China’s ‘Military Overmatch’ With Taiwan Growing: Expert

China's Peoples' Liberation Army soldiers march at the Ngong Shuen Chau Barracks in Hong Kong on July 1, 2013. (Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images)

China’s ruling communist regime is pursuing a historic military buildup, despite the nation not facing any military threats, according to one expert.

“China doesn’t face any enemies,” Grant Newsham, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, said during an Aug. 18 interview with NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times. “There’s nobody who’s ever called for attacking China.”

He said the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, demonstrates a rejection of the international rules and economic order that have allowed it to develop into a major power in the first place.

“There’s never been a country that is more welcomed into the civilized community of nations,” he said. “That’s been going on for 50 years. China has been accommodated on every front in hopes that it would become ... a sort of liberal, peaceful country.”

Despite this effort to integrate China into the greater world order, the military buildup is an indication that something has gone awry, according to Newsham, who is an Epoch Times contributor.

To that end, he highlighted remarks made by U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. John Aquilino in June, who said China’s military buildup was the biggest since World War II.

Newsham pointed to a 2021 Pentagon report, which states that the CCP would likely have at least 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030.

When asked if he believed that the United States and China were now in an arms race, he responded in the affirmative.

“I think we are,” Newsham said. “The Chinese have really made it clear that they’re going to vastly increase the size of their nuclear arsenal.

“U.S. experts have been sort of off on most of their estimates of what China was capable of. But [China’s] made it clear that they’re going to build a lot of them.”

That could spell trouble down the road, as the Chinese military was already on track to overmatch the United States on some military capacity, particularly in the naval domain, Newsham says. That’s much more so in the case of small Taiwan, which the CCP has vowed to unify with the mainland, using force if necessary.

“The buildup has gotten to the point where the military overmatch between China and Taiwan is huge,” he said. “The Chinese military is, in some cases, a match for the United States. And in some cases, it’s more than a match for the United States.

“Taiwan absolutely has to have American support, Japanese support, and Australian support. In short, the free nations have to recognize the value of Taiwan,” Newsham stated.

“The importance of not allowing 23 or 24 million free people to be enslaved by a totalitarian system, that is what is at stake.”