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Understanding the China threat requires analysts to see through the deception that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advances to disguise its ambitions. In this, they have been remarkably successful, as Deng Xiaoping intended when he devised his “hide and bide” strategy of minimizing China’s power and tremendous achievements to international audiences while growing stronger. China’s power grew from a fraction of the global economy to about 20 percent today. Its military grew from a small, unprofessional force to one that competes with the U.S. military, from space to cyber warfare and from advanced missile technology to blue-water naval competition.
Remarkably, as this occurred, there was no balancing against China’s rise. Year by year, China grew more powerful and no state sought to arrest it, not even the United States. Indeed, just the opposite happened: The West supported China’s growth, providing investment and trade, welcoming it into the World Trade Organization, permitting it to raise capital on Wall Street, and transferring technology by legal and illegal means — all of which turned China into the powerhouse it is today. There are many in the engagement school of thought who still seek to aid China’s rise or to characterize China as not an existential threat to the U.S. But those who think this way are not perceiving the reality of the CCP; they are threat-deflating. This only benefits the world’s most powerful and most odious dictatorship.
The Chinese Communist Party is not a defensive power or a tolerant “live and let live” wallflower of a state, innocently seeking to make its way against the gale-force headwinds of a hostile world arrayed against it. The CCP portrays itself as the victim, never the perpetrator. But in reality it is determined to make China the world’s dominant state. That is a heady ambition, and Beijing’s effort to realize it promises to provide considerable shocks to the U.S., its allies, and world politics as it has been defined for the last generation.
The struggle is here and now.
