Under the Nuclear Shadow

China's Deterrence Playbook

Can China use military force to achieve its political goals, without triggering nuclear war? To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed Fiona Cunningham, a professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the new book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security.

Co-hosting today is Michael Horowitz, Penn professor who served in Biden’s Department of Defense.

We discuss…

• How to use open source PLA documents to conduct deep research,

• The evolution of Chinese defense strategy, including the impact of the third Taiwan Strait crisis,

• Nuclear modernization and China’s “no first use” policy,

• How the PLA makes decisions, including why they chose to develop cyber capabilities, anti-satellite weapons, and hypersonic missiles over proposed alternatives.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Xi inspects a starstruck PLA garrison in Macau, December 2024. Source.

PLA Sleuthing

Jordan Schneider: Fiona, why are PLA studies cool and important?

Fiona Cunningham: One of the biggest issues of the day is the prospects for conflict between the United States and China. How would such a conflict unfold if it were to occur? What can both sides do to improve their chances of not only succeeding in a conflict but preventing it from taking place? US allies, countries in the region, and stakeholders worldwide want to understand these dynamics.

The PLA is also an important domestic actor in China. It plays a big role in the party’s history and serves as the ultimate backstop that keeps the Chinese Communist Party in power because it is the armed wing of the Communist Party — not a state military. This arrangement would be similar to if the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in the United States had exclusive control of the US Military.

For these reasons, we need to understand everything possible about how the PLA operates, its weapons procurement, war planning processes, and its assessment of US and other countries’ actions.

Mike Horowitz: From a US national defense perspective, this is the most important part of the most important country in the world.

Fiona Cunningham: Mike says it better than I do.

Mike Horowitz: Not better, just shorter.

Jordan Schneider: There are obvious epistemic challenges when studying an adversary communist system’s military, particularly using open-source materials. Nevertheless, you wrote 300 detailed pages with over 200 interviews and an enormous amount of documents about Chinese domestic debate and doctrinal evolution regarding nuclear war — how to prevent and avoid it. When people say, “How can you ever know anything about the PLA?” what’s your retort besides waving your book in their face?

Fiona Cunningham: Most militaries, including the PLA, must communicate internally. They teach their students and share information within the organization. At least ten years ago, you could walk into certain bookstores in China and find books with ISBNs that revealed what the PLA was researching and teaching its students about almost every aspect of warfare, not just the areas I researched for my book.

Paradoxically, with nuclear deterrence and other capabilities China uses for deterrence, they need to communicate certain aspects of these capabilities. The objective is to avoid using them while using the threat of their use to shape adversaries’ behavior. You must disclose certain information about your capabilities, usage plans, and force organization to make those threats credible. Otherwise, you won’t get the deterrent value from the resources spent to develop them.

I acknowledge there are certain gaps that open-source researchers like me can never fill. What’s in China’s actual war plans? What are the exact specifications of their weapon systems? What are the precise details of certain PLA organizations?

There are also fundamentally unknowable elements: what was in Chinese decision-makers’ minds when they made certain choices? What choices will they make in a crisis over Taiwan? How will the plans I tried to understand through doctrinal debates actually function during wartime? Some things you can know, some things you can learn from open sources, and some things remain unknowable even with the best intelligence.

Jordan Schneider: Mike, would you like to add to that?

Mike Horowitz: This is tremendously challenging research. From a research design perspective, you face enormous uncertainty about China’s military. There’s a premium on gathering as much information as possible, especially given the challenges involved in obtaining that information.

There’s a justified premium placed on those talented scholars who, despite all constraints, can find primary source documents and information. Even if incomplete, even if different from what you would get researching the UK’s or US military, you can still gather enough information to make substantive inferences about how China’s military might behave.

Jordan Schneider: The PLA does have to talk to itself, but it doesn’t necessarily have to talk to Fiona Cunningham.

Mike Horowitz: It certainly doesn’t talk to me. Actually, I was at a conference right after I left the administration and saw somebody from China, which was probably the first time I’d seen somebody from China in years due to COVID and then being in the Defense Department. The person approached me, and I said, “Hi, it’s nice to meet you. My name is Michael Horowitz.” They replied, “Hi, I know who you are. We read all of your things.” I thought, “Well, that’s scary,” and wanted to back slowly away, much like the Homer Simpson meme.

Source.

Fiona Cunningham: Michael speaks the truth. I remember picking up a set of journals in one of the university libraries while looking through recent PLA research. There were many articles on lethal autonomous weapons and military AI applications. Many contained English language footnotes citing Michael Horowitz in the Texas National Security Review. I realized I had colleagues influencing how the PLA thinks about important questions at the cutting edge of warfare. They don’t cite me, though.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay on that topic. It’s fair to say that Chinese defense analysts constitute a much larger industry studying America than Western defense analysts studying China. Thoughts on that?

Fiona Cunningham: Several factors contribute to this imbalance. First, the US military is recognized by the PLA and most militaries worldwide as the premier fighting force. If you’re trying to learn from the best, you’ll dedicate a lot of resources to studying what makes the US military so effective, including how America leverages its technological and other advantages.

For China, the US is not just a potential opponent in their most important conflict scenario but also the model of military excellence. They have two compelling reasons to study the United States. Michael can probably elaborate, but I believe the United States learns less from China as an example of how to do things differently and is more interested in studying the PLA to understand how one of its two most serious potential opponents might fight in the future.

Mike Horowitz: That’s certainly correct, but the US does spend enormous time and resources studying everything we can possibly find about China’s military, though from a different perspective than learning lessons.

One challenge is that China hasn’t fought a war since the late 1970s. If we’re considering what lessons the US would learn from China in a military sense, these wouldn’t be battlefield lessons since there’s no recent battlefield data. The lessons would instead concern capability development, acquisition approaches, or force structure concepts — if you could access their doctrinal manuals.

This differs from how the world is currently studying Russia and Ukraine, intensely examining everything about battlefield lessons and what they mean for the future of warfare. The US is trying to glean everything possible about China’s military, but it’s learning lessons in a fundamentally different way.

Fiona Cunningham: The language barrier is also significant. In China, most people learn English from elementary school, making it a very common second language. This removes a major barrier for Chinese analysts studying the US military.

In the United States, or my native Australia, studying Chinese isn’t everyone’s first choice for a second language because of its difficulty. There are fewer college or high school students learning Chinese now than 10-15 years ago, as the incentives have shifted from business to national security.

Beyond language, there’s the issue of available materials. The United States publishes extensive open-source information about its military thinking. There are types of materials I would love to see in Chinese about the PLA that simply aren’t available, while equivalent US materials are accessible to Chinese researchers. I’d particularly value joint publications that would give me confidence that the doctrinal debates and materials I’ve studied accurately reflect actual PLA planning.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with the period from the 1960s to 1984 very briefly. China experienced the Sino-Soviet split, fought some border conflicts with the Soviet Union, and nearly engaged in nuclear war. That remained the main focus for a long time — defense in depth, learning from the Soviets.

Fast forward to 1984, when Deng realized Gorbachev was serious and wouldn’t invade China anytime soon. They could reprioritize defense relative to other national priorities. Take us from there through the period when global nuclear disarmament was being considered, up to 1995-1996.

Fiona Cunningham: This is a fascinating period for Chinese defense strategy, particularly regarding nuclear weapons’ role in China’s national defense.

Starting in the mid-1980s, China downgraded the possibility of fighting a major war against one of the superpowers. This coincided with China’s economic opening and reform gathering momentum, prompting the government to redirect resources from national defense to economic development.

China also reassessed what conflicts it might face. Prior to 1988, they prepared for general war with a superpower potentially invading China. After 1988, they shifted focus to “local wars” related to territorial disputes on China’s periphery. Taiwan was only one of several potential conflicts, with uncertainty about whether the US would become involved.

Two interesting developments emerged during this period. First, China debated the role of nuclear weapons in local wars. In conventional invasions, the role of nuclear weapons seemed clearer, even though China didn’t plan to use them first to deter conventional attacks. But their utility in local conflicts was less obvious.

Harvard professor Alastair Iain Johnston wrote a landmark article about the concept of “limited nuclear deterrence,” which was being debated within the PLA in the late 1980s through the 1990s. This concept involved acquiring tactical nuclear weapons to create more options on the escalation ladder during conventional conflicts.

Since Johnston’s influential article, more sources have become available, revealing another perspective in China’s nuclear strategy debate — waiting to see what the Soviets and Americans would do, as global nuclear disarmament might make additional nuclear investments unnecessary. By 1992, China’s leaders concluded they still needed nuclear weapons because the US and Soviets wouldn’t eliminate theirs completely, but China didn’t require large numbers.

Another interesting development arose from financial pressures on China’s military, which turned to exports to sustain its defense industrial base. They developed conventional short-range ballistic missiles intended for Middle Eastern markets. When the US pressured China not to export these weapons, China’s previously nuclear-only missile forces saw an opportunity to find a role in local wars by using short-range ballistic missiles to threaten Taiwan. This was the contingent origin of China’s conventional missile force, which presents a big challenge for the US and its allies today.

Source.

Jordan Schneider: Qian Xuesen 钱学森, who most listeners will be familiar with, deserves a mention here. He was forced out of America during the McCarthy era and became the father of China’s missile program. He remained skeptical in the 80s. You have a great quote where he warned that reports heralding a “post-nuclear era” were “deceiving people and they are all false.” The man still wasn’t buying into the new world order decades after seeing the West for what he believed it really was.

Another thing worth emphasizing is the level of military downsizing during this period. They shed almost a million people from the PLA — a dramatic reorientation for any military.

Fiona Cunningham: I don’t cover this in tremendous detail in my book because others have examined it thoroughly, but China’s conventional military modernization accelerated after the Gulf War, when China developed a clearer understanding of what they would need to do.

Mike Horowitz: They observed what the US accomplished.

Fiona Cunningham: Exactly — they saw what the US did and realized that to fight future conventional wars, they needed to develop similar capabilities. This became a decades-long project for the PLA. The decision to change conventional military strategy to enable China to fight “local wars under high-technology conditions” — their strategic guideline — was inspired by watching US operations rather than perceiving a direct threat from the United States. Taylor Fravel’s book Active Defense does an excellent job of explaining that decision. It was a very influential book while I was writing my dissertation.

Jordan Schneider: Mike, can you give us the 101 on why the 1991 Gulf War was so mind-blowing to so many people?

Mike Horowitz: The 1991 Gulf War blew everyone’s mind because it revealed the “second offset” on the public stage. All those developments in stealth technology, precision strike, and advanced weapons — things we take for granted today — made their dramatic debut.

I was in middle school when that war happened and remember seeing images of precision strikes on green-screen displays — missiles hitting specific buildings in Iraq. It seemed like magic, the ability of the US military to strike targets so precisely. This capability shocked the rest of the world.

The Soviets, who were becoming Russians at that point, understood the concept but had been unable to execute it. This was fundamentally different from how people thought wars would happen toward the end of the Cold War. It demonstrated sheer technological superiority by the United States and served as a wake-up call to the PLA.

Jordan Schneider: It’s also important to mention that the US even surprised itself with its effectiveness. There were advanced projections about the casualties required to conquer Iraq. The Senate, when Congress was debating whether to authorize war, anticipated 50,000 American casualties. It turned out to be only in the three or four figures.

Mike Horowitz: You’re referring to 2003. I’m talking about 1990-91. However, in both invasions, the projected dangers to US soldiers were dramatically overestimated. In retrospect, much of that was due to operational art (force employment and the effective use of military power) and how much the American military excelled. But equally critical were defense technology breakthroughs and the ability of the American military to integrate them in ways that shocked the rest of the world.

Jordan Schneider: China realized they needed a new playbook, understanding it would be a decades-long effort to approach the capabilities of the world’s superpower in the early 90s. Fiona, take us to the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis. What triggered it, and how did it affect China’s conception of what it needed to be nationally secure?

Fiona Cunningham: The Taiwan Strait Crisis had two peaks. The first occurred in mid-1995, with another flare-up in early 1996. The initial trigger was the United States issuing a visa to Taiwan’s first democratically elected president, Lee Teng-hui, whom China viewed as agitating for independence. China saw this visa as representing American support creeping toward Taiwanese independence.

The second peak came in March 1996 when President Lee sought re-election. China attempted to influence the outcome of that election. On both occasions, China conducted military exercises across and around Taiwan, including launching some of the short-range ballistic missiles they had fortuitously acquired earlier.

Mike Horowitz: “Fortuitously acquired” sounds like a euphemism for China beginning a military buildup after the Cold War.

Fiona Cunningham: They “fortuitously acquired” these capabilities because China’s defense industry had been instructed to generate revenue. When the US blocked the export of these weapons, they became available for domestic use.

There’s an interesting sequence of events in the late 1980s. The rocket force, which at that time only operated nuclear weapons, was called into meetings with China’s leaders who asked, “What role will you play in a local war?” They responded, “We have a great idea — we’ll be armed with conventional missiles.” They put forward this proposal in the late 80s largely for organizational survival purposes. They needed a way to remain relevant in a changed environment where most of China’s potential conflicts wouldn’t involve nuclear weapons. This demonstrates classic organizational incentives for military branches to seek new roles when the threat environment changes.

Between the exercises in 1995 following Lee’s Cornell visit and those in 1996 aimed at influencing Taiwan’s presidential election, China began its five-year defense plan. In this plan, conventional missiles and what they called “Shāshǒujiǎn” 杀手锏 (Assassin’s Mace, “trump card”) weapons, primarily missile systems, received prominent attention.

A series of leadership meetings occurred from late 1995 onward after the first set of exercises. From these meetings, we can surmise that China’s leaders began to see what the rocket force had recognized in the early 1990s — these missiles could be powerful tools for intimidating adversaries and addressing a new strategic reality. If another Taiwan Strait crisis occurred — as it did in 1996 — China wouldn’t have Gulf War-equivalent conventional military capabilities to counter the United States. This would make it much more difficult for China to use force if they felt their red lines regarding Taiwan were crossed.

These missiles provided coercive leverage — a way to threaten escalation against a powerful nuclear and conventional adversary when China had few other options. Interestingly, China’s leaders determined that threatening nuclear first use, the other obvious option, was unacceptable to them.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay on that topic. What is the “no first use” policy? Where does it come from? How does it constrain Chinese doctrinal thinking?

Fiona Cunningham: I’ll make my best case for why I believe it operates as a constraint on the PRC even today, five or six years into a nuclear buildup.

The “no first use” policy originated in a statement accompanying China’s first nuclear weapons test in 1964, where China pledged it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons. They stated they would only use nuclear weapons if first attacked with nuclear weapons by another country. This policy converted Mao’s views about nuclear weapons into a formal stance that later became the strategy given to the Second Artillery (China’s missile forces) when they began formulating how to implement China’s nuclear weapons strategy almost a decade later.

Before 1964, many statements from Mao and other Chinese leaders indicated they needed conventional weapons for conventional conflicts and nuclear weapons to deter nuclear weapons use. Several reasons explain why China adopted this policy during the Cold War. It differentiated China from the nuclear superpowers, perhaps making its nuclear weapons less of a challenge to the Soviet Union and the United States. It also related to China’s geography — they didn’t need nuclear first use against a conventional invasion because China’s size would exhaust any invader. China could survive a conventional conflict, but a nuclear conflict presented a different scenario.

It’s worth noting that China’s nuclear policy isn’t just a military matter — it’s a civilian policy given to the military by top leaders. Military leaders cannot change China’s “no first use” policy. Because it originated with Mao and Deng, it became orthodoxy that’s difficult for even civilian leaders to change.

Looking at available doctrinal materials — though unfortunately we lack probative information for the last two decades — it’s clear the “no first use” policy constrains how China plans to use its nuclear weapons. However, there have been debates about changing it or placing conditions on it, and questions remain within China about whether other countries see it as credible.

Mike Horowitz: All that can be true. You’ve persuaded me that China’s military believes it is constrained by the “no first use” policy and that civilians must make those changes. In a crisis, depending on the stakes — particularly if Xi thought regime survival was at risk — there could be incentives for China to strike first with nuclear weapons. The question is, to what extent would the “no first use” policy constrain China’s military in a conflict where the civilians who can make policy changes are actively engaged?

Fiona Cunningham: Several points are worth noting. First, if you plan to use your capabilities in accordance with a policy like “no first use,” your ability as a rocket force to develop operations involving first-use options becomes constrained. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but...

Mike Horowitz: It’s not as simple as just saying “launch the missile."

Fiona Cunningham: Exactly. It would mean launching the missile outside established protocols or training. It’s possible, but would represent a big departure from doctrine.

In my book, I detail an intense debate over adding conditions to China’s “no first use” policy in the early 2000s. These debates are fascinating because we see writing in leaked Chinese missile force teaching materials discussing lowering the nuclear threshold and nuclear deterrence signaling operations. What they don’t include, however, is a nuclear first-use campaign that would follow if an adversary didn’t back down after these signals.

Mike Horowitz: That’s interesting.

Fiona Cunningham: I found a dissertation written by a missile force officer — now I believe a deputy base commander — who essentially asks what a first-use campaign would actually look like. One option he discusses is detonating a nuclear weapon in space if a conflict over Taiwan isn’t going well. Interestingly, China subsequently developed non-nuclear anti-satellite weapons.

However, official materials produced by the Second Artillery don’t describe what warning shots or nuclear first-use actions would follow these threats. We lack visibility into current debates, though other scholars have found evidence of the Rocket Force now exercising for “launch on warning.” In my decade of interviews in China about nuclear strategy issues, I noticed a change in tone between 2014 and 2016, with some experts beginning to question whether launch on warning violates a “no first use” policy.

Jordan Schneider: What is “launch on warning,” Fiona?

Fiona Cunningham: In its simplest form, launch on warning means launching once you receive warning that your adversary has launched nuclear weapons toward you. Rather than waiting until those weapons detonate on your territory, you choose to launch your nuclear weapons during the period between your adversary’s launch and the detonation on your territory.

Mike Horowitz: Can we discuss this in relation to China’s current nuclear modernization? What you’ve described presents a paradox. Launch on warning is generally considered when you’re worried about your nuclear forces being decapitated — when an enemy’s first strike might destroy your ability to retaliate. If you have secure second-strike capabilities, you can absorb a strike and still respond. Since China has been rapidly modernizing its nuclear arsenal, that should make them more secure rather than less. Why would the PLA be thinking more about launch on warning now as their nuclear capabilities become more sophisticated?

Fiona Cunningham: It depends on which capabilities deliver your secure second strike. If you rely on road-mobile land-based missiles or submarine-based ballistic missiles — nuclear missiles mounted on trucks driving around China’s vast territory, perhaps hiding in caves — you’re depending on mobility and concealment to avoid detection by adversary satellites.

If, instead, your path to survivability is through having systems that are easier for adversaries to locate, the mindset about securing a second strike differs. If your plan involves many fixed silo-based missiles that your adversary can see, you’re relying on the fact that they can’t destroy all of them due to their quantity. However, those silos contribute little to second-strike capability unless you plan to launch the missiles before enemy weapons hit them.

The launch-on-warning approach relates partly to which capabilities comprise your secure second strike, but also concerns deterrence immediacy. Consider the effectiveness of deterrence if you wait weeks to pull road-mobile missiles from caves before retaliating against Washington, D.C.

Mike Horowitz: You maintain a hair-trigger posture to increase the credibility of your threat from a signaling perspective and increase the probability of successful deterrence.

Fiona Cunningham: What surprised me in post-book interviews about China’s nuclear modernization is that Chinese experts now acknowledge the US’s improved capabilities to detect road-mobile missiles. Examining the sensors the United States plans to deploy in space, Chinese strategists reasonably worry that the US will better locate capabilities they previously considered secure and survivable.

Jordan Schneider: America had approximately 20,000 nuclear weapons toward the Cold War’s end. Many have been decommissioned, but we still maintain high four-figure numbers. China started with double-digit quantities and is now approaching an arsenal of 400-500. This presents a challenge when you lack nuclear submarines, bombers, and ICBMs to ensure national destruction capability. The concept of playing three-card monte with tens of millions of lives by driving missile trucks around rural China is simultaneously absurd and terrifying.

Mike Horowitz: Road-mobile weapons are extremely difficult to detect. This explains why every country that has faced the United States since the beginning of the Cold War — whether Iraq during the Gulf War, the Soviets, China, or potentially North Korea — has considered mobility as a solution to overwhelming American firepower.

Fiona Cunningham: Such an approach wouldn’t work in the American hinterland, but China presents a different scenario.

Mike Horowitz: The regulatory environment in the US would make that impossible.

Jordan Schneider: Perhaps this could become our trucking industry’s future. Once autonomous vehicles replace truckers, the only humans on the road might be those randomizing their drives around Nebraska.

Fiona, let’s close the loop on Chinese nuclear military modernization.

Fiona Cunningham: My book examines how nations pressure adversaries in conventional wars by threatening escalation. There’s considerable discussion about whether China’s nuclear modernization aims to create this option with its nuclear forces, especially as it develops more theater-range precision options — capabilities approaching what would be needed for credible nuclear first-use threats.

However, my conclusion is that China hasn’t necessarily decided that its nuclear modernization will replace non-nuclear capabilities as its primary source of coercive leverage in conventional conflicts. I see the drivers of China’s nuclear modernization as primarily about achieving a more robust second strike against the United States.

There’s also a political leverage component — China wants enhanced capabilities because they believe this will make the United States behave more prudently. This doesn’t necessarily involve precise calculations about nuclear exchanges or specific force posture changes to enable credible nuclear first-use threats.

My recent interviews in China suggest a psychological and political leverage rationale for modernization that doesn’t necessarily translate to posture changes that make first use more feasible or improving China’s position in a nuclear exchange. Different schools of thought within China point to different modernization rationales, but first use doesn’t clearly emerge as one of them.

Jordan Schneider: The idea that it’s worth investing to ensure nobody in the Pentagon believes they could execute a first strike on China without America suffering consequences seems reasonable. If I were a captain in the Rocket Force, I’d consider that a worthy investment. But how far that extends and what it means from a readiness perspective remains one of those “unknown unknowns” we discussed earlier.

A Chinese ballistic missile test in the Gobi desert, ~February 2025. Source.

Mike Horowitz: This might transition us to discussing conventional capabilities. What’s remarkable about China’s military development over the last decade is that they’ve rapidly modernized in every area. There was a time when we could say, “China is prioritizing this capability over that one.” Fiona’s book brilliantly discusses this earlier period when China was making some of those choices, particularly regarding conventional missiles. Now, however, the story of the last decade is essentially “everything everywhere all at once” from a Chinese military modernization perspective.

Modernizing Warfare

Jordan Schneider: I love how your book opens in the early 90s, when China essentially said, “We don’t have computers, so we’re resilient to cyber attacks.” Then we witness the informatization of warfare and doctrinal development regarding offensive cyber capabilities to threaten targets when nuclear warfare threats aren’t credible.

Fiona, give us a brief history of cyber weapons in China. How has the PLA’s thinking about their utility evolved?

Fiona Cunningham: The major turning point for offensive cyber capabilities in China — capabilities they considered using for coercion — came after the 1999 US accidental bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade. From China’s perspective, this incident was anything but accidental. There’s a notable quote from Jiang Zemin where he basically says, “I’m really indignant. This is not a trivial event. This is a big deal, and the Chinese people cannot be bullied."

Jordan Schneider: This presents an irony, right? In 1991, everyone marveled, “These Americans can hit a window from 3,000 miles away.” Then, suddenly, we accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy. Where do you stand on the conspiracy theories about this incident, Fiona?

Fiona Cunningham: My perspective is that even the best organizations can make mistakes, including the US military. I think China’s reasoning was, “This is a highly advanced military — we don’t believe they could have made such a mistake.” Additionally, once a top leader decides something wasn’t a mistake, that becomes the official position, even if contrary evidence emerges later. It becomes difficult to undo those narratives.

Following the Belgrade embassy bombing, a series of meetings took place where Jiang Zemin instructed China’s military leaders to develop capabilities addressing their leverage deficit — something that would make future conflicts, particularly across the Taiwan Strait, too dangerous and risky for US involvement. They concluded their plan to build a massive conventional missile force wouldn’t be sufficient.

Offensive cyber operations emerged as a promising capability, partly because China’s military studied the Kosovo air war and observed Serbian militias defacing NATO web pages — not particularly sophisticated cyber activities, but they recognized how quickly and inexpensively one could create problems for a more advanced military and society.

China’s awareness of cyber operations dates back to the Gulf War, when they began studying what they called “computer virus weapons” and noticed US interest in these capabilities. However, they didn’t actively pursue this option until after the Belgrade embassy bombing. Subsequently, they allowed “a thousand flowers to bloom” (百花齊放), with everyone of significance in the PLA entering the cyber arena. This resulted in capability development on both offensive and espionage fronts, but it lacked coordination and organization.

This disorganization became problematic for China’s leaders around 2010. They observed other countries using cyber operations for military effects that demonstrated the potential they had recognized. Simultaneously, China was becoming increasingly dependent on information networks for military, social, and economic functions. Seeing these cyber domain developments, they instructed their military to adjust their plans and organization for offensive cyber operations, acknowledging that they would be “throwing stones from a glass house.”

Jordan Schneider: What happens next?

Fiona Cunningham: A process of changing China’s cyber doctrine began around 2012. The PLA held many meetings to evaluate its progress and future direction. These discussions produced revealing statements, such as “We’ve made significant progress in capabilities, but everyone is fighting their own war, so we lack coordination.” Another noteworthy comment was: “If we aren’t careful with how we plan and execute these operations, we’ll harm the national interest — yet we still want to use them for leverage purposes."

Over approximately two years, China’s PLA developed approaches to modify their cyber doctrine. Around 2014, Xi Jinping particularly pressured the PLA to reorganize. This coincided with the US indicting several PLA officers for industrial espionage. The following year, China released a white paper acknowledging their cyber defense capabilities for the first time, though they still refused to publicly admit possessing offensive capabilities.

At the end of 2015, China established a new organization called the Strategic Support Force, which consolidated all the disparate elements of the PLA’s cyber enterprise into a single entity. The success of this consolidation remains unclear — in fact, China disbanded the Strategic Support Force just as I was completing my manuscript.

Jordan Schneider: Toward the end of this first period, the Obama administration attempted to engage Xi and establish norms about appropriate cyber activities. How does this international dimension interact with the Chinese government’s directives to its ambiguously organized cyber force?

Fiona Cunningham: One fascinating aspect of China’s cyber capabilities is that for most capabilities with direct strategic effects on adversary decision-makers, China’s top leaders never delegate authority to lower-level PLA commanders regarding their use. The only area where some de facto delegation occurred was in the cyber arena before the 2014-15 changes I outlined.

The activities the Obama administration complained about — PLA members hacking US corporations to obtain proprietary information for commercial advantage — appeared to occur without China’s top leaders’ authorization or oversight. The international pressure reinforced China’s trend toward consolidating their cyber forces and subjecting them to tighter oversight and command and control from the top. In some ways, the Obama administration was pushing on an open door.

For industrial espionage that supported China’s national priorities in certain sectors, the activities continued but shifted to non-PLA actors, while the PLA focused on military missions. The administration was pushing on an open door in seeing some activity decline. If you examine the timelines, major decreases in PLA cyber activity tracked by organizations like FireEye (a private cybersecurity company) coincided with Central Military Commission meetings deciding on major military reform packages.

It’s difficult to disentangle whether US threats of sanctions over cyber espionage or broader PLA reorganization trends were more influential. However, this suggests US pressure alone didn’t cause China to change its behavior.

Jordan Schneider: We’ve witnessed many high-profile actions by the Chinese government over the past decade-plus, but we haven’t seen something comparable to Stuxnet, Russian cyber attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in 2024, or the Viasat attack in 2022 — incidents where actors not only penetrated critical infrastructure but actively attempted to disrupt operations. Fiona, is this simply because China hasn’t engaged in a major war, hasn’t faced something as pressing as Iranian nuclear capabilities, or is there a broader hesitance to cause damage rather than just steal information, conduct espionage, and prepare groundwork for potential future conflicts?

Fiona Cunningham: The PLA is certainly willing to lay groundwork for disruptive operations. In late 2023, reports emerged about the Volt Typhoon intrusions, where Chinese actors — though public attribution to specific PLA units is limited — penetrated adversary critical infrastructure. This aligns perfectly with their doctrine of infiltrating an adversary’s critical infrastructure to pressure them in peacetime, crisis, or conflict — shaping their behavior through fear of system disruption.

What China hasn’t done, however, is demonstrate that if they wanted to “hit send” on these capabilities, they could effectively disrupt an adversary’s critical infrastructure. I wish I had an interview where someone explicitly explained their reasoning, but these questions are extremely difficult to raise within China. Even if you could ask, individuals might not know the answers.

This remains a puzzle, even in US analysis — why hasn’t China conducted a major public demonstration proving they can cause disruption in ways that would concern adversaries in future conflicts? The reasons likely align with China’s desire to control these capabilities very carefully to avoid blowback. Nevertheless, countries typically want to demonstrate their capabilities, especially with something as uncertain as offensive cyber operations.

Mike Horowitz: Shout out to the names that people give to things. In the official US Government release on Volt Typhoon, they also called that group Vanguard Panda, Bronze Silhouette, and Insidious Taurus, which is unbelievable.

Jordan Schneider: Are these American code names, or do the groups call themselves like Golden Panda?

Fiona Cunningham: I don’t know.

Mike Horowitz: It’s like “AKA Vanguard Panda, Bronze Silhouette.” There are a couple other names that are less funny, like “Dev-0391.”

It’s less puzzling to me why China hasn’t tried to break things. I view what China is doing in this context as building the capacity to break things. The demonstration that they are in US and other countries’ networks is a signal of capabilities, since the actual use of cyber tools to break things is pretty rare. Stuxnet is the overcited one-off in a way, and relied on a lot of very specific factors.

China demonstrated that it was deep in energy infrastructure and water infrastructure at the state level across the United States, which certainly illustrates the capacity to destroy — especially because of the way they gained access through routers, VPNs, and many common electronic devices that lots of critical infrastructure facilities and Americans have.

This points to one of the issues surrounding cyber capabilities in general and relates to what we discussed last time, Jordan, in the context of offensive cyber strikes in a world of advancing AI. There’s sometimes a tendency to think about offensive cyber as this magic thing you can press “go” on, when in reality, because the accesses are so limited and once you use them they can disappear, the incentive structure even for very competent offensive actors like China is often to hold back on breaking things. The more you use these capabilities, the more it becomes all hands on deck to completely knock you out.

I have no doubt that even in the aftermath of the Volt Typhoon revelation, China has other access points that we don’t know about. From a parochial American perspective, that’s incredibly dangerous. The questions become: under what circumstances would China try to activate that, and what would the impact be? There’s uncertainty surrounding both of those things.

Fiona Cunningham: That uncertainty is one of the reasons why it makes the threat to use them credible. It may be a total fizzle and a flop, but it might also be really bad.

Mike Horowitz: I agree completely.

Fiona Cunningham: What’s interesting to me is that China’s behavior with Volt Typhoon runs contrary to a lot of US academic discussions about the utility of cyber operations over the last five to eight years. It does raise these questions about strategy. US Cyber Command has been saying the real strategic value of cyber operations lies in the “death by a thousand cuts” under the threshold of armed conflict. But the PLA looks like it’s preparing for this “cyber Pearl Harbor” scenario.

Do you actually get the leverage that China thinks it will get from preparing for something the US has said it doesn’t really see as being that big of a problem?

Mike Horowitz: It depends on what they can actually do. Consider some of the things that Russia has allegedly done and how they’ve disrupted Americans. Part of this depends on what the goals are.

There’s “death by a thousand cuts,” where cyber is an enabler to other kinds of operations. This might say something about some of the academic literature on cyber, but we don’t need to discuss that now.

There’s also cyber as a disruption and illustration of possibilities for cost imposition, precisely because there’s uncertainty. It might fizzle, but it might be really important. The theory would be that if you could create a little disruption to the lives of average Americans during, say, a Taiwan crisis, it would bring the costs home in a different way.

The question becomes, how much disruption, and what would be the ultimate impact? If what you’re trying to do is influence American behavior — perhaps more so than affecting US military capacity in the Indo-Pacific — and you’re trying to influence public attitudes and perceptions, no one really knows how that would go, including us and including them.

Jordan Schneider: That’s a key factor with a lot of this. I like your framework of brinkmanship — what are we doing with our force posture? Are we engaging in brinkmanship? Are we doing calibrated escalation? Or are we actually preparing to fight a war?

The problem is that the more forward you are with these capabilities, the more likely you are to get America to take it seriously. When China starts taking cyber seriously, as we see with Volt Typhoon, that leads to more awareness, investments, and local water plant owners updating their systems.

The same applies in the Taiwan context. Do you really think that turning off the lights in Texas is going to turn out better for Beijing? This is almost like Japan’s 1941 logic — “They’ll really want to make peace with us after we bomb Pearl Harbor."

It could go both ways, depending on how focused you are, what timelines you’re working with, and how “feminized” you think America is — to use Putin’s term, not mine. These factors impact the way you’re going to think about what you show and what you don’t do on the world stage, which makes this all very tricky.

Mike Horowitz: Just to be clear, countries have made that mistake about the United States forever. Saddam Hussein made similar assumptions. Bin Laden did as well. Foreign powers often forget that the US can be relentless. When someone attacks the US hard, we respond with full force and persistence.

Arguably, those who understand that we’re somewhat unpredictable might find that beneficial for deterrence in the classical sense. I’m curious about Fiona’s thoughts on how China perceives us in this context. I encountered this topic frequently in defense conversations over recent years. Does China assume that if they attack the US, we’ll respond with everything we have? Or do they believe they could cause enough pain that the US would back down?

Fiona Cunningham: Three factors likely matter — timing, stakes, and nuclear weapons.

Regarding timing, if you strike the US hard during an active conflict, the consequences would be severe because the United States would be fully committed. However, if that threat exists before or during a crisis, it might encourage caution and prudence. China’s strategic deterrence approach encompasses wartime planning but is also designed to influence US behavior during peacetime.

From China’s perspective, there’s an imbalance in what’s at stake. Though not explicitly stated in much of the literature I’ve studied, Taiwan represents an immediate, tangible interest deeply connected to the Communist Party’s sense of mission and legitimacy. While China can tolerate the current situation of de facto separation as it has for years, for the United States, Taiwan is an island without a formal treaty alliance, far from the US homeland, and not essential to America’s territorial integrity. The outcome of any Taiwan conflict would matter more to China. The US can have strong interests too, but they’re more diffuse and indirect, whereas China’s interests are specific and direct — Taiwan represents unfinished business from the Chinese Civil War rather than America’s global position and alliance structure.

Finally, nobody wants to fight a nuclear war. Many of China’s information-age weapons — non-nuclear weapons with strategic effects — are designed to push the US to the threshold of nuclear weapons use and then call its bluff. The open question remains whether America’s seemingly unpredictable nature extends to nuclear weapons use. That’s the million-dollar question.

Jordan Schneider: Another point supporting that perspective is that we’ve now seen two consecutive presidents take Putin’s nuclear threats seriously, even though those threats were less credible and not directly aligned with major US strategic interests. This clearly impacted Biden’s calculations. With Trump, throughout his campaign and in his meeting with Zelensky, he repeatedly warned, “You’re flirting with World War III.” It’s one thing to exhibit Jacksonian intensity when fighting overseas wars, but it’s entirely different when you genuinely fear that Los Angeles could be destroyed.

Mike Horowitz: There’s something interesting about how presidents conceptualize nuclear war and risk. Looking at Trump’s public comments, they suggest he might be even more concerned about nuclear risk than some other presidents. While every president since Truman has worried about nuclear war, Trump seems particularly focused on the dangers of nuclear escalation.

Jordan Schneider: It will be interesting when we eventually see a generational change — a president who didn’t grow up during the 60s, 70s, and 80s when nuclear concerns were front and center. But returning to the PLA — Fiona, let’s discuss counter-space capabilities. We’ve witnessed several interesting and explicit demonstrations of these capabilities from China in recent years.

Fiona Cunningham: I should share a personal anecdote — one reason I became interested in writing this book was China’s anti-satellite weapons test in 2007, when they destroyed an aging weather satellite with a conventional missile. I was in college at the time and remember seeing it on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, wondering what it meant. The book actually opens with this ASAT weapons test, perhaps for that unwritten reason.

China pursued counter-space weapons capability for coercive purposes — to exert pressure during a potential conventional conflict with the US over Taiwan, particularly after the Belgrade embassy bombing. This decision was difficult to pinpoint precisely, but based on Jiang Zemin’s speeches, it was likely made between late 2000 and late 2002.

China recognized that anti-satellite weapons could disrupt an adversary’s space capabilities and impede the US military’s long-term objective of achieving space control. They developed a range of counter-space capabilities, including lasers that could dazzle optical sensors on US satellites. In fact, they dazzled a US National Reconnaissance Office satellite around 2005, then tested the missile that destroyed a satellite and created substantial debris, generating international criticism.

Their goal was to develop various weapons that could attack US satellites in orbit and disrupt data transmission between those satellites and Earth. These range from non-kinetic reversible effects, such as lasers and electronic warfare jamming, to irreversible effects like completely destroying satellites. More recently, China has developed co-orbital capabilities — satellites that can maneuver to grab onto other satellites, tow them elsewhere, collide with them, or position themselves close enough to jam or dazzle from proximity.

What’s curious is that China didn’t pursue counter-space capabilities earlier. There’s a common perception that China identified attacking US satellites as a valuable coercive tool following the Gulf War. However, when examining the sources, China didn’t begin contemplating counter-space attacks until the late 1990s, after the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis. Before that, in the context of the Gulf War, China primarily recognized that to fight like the United States, it would need its own military satellites to guide weapons and confirm target destruction.

This desire to build military support capabilities in space constrained China’s approach to counter-space weapons. They consistently emphasized that hostilities in space should be limited, unlike their apparent willingness to consider more extensive use of conventional missiles. That’s the doctrinal capability narrative that has emerged.

Jordan Schneider: The pattern is fascinating — China demonstrates a capability, America becomes alarmed and develops countermeasures. This is the challenge with sub-nuclear capabilities — the more you reveal, the more your adversary adapts. By the end of both the cyber and counter-space chapters, you quote Chinese analysts essentially saying, “This didn’t achieve exactly what we wanted. America now has ten times more capabilities than we anticipated a decade ago.” What are your thoughts on this dynamic, Fiona?

Fiona Cunningham: While this dynamic matters, it may not be as important as we might think. Many of these capabilities were designed to give China credible leverage when it was considerably weaker than it is today. Even if these capabilities become less effective over 20-30 years, they still provided China with methods to deter and coerce the United States when China’s conventional capabilities posed minimal threat.

Currently, I don’t believe China’s conventional capabilities threaten decisive victory against the United States in the Indo-Pacific, but they’re substantially improved compared to 20-30 years ago. The US military would face much greater challenges fighting China today than it would have two decades ago.

China’s pursuit of these capabilities has pushed the US to develop countermeasures, which in some ways validates China’s strategic choices — these capabilities delivered on their promise by forcing the US to reconsider how it approaches conflicts and organizes capabilities across different domains. The cyber changes we discussed earlier exemplify this. Additionally, the US withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty partly due to China’s conventional missile force growth, creating new questions for China about how US intermediate-range conventional missiles in the region might affect its security.

Similarly, China’s counter-space capabilities have compelled the United States to rethink its satellite architecture. The US formerly relied on “big juicy targets” — large satellites for sensing and signals intelligence that supported conventional conflicts and precision strikes. Now the United States deploys smaller, less vulnerable satellites to complement these larger assets.

Mike Horowitz: Or haven’t yet.

Fiona Cunningham: Right. This adaptation means China faces many more targets if it wants to use counter-space capabilities effectively. It can no longer neutralize US capabilities by destroying just a handful of sensing satellites. Furthermore, the United States now discusses its own counter-space capabilities much more openly.

China has triggered a big reaction in the space domain. Chinese strategists are now concerned about several US initiatives, including distributed satellite constellations, US counter-space capabilities, satellites that monitor activities in orbit, and US partnerships with commercial space companies that enhance American capabilities. They’re also increasingly worried about the potential for nuclear escalation resulting from space-based conflicts — a new development over the past five years.

Mike Horowitz: Another way to think about this more broadly is the reveal-conceal dilemma when developing capabilities. Everything Fiona said is correct. Generally, you reveal capabilities to deter or coerce, while you conceal capabilities for actual conflict. China’s actions in space represent revelation specifically to impose costs, which they have accomplished by driving many changes to US space architecture — both implemented and planned.

However, some areas are difficult to conceal even when that’s the intention. Space is arguably one such domain — concealment is easier in some ways but harder in others. We don’t know exactly what China’s intentions are when they do things like dazzle our assets. Are they purposely revealing capabilities, or would they prefer to conceal these tests but can’t? Their testing options differ from terrestrial missiles, which can sometimes be tested in relative isolation. This fundamentally changes the dynamic.

Fiona Cunningham: To add one more element, PLA space deterrence doctrine often describes a tiered approach. You begin by signaling your capabilities or repositioning assets to make them visible. Mike’s point is particularly relevant because even when examining PRC doctrine, you can see there’s a strategic place for movement and revelation of capabilities intended to send a message. Determining whether they’re following established doctrine or simply couldn’t hide what they were testing remains a key challenge.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s discuss dogfighting. Mike, would you like to address this?

Mike Horowitz: Recently, a US Space Force official published an article discussing China conducting “dogfighting” in space. This terminology demonstrates how we project our understanding of one domain onto another. However, it clearly illustrates what Fiona’s book demonstrates about China’s capabilities and their testing approaches.

Despite changes over recent years, the US Space Force still feels constrained in its ability to conduct similar testing and faces questions about what would be operationally permissible. One interpretation of this discussion about Chinese “dogfighting” in space is that the US Space Force is signaling that what the PLA is doing is legitimate. The implication is that if we want to deter and defeat these tactics — rather than merely exhausting them through proliferated assets that complicate disruption of American capabilities — we need to grant the Space Force more authority to operate in space, including activities that have been considered dangerous for decades.

Fiona Cunningham: If I’m not mistaken, the report on dogfighting described a scenario where several Chinese satellites — more than three — essentially surrounded another satellite. This demonstrates advanced capabilities in rendezvous and proximity operations — the ability to position several objects close to each other in space. This relates to Mike’s point about constraints regarding how close one might be permitted to approach in these operations.

Regarding the specific terminology of “dogfighting,” I’ll note that I don’t know how you would say “dogfighting” in Chinese. This probably indicates that the term doesn’t appear in their doctrine.

Jordan Schneider: Everyone wishes they were still flying fighter jets over Korea. That’s basically the lesson of all this.

Mike Horowitz: The question for Fiona is, how sophisticated do you believe China’s conventional missile arsenal has become? China has, by my count, at least six relatively modern anti-ship missiles, including two different anti-ship ballistic missiles, something like the DF-17 anti-ship hypersonic missile, along with the YJ-class missiles. How important is this development? Coming from the Pentagon in 2024, the importance of these missiles represents one of perhaps the top five questions facing the US military today, particularly the US Navy.

Fiona Cunningham: This is an Air Force issue as well, since these same missiles can target assets on regional airfields. Examining PLA conventional missile doctrine reveals something interesting: as their forces become more precise, the described target set actually narrows. Rather than infrastructure or economic targets, they now focus on missile defenses, electronic warfare capabilities, radars, airfields, and ships.

Some advances are obvious — China’s missiles have become more accurate. Finding reliable estimates of their accuracy is challenging — how many missiles will land within a short range of their target, and how frequently they’ll hit within a certain radius of that point.

The most important change for China comes in sensing capabilities. Precision missile capability requires not just accurate missiles but also sensing systems to locate targets and confirm successful strikes. This presents a particular challenge for anti-ship ballistic missiles. Extensive analysis has examined what space-based and ground-based capabilities China might employ to locate US carriers — the key question being whether they could find and track them sufficiently for missile targeting.

Recently, China deployed an optical satellite in geosynchronous orbit that provides persistent coverage of that region, significantly enhancing their target acquisition capabilities. The black box for me is what happens between the sensor and the shooter — this can be a very difficult process. I have less visibility on whether this presents as big an issue for anti-ship ballistic missiles targeting large vessels as it would for more precise targeting scenarios.

The other question involves US countermeasures and their effectiveness against China’s attempts to hit both moving targets and fixed installations. The US could potentially use its own counter-space capabilities to disrupt Chinese sensing systems important for locating and tracking vessels. However, fixed targets like Kadena Air Force Base remain at known locations. You may not know exactly what assets are present, but you can still strike these fixed targets even with degraded sensing capability.

This leads to considering what else the US can do to disrupt China’s precision strike capability, which ultimately points toward disrupting missiles before launch. This returns us to the challenging problems of tracking mobile missiles that we discussed earlier. You can see how these issues are interconnected.

I’m not directly answering your question, Mike, because uncertainty exists about the steps in the chain that China must complete to successfully hit the more challenging US targets. Substantial uncertainty also surrounds the effectiveness of US countermeasures, both in terms of disrupting PRC capabilities and in hiding from or diverting those missiles once launched and en route to their targets.

Mike Horowitz: That’s a great answer, super helpful. What about Chinese hypersonics in general? China has tested hypersonic systems that have excited missile enthusiasts and generated concern that the US could be falling behind in this technology. Setting aside the “falling behind” narrative — and I’ll save my personal rant about hypersonics for another day —

Fiona Cunningham: I’d love to hear it — come on, we’re here.

Jordan Schneider: We’re two hours in, Mike. The people are waiting for this.

Mike Horowitz: There’s no capability that disappointed me more when I left the Pentagon than hypersonics, particularly regarding the relative value for investment. They have their place but have been somewhat overhyped considering the overall architecture of missile systems. That’s not surprising coming from me, given my advocacy for precise mass and more attritable autonomous systems.

My question for you, Fiona: How fearsome are China’s hypersonics, and how have they managed to deploy so many hypersonic systems so quickly compared to the United States?

Fiona Cunningham: The short answer to why China has been quicker than the United States: I can’t point to a specific line in a PLA manual or teaching text, but if I were to hazard a guess, it’s because this is a priority for China. Conventional missiles, and missiles in general, represent an area where China has invested a lot of effort ahead of other aspects of its conventional military modernization and certainly its nuclear modernization. When you prioritize something, you naturally progress more quickly.

It also relates to China’s specific problem set. The United States has deployed missile defense systems around China’s periphery, most visibly with the THAAD system in South Korea in 2016, which caused considerable political disruption in Northeast Asian security dynamics. China faces the challenge of defeating missile defenses. If that’s your problem at theater range, hypersonics offer a potential solution because of both their speed and maneuverability in the terminal phase, making them more difficult for missile defenses to intercept.

Regarding their effectiveness — they’ve been tested in controlled environments. Their true capabilities won’t be known until they face actual US missile defense systems, and their success will depend on how US capabilities to track hypersonic missiles progress. This represents an ongoing development with the current space sensing architecture.

This creates a cat-and-mouse dynamic where China’s investment may provide a temporary advantage, but the US can potentially close the gap — either through the precise mass approach you advocate or through countermeasures specifically designed to address the problems that hypersonics solve for China.

Mike Horowitz: To me, that’s an “and” not an “or” for the US, but that’s very helpful.

Jordan Schneider: Thinking about that exchange, I was trying to imagine how to persuade Trump to defend spending on basic research and science. This led me to recall the “super duper missile” and “invisible aircraft” comments. We’re recording this on Friday, March 21, when the NGAD, the sixth-generation fighter, is about to be announced.

My mental model suggests Trump will approve spending on things that are big, fast, and shiny — not slow and attritable. There’s an interesting tension here. Many influential tech companies like Palantir and figures connected to Trump’s circle advocate for one theory of acquisitions and victory, whereas Trump himself seems drawn to technologies you can describe with dramatic action-figure adjectives, rather than, say, cute submersible drones.

Mike Horowitz: One notable aspect of the 17 priorities that the Pentagon announced for its review of the FY26 budget is how both sophisticated systems and “one-way attack” precise mass systems were explicitly identified as investment priorities.

My instinct is that you’re probably correct. Additionally, the now-confirmed Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg is a strong hypersonics advocate. What we might see, due to both Feinberg’s influence and presidential preferences, is a push toward a high-low capability mix — investing in both the biggest, shiniest assets like NGAD and hypersonics, as well as more distributed mass capabilities.

Since many US capability investments over the last couple of decades have focused on that mid-tier range, this shift raises questions about those programs. As an advocate for a high-low mix for the force, I don’t necessarily find this troubling, even if the pathway there differs from what I might prefer.

Jordan Schneider: Fiona, were there alternative paths the PLA could have taken? Could they have decided in the late 80s to focus on nuclear modernization, making that threat more credible, rather than building a massive conventional force with advanced capabilities in space, cyber, and missiles? Was that a viable option? And would that approach have made China’s rise less concerning to other nations? Or do you see concerns about China as primarily related to economic growth rather than specific military capabilities?

Fiona Cunningham: That’s an excellent question. It depends on which parameters you change. What if those big incidents with the United States in the mid-1990s hadn’t occurred? In the book, I also discuss the EP-3 crisis, when a US reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter collided over Hainan Island in 2001.

Mike Horowitz: Remember how big that incident was at the time?

Fiona Cunningham: It was enormous.

Mike Horowitz: We’ve somewhat memory-holed it, especially given the current global uncertainty, but when it happened, it was a major international crisis.

Fiona Cunningham: I was in what Americans would call middle school at the time. It was another event I followed closely, similar to the ASAT test, as it occurred very early in the Bush administration. Looking back, it’s clear why my childhood dream of becoming a human rights lawyer at the UN got diverted by media coverage of these events.

Mike Horowitz: By your one true love for nuclear weapons.

Fiona Cunningham: Well, if I truly loved nuclear weapons, I’d probably study a different country. They’re not China’s favorite.

An alternative narrative might have emerged when China encountered these crises with the US that revealed its leverage deficits. China could have decided, “We have nuclear weapons. We’ve observed NATO’s approach during the Cold War. We’re watching contemporary Russian strategies in the 1990s. We’ll simply adapt our nuclear posture and follow those models,” referencing Iain Johnston’s famous “limited nuclear deterrence” article. That’s one potential pathway.

Another scenario: without these crises, China might still have developed its conventional military, but its modernization and strategy would have responded to different variables — how other countries fight wars, party unity (to reference Taylor Fravel, my advisor’s work). You might have seen conventional modernization proceed without these investments in non-nuclear strategic deterrence.

Economic factors could have reshaped China’s conventional modernization trajectory. Jiang Zemin explicitly stated in the late 1990s that China’s military modernization progress toward joining the ranks of advanced military powers — “world-class militaries,” though he didn’t use that specific term — was contingent on the country’s economic circumstances.

A third consideration: how much of the current situation stems from Xi Jinping being a different type of leader with distinct visions for China’s foreign policy and defense strategy compared to his predecessors? I tend to see more continuity than change. However, with a different leader pursuing objectives unlike those of Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin — perhaps emphasizing greater international engagement or taking a different approach to domestic politics — China might have followed a different path.

Mike Horowitz: It’s tempting to view everything as inevitable in retrospect. My instinct is that if it hadn’t been the Taiwan Strait Crisis or the EP-3 incident, something else would have triggered similar developments. From a structural perspective, China’s rise combined with frequent US demonstrations of conventional military superiority during the Iraq invasion and subsequent conflicts created conditions where accelerated PLA conventional modernization became highly probable. The question is: what additional steps would they take beyond that?

Fiona Cunningham: That’s where politics enters the equation. Stepping back, one of the major conclusions of my book is that China’s decisions about strategic deterrence and capabilities intended to pressure the United States are all connected to political dynamics. This isn’t primarily about US capability dynamics but rather those political crises that create urgent demand for enhanced capabilities to deter the United States from engaging in future confrontations. The US doesn’t always pay sufficient attention to these political dynamics, while from China’s perspective, they’re paramount.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s close with three things, Fiona. First, recommend one PLA book for listeners who’ve made it to the end of this episode. Second, share your favorite Chinese phrase, perhaps something PLA-adjacent. Finally, which meeting in recent or older PLA history would you have liked to witness, and perhaps what organization you might have worked for during which time period.

Fiona Cunningham: I would decline working for any PLA organizations — I don’t think that uniform would have suited me well.

Regarding a meeting I would have liked to witness recently, I’m curious about why China’s military leaders decided to disband the Strategic Support Force around March or April last year. It previously housed space capabilities, cyber capabilities, and the network maintenance organization for all PLA Defense Information Networks. They announced a separate force for information networks, but almost nothing has emerged about what happened to the cyber and space components. I really want to understand why this occurred and why there’s been silence about the other elements.

For historical meetings, in approximately 1978, there was a meeting where Deng Xiaoping commented that China should continue considering tactical nuclear weapons while making decisions about the future of Chinese nuclear forces. Information about these decisions is scarce, but I’d love to know what choices led China’s leaders to still contemplate whether shorter-range, lower-yield nuclear weapons would help defend their borders against the Soviets, and why that idea eventually faded as China maintained its restrained nuclear strategy.

For a PLA book recommendation, I frequently return to an edited volume from the National Defense University titled Crossing the Strait: China's Military Prepares for War with Taiwan with editors Joel Wuthnow, Phillip Saunders, and others. It contains many valuable chapters summarizing China’s doctrine for a Taiwan conflict. Joel Wuthnow’s chapter on PLA command and control systems is particularly helpful for anyone wanting to understand China’s campaign capabilities as of a year or two ago. It exemplifies the best that PLA studies and analysis can offer regarding the dilemma we discussed at the beginning of this podcast — this remains the primary scenario and most difficult problem facing military leaders in the United States and allied countries.

My favorite Chinese phrase would be “惩戒行动” (chéngjiè xíngdòng), which appears in descriptions of China’s counter-space capabilities and roughly translates to “punitive strikes and disciplinary action” — essentially combining “punish” and “warn.” This phrase resonated with me early in developing my dissertation topic because it emphasized how differently China approaches the space domain and space deterrence compared to nuclear weapons. In many ways, it represented the variation in the dependent variable that made this not just an interesting and policy-relevant topic but one with academic merit as a political science dissertation.

Jordan Schneider: Can you use those words in a teaching or parenting context?

Fiona Cunningham: During my interviews in China, I asked what this phrase meant. People explained that “惩戒行动” referred to conflicts with punitive and disciplinary elements, like the Sino-Vietnamese War. When I asked if nuclear retaliation qualified, they said no. There’s a footnote about this in the book. No one suggested it was terminology they would use when teaching students or parenting children, so I would recommend keeping it within a military strategy context.

Jordan Schneider: Tell us more about the general atmosphere of the Chinese defense analyst community. How would you characterize them as people, using broad generalizations? And what do they gain from speaking with you?

Fiona Cunningham: When I conducted interviews for the book, mostly as a graduate student, I believe they were partly motivated by helping a student learn. The desire to assist students transcends cultural contexts. There’s also genuine interest among many Chinese experts to engage with researchers who make the effort to visit China, learn the language, and understand the strategic studies lexicon. They want to clarify misconceptions and ensure that American discourse about these topics shows a more nuanced understanding.

I was in China conducting this research during the 2015-16 PLA reforms. At times, when I asked questions about certain issues, people would simply respond that they didn’t know — until the reform package clarified, there was a lot of uncertainty.

As a group, the Chinese defense and strategic studies community isn’t fundamentally different from what you’d expect in the United States. There’s diversity in terms of gender, age, and ideological perspective — some more conservative than others. However, it’s a relatively small community, similar to the United States, where many experts know each other well and are familiar with each other’s views.

Jordan Schneider: One more question about the defense community. In a recent paper, you noted that the civilian defense consensus argued against extensive nuclear modernization, but Xi disregarded this view, and modernization proceeded anyway. However, before 2019, expert discussions often aligned with eventual PLA actions across various dimensions. What do you make of this shift?

Fiona Cunningham: One conclusion might be that the expert community has less influence or interaction with decision-makers than previously. Some have drawn this interpretation regarding nuclear policy. I have work in progress — referenced when we discussed China’s nuclear modernization drivers — showing that perspectives within China vary on why nuclear capabilities should be modernized and what specific actions should be taken.

In that paper, I focused on one segment of the PRC community involved in arms control that expressed concerns about threats to China’s retaliatory capability but didn’t advocate for substantial arsenal expansion. However, other voices within China’s strategic and defense community do support a larger arsenal — not based on intricate calculations about warhead targeting or force posturing to make credible threats, but simply because more nuclear weapons provide political leverage. This isn’t connected to military campaigns or outcomes but shows the psychological impact of greater capability. It could even be viewed as status-related, with nuclear prominence offering instrumental advantages.

This mentality helps explain the gap between what the arms control community might recommend and China’s actual behavior. More research on this is forthcoming.

Jordan Schneider: Standing invitation — we could host shows in Chinese if experts want to join us, with Fiona and me co-hosting discussions about specialized aspects of PLA doctrine.

Mike Horowitz: I look forward to the translation of that episode.