Chinese military strategists will have their work cut out for them in the wake of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, according to a senior State Department official.
“This newly muscular and aggressive approach is going to make the defense minister’s job a lot harder,” David Stilwell, who leads the East Asian and Pacific Affairs bureau, told reporters.
That may be an optimistic assessment, from an American perspective, but Chinese communist officials are striking a bellicose note as the coronavirus pandemic strains their diplomatic ties with key U.S. allies. The Chinese Foreign Ministry led this charge as the virus paralyzed Western societies, with so-called “wolf warrior” diplomats stoking disinformation campaigns, and now, Chinese military leaders are joining their truculent ranks.
“The Sino-US strategic confrontation has entered a period of high risk,” Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said during the National People’s Congress, the regime’s nominal legislature. “We must strengthen our fighting spirit, be daring to fight and be good at fighting, and use fighting to promote stability.”
Such a program would depart from China’s tradition of avoiding direct military conflict in the last several decades when the party consolidated power and geopolitical influence through economic growth. Wei’s exhortation came at the same conference in which Chinese officials unveiled their plan to tighten control over Hong Kong, a former British colony that has had an arms-length relationship with the mainland government despite Beijing’s sovereignty.
That maneuver has stirred unease in Taiwan, the island safe haven of the government overthrown during the Chinese communist revolution, which Beijing also claims. And Chinese forces are already in a standoff with India, as both militaries are fortifying their positions along the unofficial boundary of a disputed border region.
“That statement needs to be read as not only a warning to the Americans but also a veiled warning to New Delhi,” former Australian defense ministry adviser Patrick Buchan said of Wei’s posturing.
Wei’s linkage of combat and domestic stability evokes a potentially dangerous paradox of China’s emergence as an authoritarian rival to the United States.
“They feel both incredibly vulnerable, internally, and more confident in terms of their foreign policy,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Dan Blumenthal said. “It makes for a very messy challenge for the United States.”
Still, if Chinese communist officials continue to adopt a heavy-handed foreign policy, it could have the unintended consequence of helping U.S. officials assemble international coalitions to corral Beijing’s ambitions.
“In terms of just recognizing that the Chinese are bad actors, that’s going to be, I think, beneficial for us everywhere,” said retired Air Force Gen. Rob Spalding, a former Trump administration adviser at the Hudson Institute. “I like a China that’s aggressive. It’s a China that we know how to deal with.”
Stilwell expressed a similar hope in milder terms. “These actions they’re taking are going to have impact, and not just in — across the straits,” the senior State Department official said Wednesday. “It’s going to have impact in Southeast Asia, it’s going to have impact with its neighbor India, and others.”
