The Long Shadow? China’s Military Rise in the Indo-Pacific and its Global Implications
China’s growing power and increasingly aggressive military posture in the Indo-Pacific poses short- and long-term challenges, not only for its direct neighbours but also for nations far beyond the region itself. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has accelerated the military build-up to transform the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into a “world-class” military by the mid-century. The PLA has expanded its nuclear forces in an effort to achieve a goal to ‘establish a strong strategic deterrence system’ aimed at making external intervention prohibitively expensive. In addition, the PLA is fielding growing numbers of increasingly sophisticated conventional military capabilities, especially in the maritime domain. It has integrated the latter into grey-zone operations that are seemingly aimed at enforcing its maritime claims over contested territories and waters.
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