The surge in China’s military capacity, especially over the last decade, has been the focus of increasing Western commentary, some of it measured, much of it alarmist. Many alarmists believe it is a truth universally acknowledged that any large nation possessed of a significantly upgraded stockpile of advanced martial equipment will want to use it against others. Which surely confirms that the Global West is, above all, looking in a mirror. Richard Cullen reports.
Comparative bombs and bullets
The United States remains the world’s adamantly dominant military power. America’s massive nuclear, sea, air and personnel assets, some 800 worldwide military bases and annual martial spending (of around US$1 trillion) exceeding that of the next ten countries combined confirm why this is so (link).
Just the (treaty-limited) capacity of constantly cruising, submarine-based American nuclear weaponry is capable of exterminating a third of the total world population within about an hour (link).
However, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has also been advancing the martial capacity of all land, sea, air and space components within the PLA (People’s Liberation Army).
According to a leading US think-tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the PLA has, over the last several decades, greatly modernized itself while transforming from a regional force into a global power. Although ground forces have shrunk from 1.5 million to 1 million since 2014, naval, air, general weaponry and space-based power have all seen striking technology and capacity improvements. China’s military spending, which stood at around 17 percent of US spending in 2012 doubled within 12 years, advancing to 33 percent of US spending in 2024, says the CSIS (link).
China’s current nuclear arsenal comprises 600 active nuclear warheads – compared to 3,700 active nuclear warheads in the US.
In terms of overall warship tonnage, the PLA Navy trails the US Navy significantly but it now has more active battle-force ships, primarily focused on patrolling Chinese coastal seas (link).
Moreover, commercial ship-building capacity typically plays a foundational role in supporting military ship-building.
The CSIS lately noted how China held more than 53 percent of the global market share in the commercial shipbuilding while the United States accounted for only 0.1 percent, adding that: “Just one Chinese firm, the state-owned juggernaut China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), built more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than the entire US shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II” (link).
Furthermore, the advanced effectiveness of late model Chinese combat aircraft may have been confirmed in a short clash in May 2025, between Pakistan (using modern Chinese-built aircraft) and India (using modern French-built aircraft), where Pakistan appeared to have a clear upper hand (link).
Two pivotal factors are regularly cited as the primary drivers of this extraordinary growth in PRC military power: never again enduring the century of humiliation suffered by China following its defeat in the First Opium War (1839–42); and completing China’s reunification with Taiwan. In 2023, a report from the American Rand Corporation entitled “Why is China Strengthening its Military? It’s Not All About War” stressed the importance of both these factors, among others (link).
The South China Sea and the Gulf of America
Over the last year, a new, striking Sino-American comparative case study has emerged. It highlights how martial force has been used in very different ways to emphasize particular foreign policy priorities.
Dealing with serious tensions in the South China Sea
Chinese maritime wrangles with its many littoral neighbors bordering the South China Sea (SCS) are often traced back to China’s “Nine Dash Line” asserting sovereignty over certain islands, reefs and shoals in the SCS combined with claims over waters adjacent thereto, natural resource claims and more vague security-jurisdictional (trade route) claims. In fact, this large U-shaped maritime zone is a reduced, PRC claim derived from the larger, “Eleven Dash Line” proclaimed by the ROC (Republic of China) in 1946. The authorities in Taiwan still maintain this wider claim (link).
The most intense, modern maritime confrontations in the SCS have arisen between China and the Philippines. In 2016, a controversial UN Arbitration Panel, at the request of the Philippines, found that there was no historical basis for China to claim rights over all the maritime area within the Nine Dash Line. Both Beijing and Taipei rejected this ruling (link).
Unfriendly, sometimes hostile Sino-Philippines maritime interactions near disputed areas in the SCS have ensued for over a decade. Germany’s DW News recently reported that the most aggressive display of overt force by China during these encounters has been the use of water-cannons (link).
Naturally, the US has swiftly condemned such responses against Filipino vessels in the SCS by China (link).
In 2014, a renowned expert in international law, Professor Tony Carty argued, with respect to encounters like this, that:
“There is absolutely no doubt that this whole dispute is entirely about the Americans trying to make life difficult for the Chinese. The aggression that is building up against China and the scapegoating of China by the whole of the so-called democratic community of the world is appalling” (link).
Bandits of the Caribbean
In early 2025, one of White House’s early, audacious executive acts was to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America (link).
As in the case of the South China Sea, it is helpful to consider some historical (Latin American) background before we look at more recent events.
The highly decorated US Marine Corps Major General, Smedley Butler, delivered a speech in 1933 entitled “War is a Racket” (followed by a book with the same title) where he argued that:
“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it” (link).
Next, consider what is happening today, over 90 years later, in America’s Caribbean backyard (link).
• The US military have already killed over 100 civilians at sea in the Gulf of America (and the Pacific) in 2025.
• This “Southern Spear” military operation is killing alleged “narco-terrorists.”
• Guilt by White House assertion has entirely replaced confirming guilt according to any form of basic due process.
• Interception, arrest and interrogation play no part in this operation.
• White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles revealed President Trump’s desire to pressure Venezuelan President Maduro by “blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle” suggested America’s stated goal of stopping drugs was a cover for regime change effort (link).
• The US military (with the understanding of self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (link) deliberately murdered ship-wrecked survivors struggling for life after an initial attack, explicitly contrary to the US Defence Department’s Law of War Manual (link).
• The US military is now hijacking certain ships leaving Venezuela, complete with oil cargo, while enforcing brazen, coercive American sanctions (link).
• The US is now imposing an illegal naval blockade on Venezuela according to UN experts: A blockade is a prohibited use of military force against another country under the UN Charter (link).
• Backed by a crucial nomination from the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, America helped finagle the (now emphatically discredited) 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, for María Corina Machado, who has long urged unlawful US military intervention in Venezuela (link).
• Following an earlier, failed “gringo intervention” in 2019, reported by Time (link). Ms Machado clearly looks like a fresh, ear-marked candidate committed to enabling the US to govern Venezuela from Washington.
Meanwhile:
• Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, in October 2025, cheered on America’s unforgivable, grotesque complicity in the Gaza genocide boasting that “We are killing all the right people” (link).
• America has started bombing targets in Nigeria related to “Christian genocide” – though recent Islamist attacks on Christian farmers occurred in a different part of Nigeria (link).
• Regular American bombing attacks on Somalia have lately doubled (link).
• The White House has just ramped-up its Greenland-takeover project, never mind that this is a full-frontal political assault on a NATO ally, where the use of force is not ruled out.
• President Trump has announced the US Navy will initially build two new “Trump Class” battleships, falsely said to be “the largest battleships in the history of our country” (link).
• The Atlantic explained the US lacks the capacity, today, to build any such ships, while naming them “Trump’s Vanity Fleet” (link).
• Just after Christmas, flanked by grinning indicted war criminal, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Trump flagged yet another, potential major US-Israeli attack on Iran (link) as a follow-up to the earlier, treacherous US-Israeli attack on Iran in June, 2025 (link).
Intensifying Divergence
Smedley Butler’s striking advocacy from the 1930s confirms how the bare-faced use of raw military power against civilians, unproved-combatants and sovereign states malevolently black-hatted by the White House is not something that has just recently materialized.
This American behavior dates back over 200 years: The Munroe Doctrine from 1823 (today repurposed as the “Donroe Doctrine” (link) spelled out that Latin America is a militarily controlled, US sphere of influence off limits to all other powers.
Countless examples of American political intimidation, military incursions and violent regime change have flowed from the doctrine, for example in Guatemala in 1954 (link). And the world has been watching the endless American attempt to crush Cuba for over 60 years, a project that even American allies find inexcusably rotten (link).
Rather more recently, an article in The Harvard Political Review argued, in 2021, that Barack Obama is a war criminal. As President, he ordered 563 drone strikes which killed 3,797 people which included the murder of some 40 people attending a funeral in Pakistan. The article notes that he was not a pioneer in this endeavour but he was an exceptional expansionist. As he was beginning this homicidal project, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (link).
Meanwhile, ever since the extraordinary modern rise of China gained serious traction over 40 years ago, China has studiously avoided any level of warfare involvement remotely comparable to the level relished by the US.
President Jimmy Carter, when he identified the US as the most warlike nation in history, compared this record with that of China. “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody?” Carter asked. “None!” was the response he gave to his own question, adding that he thought America had: “wasted $3 trillion on military spending, while China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us in almost every way” (link).
When we move on to the Gulf of America – South China Sea case study the Sino-American contrast is shockingly clear:
• America’s blood-thirsty, war-mongering pedigree stands behind the wanton use of concentrated, homicidal America military force in Latin America today.
• China’s resort to water cannon usage (naturally condemned by the US) as a maximal response in the South China Sea, confirms Beijing’s desire to minimize violent conflict and avoid open warfare wherever possible.
Despite this startling disparity evident in daily global news bulletins, a recent remarkable article published by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney argued that US actions were “the least likely potential cause of any conflict across the Taiwan Strait” (link).
Conclusion
Smedley Butler, were he alive today, would surely confirm how, more than ever, war remains a huge racket for the US. What, though, can help explain this dangerous, accelerating behaviour?
In fact, instructive indications are evident in some fresh commentary on contrasting American and Chinese approaches across a broad range of policy areas:
• Another article from the Atlantic Council stresses how, in contrast to the US, China’s Five Year Plans enhance long-term “policy consistency, continuity and predictability” (link).
• In an article entitled, “China Responds to Trump’s Revived Monroe Doctrine” the journal Foreign Policy noted how the: “sugar highs of bullying the region’s leaders could lead to adverse consequences, including countries banding together against the United States—and the possibility that China may emerge as a more attractive partner” (link).
• Alex Lo, writing in The South China Morning Post, recently explained, “How Elon Musk and his merry band of billionaires run the United States” while China’s increasing number of billionaires do not pose a similar problem (link).
• In a soon to be published article, Professor Christopher Tang from UCLA argues that: “China is not merely adapting to the existing order – it is reshaping the terms under which global economic power is exercised.”
Fundamentally evident is the contrast between Beijing’s strategically planned, collective, firmly positive, long-term view of the future and Washington’s often chaotic, regularly very violent, backward-gazing quest to reimpose the level of American global hegemony it enjoyed as the Cold War came to an end over 30 years ago.
Consider our case study once more:
• Whatever China’s regional differences may be, Beijing understands that geography is destiny and China and the Philippines, for example, will be living as separate neighbors for the next 100 years and well beyond, hopefully in peace.
• America appears locked within a 200 year time-warp, where it cannot move beyond a continuous, default habit of imposing its will on neighbors by military force or other profoundly coercive means in order to secure a menacing American version of peace.
Finally, there is no question that China’s huge military build-up potentially puts Beijing in a position to impose its will regionally relying on military means, in a manner never before seen in Chinese history.
There is also no question, however, that, unlike the US, the martial imposition of its will remains a measure of last resort for Beijing – including with respect to Taiwan. Its comparative behavior over many centuries and since the rise of China began over 40 years ago both confirm this, according to Professor Jeffrey Sachs (link).
This divergence is unsurprising. For over 40 years, as it has compared itself with the US, China has confirmed the immense benefits of building rather than bombing, on a daily basis (link). Most of the rest of the world comprehends this. It is appalling that the US and too many of its dismal allies have so far failed to do so.
Richard Cullen is an adjunct law professor at the University of Hong Kong and a popular writer on current affairs.
Republishing from FridayEveryday website at https://fridayeveryday.com/war-and-peace/
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
