New Delhi: Beijing seeks to reshape the international order to better align with its authoritarian system and national interests, as a vital component of its strategy to achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, as per a report by the US Department of Defense.
According to this worldview, the accrual of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) comprehensive national power, including military power, is necessary to set the conditions for Beijing to assert its preferences on a global scale.
The PRC’s national strategy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by 2049 is deeply integrated with its ambitions to strengthen the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The PRC has long viewed the United States as a competitor and has characterised its view of strategic competition in terms of a rivalry among powerful nation states, as well as a clash of opposing systems.
As expressed in the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, the PRC is the only competitor capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system. The PRC is increasingly clear in its ambitions and intentions, the report said.
In 2017, President Xi Jinping laid out two PLA modernization goals during his speech to the 19th Party Congress: to “basically complete” PLA modernisation by 2035 and to transform the PLA into a “world class” military by 2049.
Throughout 2020, the PLA continued to pursue its ambitious modernization objectives, refine major organisational reforms, and improve its combat readiness in line with those goals.
This includes the PLA developing the capabilities to conduct joint long-range precision strikes across domains, increasingly sophisticated space, counterspace, and cyber capabilities, and accelerating the large-scale expansion of its nuclear forces.
In 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced a new milestone for PLA modernisation in 2027 broadly understood as the modernization of the PLA’s capabilities to be networked into a system of systems for “intelligentised” warfare.
If realised, the PLA’s 2027 modernisation goals could provide Beijing with more credible military options in a Taiwan contingency.
The PRC’s strategy to achieve “national rejuvenation” is not limited to domestic efforts. This strategy entails efforts to change international conditions to suit the CCP’s concept of a “community of common destiny”.
