What to Know About China’s Nuclear Weapons Program

Welcome to Foreign policyChina Brief.

This week’s highlights: US nuclear test plans shine spotlight on China A growing arsenalThe United States and China agree to re-establish Military communication channelsand Chinese in the United Kingdom Spy drama It continues.

China’s nuclear ambitions

Moments before his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced that the United States would begin testing US nuclear weapons “on an equal footing” with China and Russia. Although it is not yet clear whether Trump means testing a nuclear-capable weapons system — as Russia did last week — or testing nuclear warheads, the latest test would be the first of its kind for the United States in 33 years.

Whatever Trump believes, China has not conducted a known nuclear test since its 1996 underground test at Lop Nur in Xinjiang – after which it signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and declared a formal end to its nuclear testing program. (Like the United States, China has not ratified the treaty, but both countries say they have adhered to it.) There have been rumors about China conducting low-throughput or sub-critical tests, but they are unconfirmed.

China has expanded the Loop Nor test site in recent years, indicating potential preparations to revamp testing. This expansion included submerging deep shafts of the type used in underground testing. As analyst Rene Babiarz, who has closely monitored the site, told me, this involves transporting giant drilling rigs, one of which is about 90 feet high and weighs up to a hundred metric tons, to the site. “All in all, this indicates a significant investment of time and money, especially considering that this work is taking place within a safe zone of national strategic importance,” Babiarz noted.

If the tests are planned, they may be driven in part by China’s desire to catch up with its geopolitical counterparts. To date, China has conducted only an estimated 45 nuclear tests, compared to 1,030 nuclear tests conducted by the United States and 715 conducted by Russia.

China’s nuclear ambitions have long been considered relatively modest. However, despite former leader Mao Zedong’s infamous threat that nuclear weapons were a “paper tiger” and that China could afford to lose 300 million lives if it were attacked by a nuclear attack, the young People’s Republic of China rushed to acquire nuclear weapons in the early years of the Cold War.

It was a difficult task for a poor country, but the task became easier when the brilliant rocket scientist Qian Xuesen was expelled from the United States in 1955, and subsequently returned to China and established its rocket and space program. The Soviet Union also provided significant technical assistance, but withdrew its advisors and scientists from China in the period from 1959 to 1960 as relations between Moscow and Beijing became tense.

By the time China tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964, the country viewed the bomb as a deterrent directed against the Soviet Union as much as it was directed against the United States. Until the partial reconciliation between China and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Chinese people’s nuclear concerns were largely centered around the Soviet Union. (When Tangshan was destroyed by an earthquake in 1976, many residents initially mistook it for a Soviet nuclear attack.)

China has always maintained an explicit no-first-use policy, meaning it will only use nuclear weapons in response to another nuclear attack. Partly for financial reasons, it also adopted a simplified approach to its force structure, seeking only sufficient weapons to deter an adversary.

At the same time, China’s approach to nuclear nonproliferation has been less responsible. The country was a late rejector of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, joining it only in 1992; In previous decades, it was suspected of aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.

However, China has recently retreated from its modesty and engaged in an ambitious, expensive, and top-secret nuclear modernization program. Since around 2020, the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, which oversees China’s nuclear weapons, has dramatically expanded its missile sites and the size of its nuclear arsenal, as well as developing new missiles — which were on display at a military parade in September.

China’s nuclear weapons program is mysterious even by the standards of the Chinese military. There are no official figures on how many nuclear weapons China possesses — only outside estimates, which vary widely and are often intertwined in American policy debates. The general consensus is that China has several hundred nuclear warheads, far behind Russia and the United States, which each have more than five thousand.

Whatever the real number is, it represents an increase from even a few years ago, when the number of Chinese warheads was likely only in the hundreds. There are some theories about China’s ultimate goals with its nuclear forces, ranging from ensuring a reliable second-strike capability to achieving parity with the United States and Russia. China has aggressively responded to attempts to investigate its plans, including harassing researchers and spreading preachers online.

The only thing that can be said about China’s nuclear expansion is that it is likely to be extraordinarily corrupt. Since 2022, the People’s Liberation Army’s missile force has been one of the main targets of Xi’s military purges, with several former commanders and other high-ranking figures now in prison or awaiting trial. In any case, if the United States resumes nuclear testing, China will be willing to follow suit.

What we follow

US-Chinese military communications. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth struck a conciliatory tone after the Trump-Xi summit last week, saying on Sunday that US-China relations had “never been better” and that the two sides would re-establish military communication channels.

In recent years, the repeated collapse and recovery of these canals has become almost routine. Military contacts between the two militaries were suspended during Trump’s first term, resumed by former US President Joe Biden, canceled by China after then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, reinstated again under Biden, and interrupted again this year after Trump returned to office.

In normal times, I assume that some informal lines of communication continue regardless of the status of formal military channels between the United States and China. However, given the current chaos and incompetence on the American side and the paranoia about unauthorized contact with foreigners on the Chinese side, I do not believe this is true today.

British Chinese Drama. There appears to be something in the water in the UK when it comes to questions about Chinese influence. Last Wednesday, Governor telegraph A newspaper has launched a scathing attack on US financier John Thornton over his appearance in a photo with Chinese “spy chief” Kai Qi, linking Kai to the recent controversy over alleged espionage in the UK parliament.

It’s a weird offensive line. Tsai, a member of the Politburo, effectively serves as Xi Jinping’s chief of staff and has no direct authority over China’s intelligence agency. The espionage case — which involved the exchange of political gossip and speculation, not classified information — appears to be one of many Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts that take place informally or at the provincial level.

Meanwhile, Thornton is a key figure in US-China trade relations. It is not surprising that he met a senior Chinese official. So why the attack? the telegraph It is currently for sale, and Thornton is a potential buyer. It appears that the newspaper’s current leadership is trying to sabotage his attempt.

FP Most Read This Week

Technology and business

A new debt control office. China has set up a new central government office to unravel the web of risky domestic debt that has built up over the past three decades. Fiscal reforms in 1994 shifted a large portion of the country’s revenue toward the central government, forcing local governments to rely heavily on borrowing and land sales to compensate. With the end of the boom years, many of these debts are now due.

The key question here is whether the Debt Control Office has the enforcement powers and experience necessary to rein in local governments. After Xi cut their salaries, many skilled financial regulators left for the private sector.

The head of the new administration, Li Dawei, is a veteran budget inspector, and will need every bit of that experience: China’s local government finances are notoriously chaotic, with debts often hidden from central authorities.

Coffee wars. Starbucks has agreed to sell a majority stake in its Chinese operations to Boyu Capital, giving the company a 60% stake in the local business. The American coffee giant was an early entrant into the now huge Chinese coffee market, opening its first store in 1999 and growing to about 8,000 locations in the country.

But in recent years, Starbucks has struggled in China. The market has become saturated, and low-cost competitors like Luckin Coffee — despite surviving a massive fraud scandal — are ubiquitous. At the same time, Starbucks’ appeal as a symbol of the Western lifestyle faded; The brand often found itself in the crosshairs of nationalists.