China’s “Coercive” Imperialist Ambitions

Editor’s Note: These remarks were delivered at Center for Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups Maritime Symposium, Middletown, RI, June 28, 2023.

by James Holmes, Warrior Contributor, Navy

The Chinese Communist Party wants big things in the Indo-Pacific, yet on a daily basis it is expending a minute amount of force, largely in irregular fashion, in order to get them. That seems to cut against strategic logic. Intuitively it makes sense to pour resources into a venture that seeks major results. To go big or go home! And so Chinese strategy and operational methods warrant our attention.

Clausewitz sketches the classic formula for how to devise ways to achieve political ends using available means, telling us that the value a combatant places on its “political object,” or goal, should determine the “magnitude” of the effort, meaning the rate at which it expends militarily relevant resources to acquire that goal, and the “duration” of time it keeps making the investment. Multiply the rate by the time and you have the total price tag you must pay to wrest your political object from an unwilling foe.

In other words: how much you want something dictates how much you spend on it, and for how long. It’s like buying your goal on the installment plan.

So, far from insisting that you go big or go home, the Clausewitzian formula suggests that a competitor has a range of options if it wants its political goal a whole lot. It can go big, doing its utmost in terms of magnitude in hopes of succeeding while keeping the endeavor short. It could mount an effort of medium effort while accepting that the duration will be longer. Or, at the far extreme, it could stage an effort of minor magnitude that consumes a very long time. A lot depends on the degree of resistance the enemy puts forth. The victor does have to outmuscle the vanquished, and that sets the minimum threshold of military might for an enterprise. And a lot depends on how patient the government, society, and armed forces are about attaining their goals.

To date China has pursued a strategy of patience, especially in Southeast Asia, deploying coercion against outmatched neighbors short of armed conflict while building up the military means to do something more bold, decisive, and conventional should party leaders so choose.

So in my judgment China’s leadership has opted for a low-magnitude, long-duration effort to achieve goals party chieftains ardently covet and have promised—time and again, and in the strongest, most unequivocal terms—to deliver to the Chinese people. Beijing calls its goals the “Chinese Dream.” That’s General Secretary Xi Jinping’s banner phrase for his policy of a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts,” to borrow his words from the 20th Party Congress last October. On all fronts covers an enormous amount of ground, from constructing a prosperous socialist society to gaining control of Taiwan to overthrowing the regional order in the Western Pacific and perhaps beyond.