China is Militarizing—Will that Make War More Likely?

The global order is fracturing, with hot wars raging in Europe, the Middle East, and very nearly in South Asia, and cold wars escalating between the great powers. With mounting tensions in the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, and other contested hot spots, China’s leaders have their hands full dealing with the threat of war and are preparing its economy and society to ensure that the entire country can fight—and win—if called upon. But this process of militarization runs the risk of making war more likely.

The Birth and Rebirth of Chinese Militarization

The People’s Republic of China was born from war and spent its first three decades heavily militarized to defend from existential threats from the United States and Soviet Union. But when the country opened up and underwent economic reforms in the 1980s, it embarked on a far-reaching demilitarization that shifted resources overwhelmingly toward economic development.

Since Xi Jinping took office in 2012, national security has gradually once again overtaken economic development as the country’s foremost concern. Xi’s primary goal is to make China a global economic, innovation, and military power that could seriously challenge the United States for global dominance by mid-century.

A Changing Global Landscape

Great-power rivalry between China and the United States ramped up in the mid-to-late 2010s, with Washington imposing trade restrictions and technological controls to blunt China’s rapid rise as a techno-security power. Beijing responded by securitizing its economy, working to harden the resilience of its supply chains, strengthen innovation to lessen reliance on foreign technologies, and build up its internal market to diversify away from an export-dependent model.

These efforts picked up urgency in the 2020s, amid further deterioration of U.S.-China relations following the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, by 2019, Chinese military planners had begun to describe their fight to combat Taiwanese separatism as “becoming more acute,” signaling their intention to better prepare for a military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait.

The outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022 unleashed a global wave of military capacity building, and militarization sped up in China as a result. China took key lessons from Russian missteps in prosecuting the war. Russia, believing it would subdue Ukraine quickly, was not adequately prepared to fight a prolonged attritional conflict, and had to quickly militarize its economy and society after the initial invasion.

For Chinese policymakers, this demonstrated the need to militarize before a possible military conflict, rather than after the fact like Russia. This strategic shift was exemplified by Xi’s May 2023 call for China to engage in “extreme thinking,” which was received by the bureaucracy as a command to prepare in advance for a military contingency.

What Chinese Militarization Looks Like

While China’s militarization under Xi is opaque and still in its infancy, there are conspicuous clues that it is happening. Perhaps the most prominent has been the elevation of defense industry leadership to the top of the country’s political and bureaucratic establishments. Officials who have served in the defense industry now make up around a fifth of the leadership lineups in the full Politburo and at the provincial party secretary and governor level, their highest proportion of representation in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

This blurring of the boundaries between the defense and civilian sectors is part of Xi’s broader policy approach of National Strategic Integration, which aims to intertwine the military and nonmilitary sectors across the economic and technology realms. Among its objectives are bolstering the defense science, technology, and industrial base—which now appears to be operating at or close to a wartime pace—and meeting the PLA’s goal of significantly increasing its strategic defense and deterrence capabilities by its centenary in 2027. Outside analysts consider this date to be when the PLA is required to be ready to fight and win a war against Taiwan if ordered into action.

Will this Make China More Likely Go to War?

Militarization by itself will not determine if China is more likely to go to war—what will have more influence in shaping the leadership’s propensity to go to war is the political ideology that accompanies it. Militarism is concerned with the ideological thinking, beliefs, and intentions behind a country’s preparations for going to war. An underlying militaristic ideology has taken root in China’s political culture, evidenced by everything from China’s aggressive posturing in disputed territorial waters to the increasing prominence of military themes in Chinese blockbuster films.

History teaches that as militarism permeates the strategic and political culture of a regime, it makes leaders see war as a normal and even desirable policy outcome, making it more likely that such nations will end up in a military conflict. Decisionmakers in Beijing must make sure that as the geopolitical temperature rises and crises abound, preparations intended to enable China to survive a military confrontation do not instead enable a self-fulfilling prophecy of great-power conflict—which would be extremely dangerous to both China and the wider world.

Tai Ming Cheung is the director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego.

This article is based on IGCC’s latest policy brief, Back to the Future: The Rise of Militarization in China in the 2020s, which can be read here.

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