The British media reported yesterday (March 29) that the Chinese Communist Party has invested heavily in modernizing its military, but experts say its actual combat power is hard to tell. Experts suggest that the West should focus more on the economic, political and diplomatic ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party than on its military might.
The Telegraph reported yesterday that the Communist Party’s official defense budget has more than doubled in the past decade, reaching 1.355 trillion yuan in 2021.
The newspaper noted that the Chinese Communist Navy is now one of the largest in the world, with about 350 ships and submarines. It has developed long-range precision cruise and ballistic missiles, early warning radars and air defense systems that allow it to dominate airspace as far away as the Pacific Ocean. It has also recently introduced hypersonic weapons designed to counter U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups.
But the report argues that the Chinese Communist Party’s military is not necessarily invincible. It faces major personnel challenges such as difficulty recruiting, training and retaining professional soldiers, corruption has decimated military morale, and the Communist army has not fought a war in more than 40 years.
The newspaper quoted experts as saying that the West should be more concerned about the CCP’s economic, political and diplomatic ambitions than the number of ships and tanks it can send.
Scholar: CCP’s Real Military Spending Far Exceeds Its Defense Budget But Does Not Equal Power
In his report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping called for the basic modernization of the national defense and military by 2035 and the comprehensive establishment of the military as a world-class army by the middle of this century.
How the Chinese Communist Party’s military will actually perform in combat is “an important but difficult question to answer,” according to a China security policy expert from Stanford University and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington, D.C., think tank. It’s “an important but difficult question to answer,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China security policy expert at Stanford University and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington, D.C., think tank.
“In the U.S. military, no U.S. officer would consider that orders might not be carried out —— If you tell your troops to charge a mountain, they will charge a mountain. In China, there’s a huge uncertainty – whether the troops will actually run toward the bullets, not away,” Mastro added.
Yao Cheng, a former lieutenant colonel in the Communist Party’s naval command, revealed earlier that Communist Party soldiers simply do not want to go to war and that there are serious internal problems. There are many deserters who are simply not capable of going to war because of the one-child policy.
Wen Zhao, a Canadian cultural scholar and famous self-publisher, has pointed out that the real military spending of the CCP far exceeds its defense budget. For example, most of the military research expenses do not enter the defense budget, but are included in the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the former Ministry of Space.
However, Wen Zhaoge also pointed out from another perspective that more military spending does not necessarily mean that the CCP’s military is powerful, because the input-output efficiency of the CCP’s military spending is very low in many aspects, such as domestic equipment, which costs more than similar foreign products, but the performance is much worse, especially in electronic equipment, such as aerospace, electronic information technology research institutes, its actual business capacity, product quality and the U.S. Several major arms dealers compared, the gap is huge.
A 2013 BBC article on the composition of the CCP’s military spending pointed out that foreign military procurement and the expenses for building aircraft carriers in those two years also did not come from the defense budget, but were earmarked.
According to a 2002 report by the U.S. Department of Defense, the CCP’s actual military spending that year was four times its nominal defense budget; in 2018, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden estimated that the CCP’s actual military spending was 1.4-1.5 times its defense budget; many other institutions believe that the CCP’s real military spending is two to three times its budget.
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