China may pose to the United States in a variety of different domains.
There’s going to be a lot of public discussion about the balloons. There are going to be demands for answers about why we didn’t track them earlier, why we didn’t know about them earlier, and so forth. And, of course, this is all going to challenge China’s initial explanation, which was that it was a civilian airship conducting meteorological research. And so I think China’s going to double down on its own perception of its innocence here, and you’re going to see, I think, debate and discussion of the balloon take on a life of its own that may exceed the significance of the actual event.
It sounds like you think there may be a danger in overreacting to this. Is that accurate?
Well, I think the danger would be if the focus on the balloon itself significantly sets back or prevents what is the absolute pure need for the two countries to find a modus vivendi. Blinken’s visit, at least, was perhaps the first step of what would be a very long process to do that, but it seems that the two countries are groping for a framework with which to govern their ties. This is important, given their respective sizes and capacities, not to mention the degree to which we’re still quite dependent upon each other in the economic realm. I think the balloon will become a distraction from what is a larger and more important strategic issue between the two countries.
How do you view the American response to China’s military modernization?
Depending on who you talk to, China is either the pacing challenge or the pacing threat. It’s the country around which, at least in principle, U.S. modernization and plans are being oriented. What that means is that there’s going to be a much greater focus on competing with China in the military domain, to maximize U.S. leverage and minimize U.S. vulnerability. But, of course, China has a say in how it responds to the actions that the United States is taking in response to Chinese modernization. It will almost certainly seek to offset those, which means that, in the military domain, you’re quite likely to see a greater spiral of tensions and instability, which runs the risk of a real crisis between the two countries. If you look at how a balloon was handled, one has to ask: How are the two countries prepared to handle an actual military fight? ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of the Chinese Embassy bombed during the war.