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Tai Ming Cheung has spent much of his career studying the relationship between defense, economic, and technological power in the People’s Republic of China. A professor at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, director of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and a former foreign correspondent in Asia, his first book examined the Chinese military’s foray into business in the 1990s, while his more recent scholarship has examined China’s emergence as a world-class technological and security power. In this Q&A, we spoke about Beijing’s strategy to integrate its economic and military bases and what comes next in its preparations for war. 

Q: Your latest research argues that Xi Jinping is increasingly militarizing multiple parts of the Chinese nation and economy. What does that mean and what does it entail? 

A: My research looks at the political economy of China’s national security and its military development since the beginning of the People’s Republic of China. In the first few decades of its existence, from 1949 to the end of the 1970s, it was a militarized state. Then, from the 1980s to the early 2020s, China went through economic reform and transitioned to a more balanced approach between national security and development. Now, militarization has returned. This oscillating balance between national security and economic growth has profoundly impacted China’s development trajectory. That is the arc of the history of the People’s Republic. 

With Xi Jinping’s rule, his approach to national security has gone through three phrases of development. The first stage was during his first term, when his focus was on securing political control through anti-corruption purges, beefing up the internal security apparatus and dealing with sources of internal instability. This stage can be termed political securitization. His second term was about economic securitization, addressing external threats to China’s economic development model, with access to markets like the U.S., the increasing imposition of sanctions and various trade barriers, a focus on supply chains, economic resilience, technological self-reliance and all that. Then, towards the end of Xi’s second term and as his third term has developed, we’ve seen the emergence of militarization. These three phases overlap a lot with each other and they often occur in cycles.

What does militarization entail? 

I wrote a book about the development of the Chinese techno-security state that came out in 2022, with an increasing focus on an integrated model of development between the defense and civilian sectors. The underlying analysis was premised on the fact that China was in a peacetime mode, that the world was peaceful, and that while there was a need to focus on military modernization and national security, there weren’t any really urgent existential threats to China’s survival. 

Militarization means that China has shifted away from this peacetime era to increasingly thinking about not quite wartime, but preparing for wartime contingencies, whether it’s actual war or, more likely, militarized competition. When you’re in a peacetime environment, you don’t want to burden your economy or your society with costly security requirements, and the military establishment’s focus is on modernization to improve and upgrade outdated capabilities and so on: it’s not really intended for immediate combat use. When you shift to a much more threat-based mode and start to worry about war, you expand from just focusing on the military establishment into all these other economic and societal domains. 

…the economy is looking to align itself and catch up with what the military has been preparing for. If this militarization spills over into the political arena, then there will be the possibility that more bellicose and repressive policies could be pursued. 

When I talk about militarization, my focus is primarily on mobilization and preparatory efforts, which involves economic mobilization, readiness preparation and ensuring that key parts of the economy are robust and able to deal with the potential and actual need to step up production at quick notice. What I don’t see yet [in China], which is critical, is militarism. Militaristic leaders are much more willing and eager to go to war, with war considered to be a just and ready-to-use policy option. 

PLA soldiers take part in drills in Chongqing (left) and Sichuan (right). Credit: Depositphotos

When you say different sectors are ensuring that they’re ready for mobilization, what does that involve? Are we talking about things like supply chain securitization, making sure everything is indigenously produced etc.? 

So economic securitization is a level or two below militarization. It is still primarily focused on a peacetime environment, and yes, you need to secure all that. But economic securitization is insufficient if a country is thinking that it may have to go to war. There are a number of additional steps. 

One is in terms of the leadership’s thinking. For example, Xi Jinping has referred to the need for extreme thinking (极限思维) about extreme scenarios. This was raised in 2023, in a very important forum. Xi made reference to this during one of the rare occasions that the Central National Security Commission meets, and rarer still, issues a press report. It’s a political signal, and he referred to it a couple of times that year, albeit in other contexts. 

Chinese analysts and commentators have interpreted ‘extreme thinking’ as a euphemism about preparing to go to war. It’s about the very worst case scenario, the very worst bottom line thinking that you can think about. Last year, an official document from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was published which said that with Xi Jinping talking about ‘extreme thinking,’ we now need to develop policies to carry that out. That particular document was referring to the need to upgrade and improve [the MIIT’s] emergency communications system. So you can see that within the Chinese bureaucracy, extreme thinking has become a policy approach for beefing up critical infrastructure.

So if you were, say, a Party Secretary for a province, and you receive the instruction to start contemplating ‘extreme thinking,’ how do you interpret that? 

The phrase is contextual, but it basically means we have to prepare for the very worst. We have to think that there is a likelihood that war may occur. It means you need to harden your infrastructure, build up your reserve capabilities, stress test your economic and societal capabilities. You need to prepare for mobilization. With the Trump administration coming in with its tariff and trade wars, that can easily spill over into other areas. As the impact of the tariffs goes on, the threat perception from the Chinese authorities will only continue to grow. 

This is linked in with longer-term defense preparations that have been occurring since the beginning of this decade, the most significant of which is the 2027 deadline for the military to become ready for major war. On the civilian side, the economy is looking to align itself and catch up with what the military has been preparing for. If this militarization spills over into the political arena, then there will be the possibility that more bellicose and repressive policies could be pursued. 

PLA soldiers launch anti-tank missiles (left) and train with night vision cameras (right). Credit: Depositphotos

You’ve argued that China learned a lesson from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine about the consequences of not militarizing enough. Could you say more about that? What is China now doing that Russia did not ahead of its invasion? 

Russia went into Ukraine in 2022 with armed forces that had been engaged in military modernization. But we didn’t really see very much in terms of large-scale economic preparedness, with the building up of capabilities and supplies — for a variety of reasons. One is that the Russian authorities didn’t really want to militarize all of society and the economy, because this would be a very clear warning sign that they’re intent on invasion. Another is that they didn’t think that their invasion would become a prolonged war of attrition. Russia bet big that they could go into Ukraine and win quickly and decisively, and that it would not disrupt Russia’s economic growth and prosperity. 

Chinese civilian and military leaders watched this and likely came to the conclusion that the Russians were not really well prepared. If you were going to go to war, you would really need to take these steps towards militarization. When the war didn’t turn out as Russia expected and the West intervened militarily to support Ukraine, the Chinese determined that if they went to war against Taiwan and faced a similar level of opposition, that would seriously hamper their ability to win. 

As we’ve heard from Western governments, the Chinese have been providing considerable assistance to the Russian military industrial complex. The Chinese have a good view of what is going on with the Russian war effort, especially in terms of the economic and the industrial situation. And it’s not just with the Russians. The Chinese have seen that NATO’s support of Ukraine has had a significant impact on depleting its stockpiles and military capabilities. All these issues have made clear to Chinese policy makers that in the wars to come, you have to plan for very protracted and attritional types of war.

Left: ‘NATO’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’ as displayed on NATO’s website. Right: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Ukranian President Zelenskyy, and Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, at the Defence Industry Forum at the NATO Summit in The Hague, June 24, 2025. Credit: NATO

If China is moving towards full scale militarization, at what point does the economy start to face trade-offs in terms of the guns and butter problem? Are these trade-offs already apparent? 

Another lesson that the Chinese have learned from studying the history of the Soviet Union’s rise and fall was that they should not move towards excessively investing in the defense sector. China’s own militarization in the first few decades [of the People’s Republic] was a clear lesson in that as well. That’s why the Chinese have been trying to keep the militarization burden at a sustainable rate. And they’ve been able to do that since the beginning of the 1980s even though the official defense budget has risen. Officially, the defense budget is still about 1.5 percent of GDP, although few experts seriously believe that figure. My estimates are probably closer to four to six percent of GDP, which is still sustainable as long as the Chinese economy is still growing. 

The longer this [militarization] goes on, the more we may see a trade-off between guns and butter. This is one reason why Xi Jinping and his government has not been particularly active in trying to intervene and support the economy in sectors such as poverty alleviation and housing. They’ve been holding back and making sure that strategic areas, whether it’s the military or the science and technology sectors, get the bulk of resources. 

You have argued that the relationship between China’s military and industrial sectors is transitioning into a phase you describe as ‘National Strategic Integration.’ Could you explain what National Strategic Integration is and how it’s different from military-civil fusion?

The official Chinese term is “Integrated National Strategic Systems with Capabilities.” (一体化国家战略体系和能力) But there isn’t really a detailed description of what national strategic integration is, compared to military-civil fusion. The development strategy for military-civil fusion came out in the mid- 2010s and was accompanied by a corpus of official documents that described what military-civil fusion was. Because of China’s increasing lack of transparency — especially since 2019, when the Chinese authorities stopped talking about military-civil fusion — they have been very reluctant to specify what National Strategic Integration is. The few times that they have talked about it, they’ve described a system-of-systems approach, which looks at different parts of the Chinese system — the economic system, the political system, the legal system, industrial systems — and how all of that helps in integrating the defense and the civilian sectors. 

To me, National Strategic Integration is the strategic planning and thinking about what militarization should be. And so it’s a much broader, higher level and more assertive approach compared with military-civil fusion. Military-civil fusion was primarily drawn up during a peacetime period, in the mid-2010s, to support the peacetime modernization of the PLA. National Strategic Integration, which Xi Jinping began to highlight in 2023, is about preparing for war. The assumptions are more about wartime contingency planning.

What does this mean for businesses in China? If you’re a company and you hear these exhortations to participate in National Strategic Integration, what are you potentially doing that you wouldn’t otherwise as a purely profit-driven enterprise? 

A lot of companies during the peak period of China’s economic growth avoided doing anything with the defense establishment or the national security apparatus. That’s because there was so much paperwork and costs attached to doing business with the defense sector. But the economic slowdown has made assisting the national security and defense apparatus more attractive, because that’s where the money and the growth is. The issue is, if you focus on taking part in military or dual-use activities, that essentially locks you into the Chinese domestic system, because the West, particularly the U.S. government, will target you with trade restrictions. Any Chinese company which does business with the Chinese military knows they won’t be able to engage in global trade, especially with the U.S.. It means you have to decide which market you want to be in.

There is a view in Washington that any Chinese company that matters can and is compelled to aid the military and national security apparatus. Do you think Chinese companies still have agency in deciding whether to work with the defense sector? 

China is not yet in a full blown militarization. Martial law hasn’t been declared, and China hasn’t invoked their equivalent to the Defense Production Act like the U.S. has done. The Chinese defense production sector is very selective about who it works with. When you look at the number of firms who are engaged in the Chinese defense acquisition system, it’s a very small number. This is by no means all of the Chinese economy. Maybe one or two percent of Chinese companies are involved. 

The vast majority of Chinese firms have nothing to do with defense or national security. We can see the main actors are the big defense firms, as opposed to high-tech companies, etc. I think companies still have a lot of agency. Sometimes their involvement is simply on the periphery. There’s the issue for example, of entire Chinese universities being sanctioned for ties to the defense sector when there may be a few entities within a university that are involved in defense-related work, but the vast majority of the university is not. It’s like U.S. universities where maybe a professor or a research institute is involved, but the rest of the campus is not. If you paint with a broad brush and say that if one entity is involved, every party of that entity becomes off-limits — which is how we approach it now — the result is that the Chinese economic system will increasingly be shut off from the West. 

Some U.S. military officials have pinpointed 2027 as the year when China will invade Taiwan? How do you see the 2027 date?

Militaries love to have specific targets and goals because it helps them to work out where they direct their resources and do their planning and training. But it has become clearer, and U.S. officials have now said that 2027 is not an exact date when China will invade Taiwan. It’s the date that the Chinese military and Xi Jinping says the PLA’s capabilities should be ready by, should it need to invade. So the date is about the development of military capabilities and not about China’s intentions on the use of force. 

The Chinese have set other dates too. 2027 was introduced with the 14th Five Year Plan. But before then, they had 2035, which is what much of the 2027 date was. 2035 was the deadline for the PLA to more or less complete its defense modernization. They later moved up some of those deadlines to 2027 to make it more urgent. But the Chinese have had 2035 and 2049 — the centenary of the [People’s Republic] — as deadlines for other military development priorities. As the 15th Five Year Plan will soon come out for 2026-2030 period, we’ll have a clearer understanding. As China approaches 2027, Chinese strategic policy makers will shift to focus on the 2035 timeline. And this means looking at the development of other types of strategic capabilities. 

Does all this make China more likely to go to war soon? How do you gauge when and whether China will be ready for conflict with Taiwan? 

It’s a very complex question. 

…as the PLA becomes more capable, there’s also more willingness to use military tools, whether it’s in the South China Sea or in the Taiwan Strait. And we’ve seen more militaristic tendencies within the Chinese leadership and society…

Beyond China, the academic literature shows that similar militarized states are more likely to go to war because their militaries are often in charge, and military instruments are often seen to be a desirable tool. But with China it’s not a black and white issue. 

First of all, we’ve seen from recent political developments that the military is not in charge in China. Xi Jinping is very much in charge. And Xi Jinping, while he’s very focused on military issues, is a Party leader. So in terms of the civil-military dimension, the military is very much under the control of the Communist Party, and the Communist Party has broader issues to deal with. Having a civilian leader in charge makes it less likely that China would actually go to war. 

But as the PLA becomes more capable, there’s also more willingness to use military tools, whether it’s in the South China Sea or in the Taiwan Strait. And we’ve seen more militaristic tendencies within the Chinese leadership and society, whether it’s in its propaganda or the increased profile and reputation of veterans. The military has never had much of a glorious role or presence in modern Chinese history, but that has begun to change in recent years. So it’s very much a mixed picture. I would say that on the whole there is more of a militaristic tendency in China, but it’s still under firm control by the Party. 

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