The 052D guided missile destroyer Taiyuan of the Chinese Communist Navy takes part in a naval parade in the waters off Qingdao, Shandong province, April 23, 2019.
The British government released its Comprehensive Assessment Report in the middle of this month, which covers foreign, defense and security policy assessment and identifies the Chinese Communist Party as one of its global adversaries. Some British media quoted experts’ analysis that although the CCP’s armaments seem to be very formidable, the specific performance of its military in combat may not be so.
According to The Telegraph, the Chinese Communist Party has invested heavily in military modernization, with its official defense budget more than doubling in the past decade to 1.355 trillion yuan in 2021. And according to analysts’ projections, its actual defense spending far exceeds the publicly reported amount.
In 2017, Communist Party leader Xi Jinping announced that by 2049, the Communist Party’s military would achieve the goal of being “world-class” and having the ability to supposedly win global wars.
In addition to direct military spending, the CCP has made significant investments in state-owned and private defense companies to acquire new technologies.
The CCP’s navy is now one of the largest in the world, with some 350 ships and submarines, including more than 130 surface combatants. 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 notes that the Communist Party’s military is not necessarily invincible. The Communist Party’s military faces major personnel challenges, difficulty recruiting, training and retaining professional soldiers, and faces a perceived decline in morale due to corruption, and they have not fought a war in more than 40 years.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China security policy expert at Stanford University and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington, D.C., think tank, said the Communist Party’s military in combat This is the “million-dollar question” of how the Chinese Communist Party’s military will actually perform in combat.
“In the U.S. Army, 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.” Mastro added that “in China, there’s a huge uncertainty – whether the troops will actually run toward the bullets, not away.”
Experts say 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. Many analysts believe the Communist Party’s international infrastructure investment program, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, could translate into global military leverage in the future.
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