Most experts accept the fact that China’s official, published estimates of its military budget are an understatement. But China hawks have seized upon that grain of truth to concoct poorly documented estimates that overstate the military challenge posed by Beijing.
So it is with the new paper on Chinese military spending released this week by the American Enterprise Institute. It takes real issues like China’s failure to include all of its military-related activities in its official budget and the fact that China’s military inputs are cheaper than America’s and uses them to justify a huge, fantasy number on Chinese spending that cannot be justified by any credible evidence.
AEI’s intellectual gymnastics put Chinese military spending at over $700 billion per year. An analysis I did for the Brown Costs of War Project last year takes account of the same issues cited by AEI, as well as alternative takes, and finds that even under the worst case scenario, China spends only about half of what the United States spends for military purposes. Add to this that a significant part of China’s military is devoted to internal security, and that its forces are largely untested, since it has not fought in an actual conflict in over 40 years. And in that case – the 1979 invasion of Vietnam – China did not fare particularly well in the face of smaller but highly motivated Vietnamese forces.
The AEI paper also ignores the fact that spending alone is a poor measure of military capability. In terms of traditional military power – from numbers of nuclear weapons to naval tonnage to numbers of modern combat aircraft – China lags far behind the United States. Its military is at best configured for a regional role, and much of what it possesses is more appropriate for defense than offense.
Information on the development of next generation systems, from Ai-driven weapons to pilotless vehicles to advanced communications and cyber attack capabilities, is hard to come by, which is why upcoming talks designed to set rules of the road for the development and deployment of these systems are so important. But one thing is clear. A U.S.-China arms race in untested but highly risky high tech systems is a recipe for instability, and could even lead to unintended mass slaughter due to software malfunctions or an accidental nuclear exchange. This is ample reason for both sides to go slow and think carefully before deploying these next generation systems. If they follow the pattern of other so-called “miracle” systems – from the electronic battlefield in the Vietnam period to the “revolution in military affairs in the 1990s and beyond – they will be far more costly and far less useful than advertised.
The key to U.S. and Chinese security does not lie in racing to see who can spend more on their military forces. It will require a political and diplomatic accommodation that recognize that the two nations have sharp differences on certain issues, but that these differences will be better managed through dialogue than through force or threats of force. A war between the United States and China – two nuclear-armed powers – would be an unprecedented disaster for all concerned.
Inflated estimates of Chinese military spending aren’t just inaccurate. They are also irresponsible, because they help feed the false narrative that a militarized approach is the best way to manage the U.S.-China relationship.
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