What is China's Grand Strategy for Asia?

Xi Jinping's geopolitical gambit for Asia is strategic and personal.

China's economic, geopolitical, social, financial, and military strategies are oriented around reclaiming its regional foothold in Southeast Asia. It has no interest—and too many constraints—in supplanting global U.S. hegemony.

The historian Peter Frankopan pointed out that the heart of the world is beating in Asia. Indeed, the arteries of commerce and capital pump into the region which continues to grow in geo-strategic importance.

But more accurately, China wants and continues to dig its heels specifically into Southeast Asia. From a macro perspective, Beijing’s strategy leverages five dimensions of power to influence its global and regional standing.

1. Military

2. Economic

3. Financial

4. Social, Intellectual, Cultural

5. Institutional

A book could be written on each of these alone—and some have been—but this will aim to cover these strategies from a 30,000-foot view. The omission of domestic frameworks vis-a-vis technology and industrial policy were deliberate.

While they are relevant to analyze, they don’t feature as prominently relative to the other five dimensions that reinforce China’s regional strategy. Beijing’s goal is dominance in Southeast Asia, and it needs - and does - leverage global conduits to achieve its regional objectives.

Military

The aircraft carrier is arguably the ultimate symbol of American military dominance and its ability to project power overseas. Naturally, when China started to build their own, it was an indirect symbol of challenging the US.

China used anti-piracy missions and joint, multilateral military exercises in Asia to justify building up what would become a larger military network. This is a re-occurring theme in Chinese strategies: leverage existing systems to advance your own strategic interests economically, militarily, etc.

However, there is nuance here. As Oriana Skyler Mastro points out in her book Upstart:

“China’s carriers are nowhere near the US gold standard. US carriers are bigger and can support more aircrafts, and they are nuclear-powered (meaning US carriers do not need to be refueled until about twenty years of service, in stark contrast to the Lianing and Shandong, both of which needs to be refueled every six days”.

China also lags behind in nuclear strike capabilities and advanced warfare tactics in space. However, Beijing has its own advantages and strategies for exploiting US vulnerabilities. This is what has been dubbed "the “assassin’s mace”.

In Chinese military strategy, it refers to a surprise, decisive weapon or tactic that can enable a weaker force to defeat a stronger adversary. Historically, it has roots in the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), a time marked by intense conflict between rival states in ancient China, where strategies for achieving surprise or asymmetrical advantages were highly valued.

China’s cruise and ballistic missile programs are the most advanced in the world. Their anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM) are specially designed to neutralize “slow moving targets at sea”; in other words, aircraft carriers. In terms of efficiency and cost differential, China has a leg up.

“It would take only a single $18 million Chinese DF-21D carrier-killer missile to cripple a $13 billion American Ford-class aircraft carrier”, Mastro writes. Top US military strategists also contend that China’s anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) tactics are formidable:

“…repeated wargames reveal that the United States could lose if forced to project power into Chinese A2/AD zones, as in war over Taiwan”.

Just last week, Mainland China concluded two days of military exercises around Taiwan, including long-range live-fire drills in the East China Sea, escalating its show of force near the island. Beijing views Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out using force to assert control.

As the world becomes increasingly digitized and AI development accelerates, Chinese strategies are rapidly shifting as well. But this change already started over twenty years ago: since 2000, every Chinese national defense white paper has emphasized informatization.

The US’ use of intelligence in the Gulf Wars led China to conclude that the decisive victories were a function of superior information technologies. Since then, and particularly with the advent of AI, it has led China to re-conceptualize warfare into a framework called “systems confrontation”.

A paper from Georgetown University defined it as “a duel between opposing military operating systems, with the center of gravity being the information architecture”. You can read more about this in my previous report: Geopolitical Power Play: AI Unleashed.

It is therefore not surprising that since US military dominance primarily relies on its space-based telecommunication networks for terra operations, China’s assassin’s mace framework would exploit this weakness to gain a military advantage.

More specifically, disrupting space-based, information-sharing networks that would render US military strategies less effective. This assassin’s mace would help level the playing field in a regional conflict.

But a strong military is nothing without a strong economy to back it up.

Economic

China boasts a near-monopoly on processing so-called rare earth minerals, and uses them as leverage in global affairs. A few weeks ago, China imposed export controls on germanium and gallium exports to the US. They produce 98 percent of the world's supply of gallium and 60 percent of germanium

Both are used in civilian and military applications including but not limited to medical devices, semiconductors, solar panels, LEDs, fiber optics, etc. But that’s just two. Others include: