The following is the Dec. 18, 2024, Pentagon report, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.
From the report
Understanding the tenets of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) national strategy is essential to understanding the drivers of the PRC’s security and military strategy. This understanding, in turn, offers insights on the current and future course of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) reform and modernization efforts in terms of its strength, technological advances, organization, and operational concepts—all of which could offer PRC leaders expanded military options to support national goals.
As PRC leader, Xi Jinping concurrently serves as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary, Central Military Commission (CMC) Chairman, and President of the PRC. The title used for Xi varies depending on whether he is acting in his capacity as party leader, military leader, or head of state.
THE PRC’S NATIONAL STRATEGY
Key Takeaways
- The PRC’s national strategy is to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” “China Dream,” and “Chinese modernization” by 2049. The strategy determinedly pursues political, social, economic, technological, and military development to increase the PRC’s national power and revise the international order to support the PRC’s system of governance and national interests.
- The PRC increasingly pushed the narrative that its preferred revisions to the international order are in other countries’ interests as well.
- The PRC increasingly views the United States as deploying a whole-of-government effort to contain and suppress the PRC’s rise, presenting obstacles to its national strategy.
- PRC leaders are expanding domestic efforts to develop new capabilities for advantages in competition and maintain independent supply chains and strategic stockpiles in the face of Western efforts to derisk supply chains.
The PRC characterizes its view of strategic competition in terms of a rivalry among powerful nation states as well as a clash of opposing ideological systems. PRC leaders believe that structural changes in the international system and an increasingly confrontational United States are the root causes of intensifying strategic competition between the PRC and the United States.
The PRC’s strategy entails deliberate and determined efforts to amass, improve, and harness internal and external elements of national power that will place the PRC in a “leading position” in an enduring competition between systems.
The CCP characterizes its strategy to achieve political, social, and economic modernity as a grand national endeavor, sweeping in scope and far-reaching in how it will transform the PRC and, in turn, the world. The CCP defines this as “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” or national rejuvenation as a state in which the PRC is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.” The PRC’s strategy entails efforts to amplify internal and external elements of national power that will “raise China’s international influence, appeal, and power to shape events to a new level.” The PRC’s strategy entails a long-term planning process to attain national rejuvenation that sets objectives, priorities, and milestones across all aspects of governance and policy areas, including economics, political affairs, legal systems, public order, national security, diplomacy, defense, education, science and technology (S&T), culture, and the environment. The objective of “national rejuvenation” or “Chinese modernization” is broad enough to justify almost any policy put forth by the CCP.
CCP officials have described achieving the unification of PRC and Taiwan as “a natural requirement” for national rejuvenation.
The PRC pursues its efforts to generate greater national power by defending and advancing its sovereignty, security, and developmental interests. Consequently, the PRC’s national ambitions and statecraft rest on the foundation of the CCP-dominated political ideology of enhancing “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” which the CCP views as the only path that will lead to the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The objective of this CCP-led strategy is perhaps best stated in what the CCP calls its “basic line,” a single sentence in the CCP’s constitution that serves as the mission of the CCP and the cornerstone for its policymaking. Last amended at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, it states:
“The basic line of the Communist Party of China in the primary stage of socialism is to lead all the people of China together in a self-reliant and pioneering effort, making economic development the central task, upholding the Four Cardinal Principles, and remaining committed to reform and opening up, so as to see China becomes a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.”
The 20th Party Congress, held in 2022, incorporated new developments since 2017 in “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” after the term was adopted into the CCP’s constitution. The inclusion of Xi Jinping’s namesake ideology into the CCP constitution was hailed as a “guide to action for the entire Party and all the Chinese people to strive for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The 2022 changes to the CCP constitution included an obligation of party members to “uphold Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee and within the party” as a whole while “upholding the authority and centralized and unified leadership of the Party Central Committee.”
Since the 20th Party Congress, the CCP has continued to stress the need for strengthening the PRC’s capacity to secure its overseas interests, including improving its control over grain, energy and other resources, and key industrial and supply chains. The PRC relies heavily on imported oil. Food security has been elevated to a top national security priority by the CCP in recent years due to climate shocks, trade disruptions, uncertain global markets, and unsecure lines of transportation. The Party Congress report stressed the CCP’s need to prevent digital penetration, sabotage, subversion, and separatism activities from external actors.
Throughout 2023, PRC leadership conceded that the COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges for the PRC’s diplomatic, cultural, and economic influence abroad. PRC leadership took diplomatic measures to manage increased global concern about PRC rhetorical and diplomatic alignment with Russia before, immediately following, and during Russia’s war against Ukraine as well as concern for the PRC’s growing assertive and coercive economic and military actions. PRC leaders continue to believe that global trends, especially the perceived U.S. decline, are generally conducive to their long-term interests and, at the close of 2023, saw the “new period of turbulence and transformation” as “posing new strategic opportunities” in China’s development.
As PRC leadership views a divided China as a weak China, they argue that “full reunification”—including the resolution of the “Taiwan question” by 2049 and solidifying the PRC’s “overall jurisdiction” over Hong Kong—is one of the fundamental conditions of national rejuvenation. Beijing believes that the PRC must field a world-class military by 2049 that can “fight and win” and “resolutely safeguard” the country’s sovereignty, security, and development interests. In support of this goal, the National People’s Congress passed revisions to the PRC’s National Defense Law in December 2020 to broaden the legal justification for PLA mobilization, including defense of the PRC’s “development interests.” The codification of this language in PRC law is intended to add legitimacy to the use of military force to protect overseas interests.
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