Russia’s Ukraine Disaster Exposes China’s Military Weakness

Tai Ming Cheung

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has stirred fears that China could similarly move on Taiwan. By this logic, shared among foreign and security policy thinkers across the American mainstream, Putin’s floundering conquest of the eastern European nation on NATO’s doorstep shattered international norms and expanded the policy menu for the world’s other leading irredentist strongman, Xi Jinping.

But this line of argument has a fundamental flaw. In Beijing, the conflict in Europe serves not as a green-light for China’s military campaign against Taiwan, but as an invaluable opportunity for Chinese war planners to learn about their own battlefield vulnerabilities at someone else’s expense. Beijing is not in a state of reckless escalation or suicidal. To the contrary, Chinese military planners view their own military capabilities with marked caution, and eight months into the war in Ukraine Russia’s serial failures have amounted to a drawn-out approximation of what a rash or poorly prepared Chinese campaign in Taiwan might look like. From a strictly military perspective, the Ukraine crisis has very likely pushed the timeline for Chinese attack against Taiwan backwards, not forwards.

China’s decades-long military relationship with Russia helps to explain why Chinese leaders see the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait with so much circumspection. Russia and China have an extensive if volatile history of close military cooperation—the Chinese Communist Party based the organization of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the Soviet model and has imported a significant amount of high-end weaponry from Moscow. When Chinese leaders see Russia’s tens of thousands of dead or wounded troops over the course of its sputtering campaign in Ukraine, its loss of several thousand fighting vehicles, its inability to achieve battlefield objectives that once seemed easily attainable, and the end of its military’s ability to inspire any real fear, they are glimpsing a potential catastrophe that has alarming implications for their own security. Chinese leaders fear that if they were to go to war against Taiwan and fail to take the island, this would lead to the downfall of the Communist Party.