What War With Communist China Could Look Like

China expert outlines strategies for different scenarios

Michael Pillsbury, Director for Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, and author of “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.” Patrick Mauler/The Epoch Times

“If you just watch television, you see all these members of the House and Senate bragging about their new legislation,” says Michael Pillsbury. “So of course, I would think—and others would think—we’re doing a lot to stop the Chinese. But what if it’s not true?”

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek meets with Michael Pillsbury, a senior fellow for China strategy at The Heritage Foundation and co-author of a new report: “Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China.” Here, they discuss the possibility of war with China, the factors influencing the outcome of that conflict, and the need for legislation protecting U.S. interests. Pillsbury is also the author of “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.”

Jan Jekielek: You’ve said you expect war with China sometime this century. What kind of a war would this be? Is it a war the United States can actually win?

Michael Pillsbury: It depends on the quality of strategy the United States brings to the war. We have certain advantages in terms of economy, and experience in war with Afghanistan and Iraq. But we have certain major disadvantages, one of which is distance. It’s up to 10,000 miles away from our best ports, our munition storage areas, and our bomber bases to get near China.

Whether it’s to defend Korea, India, or Taiwan, we have a huge disadvantage in that it takes our forces two or three weeks to sail there. It takes 24 hours to fly there. The Chinese are right there with quick action to seize something, like a piece of Indian territory, or something involving Taiwan.

China has the advantage for a short war that involves distances close to China, something that would be over within three or four days. Then, the Chinese simply announce, “We’ve done this, please don’t overreact. We’ll be happy to debate this with you at the UN Security Council, where we Chinese have veto power.” That’s one kind of war we would probably lose.

It’s the topic of an interesting book called “The Strategy of Denial” by Elbridge Colby. He was a Pentagon official for a few years. He says: “Taiwan would probably collapse within a week of combat. There would be 50,000 to 100,000 Chinese PLA [People’s Liberation Army] troops on Taiwan. Should we Americans surrender?”

He says: “No, this is a great opportunity for us. We can land our own forces, and link up with whatever’s left of the Taiwan forces. Then, in a kind of guerrilla warfare movement, we can force the PLA off Taiwan to return to the mainland.” I’m summarizing a 30-page description from Chapter 10.

He says this will be a good thing, because right now, most countries in Asia want to hedge their bets. They want to be friends with America and friends with China. But according to Mr. Colby’s argument, when Asian leaders see that China has attacked Taiwan and that America is fighting back, they’ll be galvanized. They’ll see just how evil communist China is. They’ll stop hedging and join our coalition.

It’s quite a stretch to say: “Here’s this island with 23 million people. Here’s how close they are to China, 100 miles away. Here’s all the forces that could land on the island. How are we going to take it back?” But at least the Colby book is raising the issue publicly.

The idea of deterring the Chinese leadership gets you into how they think about war. As long as they believe Taiwan is going in the direction of unification, there’s no incentive for them to start a war. It would be idiotic. If Taiwan is going in a different direction, then war becomes the only hope they have of reunifying with the island.

Some war games looked at a three-year war with China over Taiwan. The first thing we learned is that we run out of ammunition. The U.S. Navy, in each of its submarines, only has so many torpedoes. Each Navy warship has what they call loading. How many of each kind of missile goes into that ship? You can mix different kinds of missiles. When you make this decision, you’re deciding what happens in the first couple of weeks of the war. How many ships can you shoot down on the Chinese side? What will happen to our side?

There is a very scary Rand Corporation report from 2015, highly recommended by me, called “Military Scorecard.” It shows how the balance of power between Washington, D.C., and Beijing has shifted. In almost every category, we do worse over the last 30 years. One of the worst cases is a long war where we cannot produce anti-ship missiles, air-to-air missiles, torpedoes for submarines, or even fuel.

So we will run out of these things. But here’s China, highly productive, with arms factories already building hundreds of missiles of various types over the past 15 years.

Another related issue is whether our allies will be with us. Defending Taiwan involves our forces going through Okinawa and other bases in Japan. We would need the Philippine naval and air bases. In a long war of six months or a year or more, if the United States is denied access to Japanese bases and to Filipino bases, and if our main forces on the island of Guam are harmed by Chinese missiles and bombers, then we don’t have any support infrastructure.

That’s why other historians and I have gone back to World War II to ask, “How did it happen then, when the Japanese took such a large area in just a few months?” The answer lies in the Pacific Islands. We had to start out in Australia and New Zealand, go north, and take these Japanese-occupied islands one by one. We hadn’t built bases in advance. The Japanese carefully used these islands instead.

It took two years to reclaim these islands that could then be used as air bases, depots, or naval storage areas. Only then could the war be brought to an end by a complete blockade of Japan. Could we do that again today? If we have to fall back from the Japan ring, the first island chain and the Philippines, the next set of bases are in the Pacific Islands.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are opening embassies in those islands, signing security agreements, and building air bases. They have obviously thought this through, saying, “We can take care of the Americans near China in the first island chain, but we have to make sure they can’t use the Pacific Islands like they did in World War II to come back into the war zone.” Right now, that doesn’t look promising for us.

Nuclear power also comes up in a lot of war games. China’s nuclear power, at a minimum, is 300 warheads. What would they do with all this? Some smart people interested in nuclear strategy write a lot about deterrence through demonstration. They might fire off a nuclear weapon someplace in the ocean as a demonstration that they are serious.

And the whole nuclear balance is changing. Everybody used to write articles about how China would never exceed 200 or 300 weapons, but the Defense Department has announced in the past year that within five to seven years, China probably will go to 1,000 more warheads, and then to 1,500 warheads by 2035.

[This] is an important number. Our ceiling for strategic nuclear warheads is 1,500. The Russians have the same cap. It was negotiated. The Chinese refused to come to the talks. President [Donald] Trump invited them, but they refused to come. So the nuclear balance is also changing against us. When you line up these various trends, you can get yourself into a very pessimistic mood.

Mr. Jekielek: There are some lessons from the pre-World War II period to be learned with the mentality that you just described, even though nuclear weapons obviously weren’t in play.

Mr. Pillsbury: The main thing is deterrence. How do you deter the leadership in Beijing that may not think the same way we do about the nature of the world? The Chinese view of what we’re doing right now is very different from what we’re actually doing. You can see this almost daily in Chinese propaganda. They say: “America is trying to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. The Americans did this to the Soviet Union, and they’re trying to do it to China today.”

A recent Chinese foreign ministry article was a long attack on America. It says, “America dominates the world in culture, economics, politics, propaganda, and the use of armed forces to invade little countries.” If they believe this, they see us as a malevolent force that not only wants to overthrow the Communist Party of China, but wants to seize Chinese territory.

Mr. Jekielek: There were joint naval exercises, the largest ever, with the Philippines. You’re saying that doesn’t mean the Philippines and the Americans are on the same side?

Mr. Pillsbury: Not at all. Everything I said about war with China is hypothetical speculation based on war games and thinking about what might happen for extremely unlikely events.

We’ve got a school of thought, for example, that says China is going to collapse. That it won’t be around as a great power for more than a few more years into the future. When our military planners hear things like this, they say to the civilian leaders, “Why should we plan against China? The place is going to collapse.” You can see how the assumptions you make for war games or forecasts depend on your initial thinking.

By the way, will we create an effort to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party? There are ways to do that. It was done against the Soviet Union. If it’s not being done, why not? The issue ought to be discussed and people should think about it.

Mr. Jekielek: We’ve had decades of appeasement policy, and not any form of deterrence.

Mr. Pillsbury: It’s true, and we have no organization to fight a war with China. You have commands in charge of the Middle East. You have the NATO planning staff that allocates weapons systems and makes war plans for NATO. But do we have a command in charge of fighting a war with China? Is there any kind of China command somewhere in the world? Is there an admiral or general with four stars who can say, “My duty is to prepare to win a war with China”?

The answer is no. We don’t have a command for war against China or to deter China within our whole U.S. government.

Some people might say it’s provocative to do such a thing. “Oh, how stupid. If we have a command for fighting China, that will just provoke China and cause a war. How irresponsible can you get?”

Mr. Jekielek: It’s a fantastic question and deeply concerning. We’re here at The Heritage Foundation, and you have a proposal on how to counter the China threat.

Mr. Pillsbury: Not exactly. This exercise ordered by the new president of Heritage was not to create a new set of measures, it was to survey the best ideas that have been proposed so far, mainly in legislation by Senate and House members. A couple of congressional commissions have also been producing recommendations for almost 20 years.

One is called the United States–China Economic Security Review Commission. Every year, it produces about a 500-page report. Usually, it averages 70 to 80 recommendations. None of them ever get implemented. For example, the current one is to monitor American high-tech investment going into China. Most people are surprised that we don’t already do that. We have no idea what American high-tech firms are investing in China’s state-of-the-art technology.

We went back through the last five years looking for ideas and found 300 pieces of legislation, each one quite useful and quite thoughtful. Marco Rubio, for example, had a proposal in 2018 for the White House to set up a technology czar to review technology about to be sent to China and stop it if necessary. It should coordinate across all departments of government. Technology czar was the title. It never passed. We put it in our set of proposals.

This is not a new Heritage plan for China. It’s pointing out that many good ideas were proposed which were never implemented. As a former Senate staffer, I saw it happen in at least 200 pieces of legislation where the sponsor would introduce it, then go on television and say, “Today, I introduced a bill to block the purchase of farmland by the Chinese Communist Party.” It was a big news story. At last, the CCP will be denied American farmland near sensitive military installations.

But it’s not happening that way. You get senators and congressmen who have a sexy bill. They introduce it and get on Fox News or in The Epoch Times, because they’re a hero. They’re standing up to the Chinese Communist Party. But is there a follow-up a month later, six months later, two years later? “Whatever happened to that bill of yours?” They reply: “I don’t know. Somebody blocked it.” However, the people who introduced the ideas get a lot of credit in the media.

If you watch television, you see all these members of the House and Senate bragging about their new legislation. Of course, I would think—and others would think—that we’re doing a lot to stop the Chinese. But what if it’s not true?

I run into people all over the world who think China’s going to collapse soon, but we know the Chinese themselves sometimes push this argument. They say: “We have so many problems with our one-child policy, cancer, pollution, the water table, and the lack of agricultural production, you Americans don’t need to worry about China. We’ll be lucky to be around 20 years from now.”

And over here, we have a weak effort to stop China, combined with a powerful lobby and cheerleading force, and frankly, lots of goodhearted Americans who think everybody is like us. They think: “They all want to have a constitution and democracy. This will break out in China someday. There’s no need for us to do anything.”

Mr. Jekielek: Talking about these theories of how the Chinese economy is fragile, we know there’s fragility in our own economy. We know there’s a huge housing bubble. At the same time, we know there’s still massive investment from the United States through these index funds.

Mr. Pillsbury: It’s not even tracked. We don’t have the number. One guy in the private sector, Roger Robinson, has come up with different estimates of up to $3 trillion or more. But the important thing is there’s no government law that says: “Track this. We care.” It’s the same thing with farmlands. It was just revealed a couple weeks ago that the Farm Service Agency on a voluntary basis can be told the Chinese or someone fronting for them is buying land. It’s voluntary.

So if you don’t want to tell the Farm Service Agency, you don’t have to. Plus, these are often county-level transactions, and counties don’t necessarily say: “National security is being threatened. I better call somebody in Washington.” It keeps the perception of threat very low. This is part of the Chinese secret formula that over time really pays off.

To counter it, and that’s the purpose of our exercise here at Heritage, is to pull together all this legislation that hasn’t passed. In a way, it’s meant to shock effect the reader. What if 100 bills haven’t passed, but members and senators have taken credit for them when they introduced them? That means we can’t respond to China other than by talk, rhetoric, papers, and articles, which the Chinese simply laugh at.

It confirms their hope that the Americans are not going to wake up, other than by talking, of which we have plenty. I was watching a recent TV show. This guy called in and said: “It sounds like, from what your guest is saying, we’re a nation of talkers. That’s all we can do.” I saw the host kind of smile, like this was a pretty shrewd observation.

Mr. Jekielek: Is your policy recommendation to start passing these pieces of legislation that you reference in this report?

Mr. Pillsbury: These recommendations are feeding back to current members of Congress and especially their staff from people at Heritage who, like me, are former Senate or House staffers. The long-term president and founder of Heritage, Ed Feulner, helped create something called the Republican Study Committee. There’s something on the Senate side called the Senate Steering Committee. Both of these are active on China policy. But our idea is bringing this together like a guidebook, with specific recommendations and how to implement them.

Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, your overall thesis in this interview is that we as a society are not awake to the China threat.

Mr. Pillsbury: No. The polls show that a high percentage of Americans are very concerned about the China threat. I’m talking about members of Congress who don’t pass legislation. I’m talking about the county governments that don’t report Chinese farmland purchases.

Our guide will be a handbook for insiders. You are going to be judged. People are going to know a year or two from now if your legislation passed or not. Is the Army still buying drones from China? Or did the legislation pass banning that? It’s going to be yes or no, and it’s going to be graphic. This is a very sophisticated guide on how our government is doing on China at local, state, and congressional levels. We’ve got to have accountability.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.