Column: China President Xi’s aggressive trajectory – a strategic concern

Xi Jinping, People’s Republic of China (PRC) president and Communist Party leader, is piloting his country and the Asia-Pacific region along a dangerous trajectory. He has accelerated China’s military buildup and modernization. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has commissioned more warships over the last five years than the United States and all of its allies combined.

The warships’ capabilities have also advanced. The PRC’s Air and Missiles Forces are growing as well. That expanded air and naval missile threat now outnumbers the U.S. Navy in seaborne missile shooters and shore-based air power.

However, a naval buildup alone is not alarming. Historically, nations build their military power in consonance with their economic and political interests, and Beijing is a global trading and diplomatic player. However, Xi’s actions demonstrate aggressive intentions.

Politically, Xi is pushing China’s irredentist claims at an alarming pace. He is employing Beijing’s expanded military power to bully his neighbors across Asia, from India to Taiwan. He has not even spared Beijing- friendly nations like Indonesia and the Philippines from predatory actions against their offshore territories.

Farther afield, PRC “fishing craft” have threatened, bumped and sunk those of other nations in the South China Sea and massed in other nations’ economic exclusion zones (EEZs) as far away as Peru and Chile.

He was pushing India along the Line of Control until India reacted strongly. Then he resorted to reasonableness, negotiations and withdrew to come back another day. Meanwhile, the periodicity and size of PRC air and naval operations around Taiwan and in the South China Sea have increased threefold over the last two years. China’s amphibious exercises are larger in scale and are now being conducted at greater distances from the PLAN Marines garrison and normal exercise landing areas.

China’s propaganda and threats against Taiwan and China’s South China Sea neighbors have escalated over the last four years. For example, PRC military aircraft violated Taiwan’s ADIZ (air defense identification zone) 283 times so far this year, just 20 short of 2020’s total and more than double that of 2019. The PLAN has begun to practice coordinated naval, naval air and anti- ship ballistic missile operations. Beijing is honing its ability to execute an area denial operation or threaten to do so.

Additionally, PLAN warships now operate routinely around or near Japan’s Senkaku Islands and China’s Coast Guard, and paramilitary maritime militia were bullying Japan’s fishermen until the Japanese Coast Guard established a near-permanent presence there.

Those actions are concerning but become alarming when viewed alongside Xi’s domestic actions. He has been consolidating power, having crushed all potential Party opposition and crushed Hong Kong’s democracy in violation of the 1987 Turnover Agreement. He did so patiently and incrementally, using threats and astute propaganda to isolate the democracy movement and its supporters. But that pales in comparison to his mass incarceration of more than 1 million Uighurs and Tibetans for their religion and ethnicity. That demonstrates a disregard for modern standards of international law and human behavior.

Xi must be deterred before he initiates a military misadventure or action that either destabilizes the Asia-Pacific or presents the region with a strategic Hobson’s choice between war or accepting PRC regional domination. Preventing that scenario will require the balanced application of diplomatic, economic, military policies and communications with our allies and partners.

Unfortunately, it will prove challenging. Xi is smarter than Hitler or any Soviet leader and the PRC is far stronger diplomatically, economically and militarily than any past strategic opponent.

Adm. Phil Davidson, former head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, spoke several weeks ago of what we have to invest in to prevent Xi seeing a strategic opportunity three to four years hence. Otherwise, we risk the dilemma Britain’s Neville Chamberlain faced at Munich, with Taiwan or the South China Sea serving as Czechoslovakia.

The Indo-Pacific Command will lead the military component of that effort, aided greatly by Hawaii’s strategic location and its population’s trans-Indo-Pacific expertise and relationships. The latter may make a critical contribution. Today more than ever before, the human element is foremost and whether building or sustaining partnerships, there is no substitute for personal relationships, both individual and collective.

Honolulu resident Carl O. Schuster is a retired Navy captain and former director of operations at U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.