China would never directly initiate a war against the US; China’s long-term goals have nothing to do with militarily weakening the US, and are rather more focused on a global hegemony achieved by economically cornering emerging markets.
However, there are a number of actions China could take against countries other than the US, where the US would either feel obligated to initiate war against China in response; or where US voters might demand the US go to war against China in response.
(And Chinese military analysts are very aware of all of these, drawing big red lines around these parts of strategy-space. Though they're also always re-measuring where these lines land — American public sentiment can waver such that today's "unforgivable" action might be tomorrow's "barely tolerable" action.)
There are also a number of actions China could take against its own citizens, that could "require" the initiation of war against them according to various treaties signed by the US, or even according to "international customary law."
Re: the Genocide Convention:
> Importantly, the Convention establishes on State Parties the obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals” (Article IV). That obligation, in addition to the prohibition not to commit genocide, have been considered as norms of international customary law and therefore, binding on all States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide Convention.
(I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop them from doing this.)
> (I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop them from doing this.)
They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines, nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes. A land war in Asia against a nuclear armed emerging superpower with a good percentage of the world’s population is practically suicidal.
International customary law only matter if you have the firepower to back it up.
Land war? Who said anything about a land war? This would be a two-pronged war: a war of orbital+information supremacy (probably, but we don't even know the full evolution of internal military doctrine in 2023); and an insurrectionist war.
Specifically, the goal from the Western perspective wouldn't be to "fight China" as one coherent entity, but rather specifically to erase the CCP from existence. A decapitation, of a head from a body that isn't a very big fan of that head.
This would be done presumably by:
1. trying to pump information and agent-provocateurs into China, to get China's own people on the same page the rest of the world is on that's making them want to go to war; to get the Chinese people to — at least partially — disavow the CCP as representing their interests. (Seems like this is already well on its way, and has been going on for about a decade now.)
2. having very precise information about where every key member of the CCP is at all times, both optically and packet-traffic-wise. And having some petite, precision, semi-ballistic, hypersonic missiles, to send to those places. Not from submarines, mind you. Nor from planes. From "somewhere else." Somewhere that probably sounds like stupid science fiction if someone without medals on their chest says it's already feasible and has been implemented for years now.
3. being friendly with the Taiwanese government, and having them ready and briefed to step in when a plug-and-play APT-delivered information campaign triggers that will see them installed them back as the "rightful government of China" — without any of them having to step foot off the safety of their island.
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A tangent about technology and doctrine:
Every war the US (and partners like Britain) has fought since WW2, every proxy war, every time they've given weapons to allies — the US has been not using its strategic arsenal for these things, in order to not show its hand to bigger enemies.
But China is the bigger enemy. No need to hide anything.
> They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines
So, okay, there's a thing you have to recognize that goes on in the world — the declassification treadmill. Technologies become public, stories become declassified, etc. at exactly the point where the government involved in their classification, no longer thinks that there's any competitive advantage in keeping the technology secret. This might be because their opponents now all also have the technology. But it's more-often the point where the government involved has moved on to bigger and better things.
We got a lot of declassification of nuclear technology and history back in the 1970s. (But going so far as to allow that history to be made into a major 2023 motion picture? Well, that's a taunt: basically making fun of your rivals for still thinking nukes pose any threat to you at all.)
The public — and not just the American public — got access to GPS in the 1980s. And to very precise GPS in the 2000s. Do you know what that means? It's a tacit statement that the US military doesn't consider GPS-guided [or BeiDou-guided] ICBMs a viable threat any more, either!
What does a threat look like? Well, it might be something both the US and China secretly have, and will both pull out and go to war with. Or it might be something only the US has. But from the US's posturing, it seems a lot like it's a thing — several things — that only the US has. A thing that China knows or at least suspects the US has, where having this thing is more than enough to entirely subdue China from taking certain aggressive foreign-policy positions.
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> nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes
Well, no, of course that's not why anyone would actually bother. The Western goal is to pop China like a pinata and get all the candy that falls out. Not to invade/colonize, per se, but rather to interface directly with the Chinese people as a trading partner, without an insular and ethno-nationalist Chinese government setting the terms. To unplug the propaganda machine that makes Chinese tourists never bother to visit Western countries (except in insular, state-managed tour groups.)
A crime like genocide is just a defensible moral justification that everyone in the room in the UN could agree on, as a signal to get started on the project.
It's like if some awful billionaire who lives in your small town in his mansion with armed guards, one day killed his own wife, and everyone in town found out. From one perspective, it's "his family's internal business." But from another perspective, it's a defensible moral justification to everyone else in town finally forming a posse to storm his mansion, haul him out, do unspeakable things to him, and then auction off everything he owns! (Will his armed guards stop you? Maybe if he's still alive... but what if you could kill him at the very start? Maybe they'd admit they'd been waiting for you to do that for years, and they'll be glad to be off to a new job!)
> A decapitation, of a head from a body that isn't a very big fan of that head.
What's the argument behind this? Yes, there are questions about the quality of polling data you can extract from the Chinese public, but the polls that do exist seem to show broad and wholehearted support and trust in the state.
I can see why: they addressed the core 'are you better off than your father was at this phase in his life' question for the vast majority of their population.
There's a real chance this backfires: you didn't throw off the hated tyrant, you assassinated a respected symbol of progress and prestige.
Maybe China's relatively modest global ambitions come from a conscious attempt to avoid a direct replay of the Cold War. From an idealistic perspective, one obvious lesson was that you can't reliably export philosophy; Soviet satellite states and American-propped-up democracies both became money pits and fell apart. So why not stick to things like Belt and Road, which provide you economic opportunity and soft power on a budget?
>2. having very precise information about where every key member of the CCP is at all times, both optically and packet-traffic-wise. And having some petite, precision, semi-ballistic, hypersonic missiles, to send to those places. Not from submarines, mind you. Nor from planes. From "somewhere else." Somewhere that probably sounds like stupid science fiction if someone without medals on their chest says it's already feasible and has been implemented for years now.
And there's the flaw in your plan, if your orbital slaughterbot fantasy hits the wrong dead man's switch, half the world's population will be wiped out due to the fall out. There's a reason every single nuclear armed state still stands in some form. Nukes work, and intercepting hypersonic vehicles at scale is still tremendously difficult.
> and intercepting hypersonic vehicles at scale is still tremendously difficult
...as far as you know. Working purely from declassified information, which is all any of us have; but also in clear awareness of the clear forty-year gap between the frontier of declassified military secrets, and what would be the current classified state of the art.
> dead man's switch
I think you missed the part about, uh, the whole other half of how current doctrine works.
Do you know why having cyber supremacy is ranked above having space supremacy?
Because, if you have a sufficiently-good APT, you can have it press buttons! Buttons in places you'll never be able to get a spy inside at the right time! Buttons that subtly break all production missiles at the factory in ways undetectable until launch! Buttons that were meant to give civilian command oversight the emergency-override capability to cancel a pending launch of an insurrectionist military!
(Or, if you don't think that's plausible: "buttons" on a commander's personal cell phone, that calls a staff member of his and deepfakes their voice to tell the staffer to physically hit an air-gapped e-stop button. Add to the theatre by having the APT cut off Milnet-equivalent services at the time, so that a personal cellphone would be the obvious workaround.)
And of course, with previous APTs, you can also steal or more likely, create and plant all the blackmail material you want — to turn previously clean-and-trustworthy "keyholders", into your catspaws, willing to not turn the key when told. (Spies could do this too, but APTs can do it at scale.)
> There's a reason every single nuclear armed state still stands in some form.
Because none of them have yet stepped out of line enough for a major power who has anything "better than nukes" to see the point in showing their hand to their own much stronger opponents who have also moved on to playing this "better than nukes" poker game. (Nobody has had to show their hand at any point in the game so far. It's just been bluffing and folding. Nobody wants to be the first.)
For example, while North Korea has nukes, it has no answer to even basic 1990s-level orbital EMINT; and no functional Navy, let alone long-dive nuclear submarines to serve as untrackable launch platforms. All of NK's nuke launch sites are known — and so could be targeted for bombardment (with plain-old non-nuclear payloads!) in advance of launch, the moment they seem to be getting ready to shoot anyone.
The only reason it hasn't happened already, is that the action of taking the nuke sites out involves cards nobody wants to lay on the table until they have to. It's a move that weakens you, strategically. Although it's something that would almost certainly happen — many times over — the moment a hot war between larger players begins, once all those cards become destined to come out regardless.
Xi invading Taiwan would directly initiate a war with the US. Xi’s illegal actions in the South China Sea is evidence that Xi is willing to cross that line rather than keeping the status quo despite running afoul of PLA leadership and many others within the CCP itself.
However, there are a number of actions China could take against countries other than the US, where the US would either feel obligated to initiate war against China in response; or where US voters might demand the US go to war against China in response.
(And Chinese military analysts are very aware of all of these, drawing big red lines around these parts of strategy-space. Though they're also always re-measuring where these lines land — American public sentiment can waver such that today's "unforgivable" action might be tomorrow's "barely tolerable" action.)
There are also a number of actions China could take against its own citizens, that could "require" the initiation of war against them according to various treaties signed by the US, or even according to "international customary law."
Re: the Genocide Convention:
> Importantly, the Convention establishes on State Parties the obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals” (Article IV). That obligation, in addition to the prohibition not to commit genocide, have been considered as norms of international customary law and therefore, binding on all States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide Convention.
(I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop them from doing this.)