Russia’s War in Ukraine: China’s Lessons

China’s most recent war anywhere in the world occurred in 1979, when it took over several cities near its shared land border with Vietnam but failed to stop Vietnam from toppling the pro-Beijing Pol Pot government in Cambodia.

Battle Preparation
China, keeper of the world’s third strongest armed forces, would vie with No. 21-ranked Taiwan in terms of military equipment and personnel.

Russia’s setbacks, however, suggest that any Chinese attack would take time, possibly more than China is ready for, some experts say.

“If Beijing wants to take Taiwan by force, it won’t act until it’s convinced it can win decisively and quickly,” James Jay Carafano, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, said in a commentary on March 8.

China would strive for a battle focused on disabling military installations and “decapitation” of Taiwanese leaders to ensure that no one stays on the ground as a “hero,” said Alexander Huang, chairman of a military strategy research foundation in Taipei. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appealed to multiple sympathetic countries for military aid — and received it.

“I think a lot of the discussion inside China is how to perform a total information blockade so Taiwan cannot cry for rescue,” Huang said.

Chinese military leaders should be rethinking their command structure, said Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst with the U.S.-based RAND Corporation research organization. “It is an open question whether a field commander can pull the trigger in a lot of these cases,” Grossman said. “They may still need to get Beijing’s authorization.”

Bracing for Sanctions
Beijing is likely to recalibrate its expectations for the international response to any attack on Taiwan, Tong Zhao, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment’s Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing, told a conference hosted by Boston radio station WBUR.

“China is very surprised about the Western response,” Zhao said. “I think this shows that even … Russian experts … didn’t know there was going to be such strong international support to Ukraine. I think Chinese experts are starting to reevaluate these strategies and policies.”

Officials in China are braced only for “limited” economic sanctions lasting three to five years, said Oriana Skylar Mastro, fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who spoke at the WBUR event.

Compared to Russia, China depends more on other countries for economic stability. China is the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods with 14.7% of the world total from 1978 to 2020, the U.N. agency UNCTAD estimates.

Peaceful Solution
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, asked in early March about Taiwan, pledged to “advance the peaceful growth of … relations and the reunification of China.”

Officials in Beijing are probably exploring harder now for a nonmilitary solution, Huang said. Taiwan and China have been at odds since 2016 on how to treat each other in any talks — as separate countries, parts of China or something else.

“The lessons (from Ukraine) send a big alert to Beijing (that) if they cannot achieve the goal militarily, quickly, then it’s going to be a geostrategic disaster, and that might lead Beijing to think more about other measures, not the military option,” he said.

Ralph Jennings is a writer covering China. This article is published courtesy of the Voice of America (VOA).