I-See-BMs: Chinese Nuclear Policy Under Xi Jinping
In 2021, open-source intelligence efforts revealed a surprising discovery using commercial satellite imagery: China was building at least two silo fields for nuclear missiles. By 2022, a third field was identified. Intelligence experts even speculated that a field in Xinjiang was built with the intention of being found, given its proximity to an infamous “re-education” camp already under international scrutiny. However, when the discovery of three silo fields was mentioned in the Pentagon’s 2023 annual report to Congress, China’s Ministry of National Defense did not explicitly confirm or deny their construction and criticized the report as “exaggerat[ing] and sensationaliz[ing] the nonexistent.” These events beg several questions. Why would China embark on such a large infrastructure project that would surely be detected and then deny the construction of the missile silos? If China seeks to signal its augmented nuclear capabilities and bolster its nuclear deterrent, why would it decline to acknowledge their existence?
The identification of the silo fields through commercial satellite imagery provided a “vivid … public look” into China’s nuclear program. China’s denial is therefore puzzling: By denying the existence of something clearly there, China is producing a “growing discrepancy between China’s declaratory policy and its advancing nuclear capabilities [that] has raised questions about both the status and the future trajectory of China’s nuclear forces and strategy.”. Such obscurant acts therefore only inspire further doubt and mistrust.
Neither does it seem desirable for China to deliberately sow confusion about its nuclear policy. Tong Zhao argues that not only is it “challenging to understand how a larger nuclear arsenal enhances ‘safety,’” but further, “if improved US military capabilities were the main driver behind China’s recent buildup, the Chinese government had every reason to say so directly and put pressure on the United States.” In other words, China could have further capitalized on its silo field construction by publicly signaling about them to bolster its nuclear deterrent. That they declined to do so is perplexing.
These developments therefore cannot be explained by a rational-actor model, assuming that China is conducting cost-benefit analyses in making policy decisions—China is incurring the costs of heightened insecurity, without reaping the benefits of a clear nuclear deterrent. Instead, it may be worth considering other explanations for Chinese nuclear policy. In other words, Beijing’s puzzling response to the episode raises questions about whether other factors, like Xi’s desire to project Chinese power, drive its decision-making.
A Sleeping Dragon Flexes its Muscles
First, the construction of the silo fields needs to be situated within the broader trajectory of Chinese nuclear policy. In the last decade, Chinese nuclear capabilities have grown considerably, and Beijing’s nuclear doctrine has become more assertive. This is a dramatic shift when contrasted with China’s nuclear capabilities and doctrine in prior decades, which had long emphasized maintaining a modest nuclear force for minimal deterrence.
In terms of nuclear capabilities, following its first atomic bomb detonation in 1964, China possessed “a small, unsophisticated, and, arguably, highly vulnerable nuclear force.” China only developed large inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) abilities in the early 1980s and possessed four ICBM warheads in the early 1990s. In contrast, the Soviet Union pursued ICBM capabilities throughout the 1950s, culminating in the launch of the Sputnik satellite using a modified missile in 1957. In 1975, the Soviet Union had approximately 1600 ICBM launchers. The United States’ first ICBM, the Atlas missile, was operational in 1959. By 1991, when the United States permanently ceased the production of new nuclear weapons, the US Air Force had purchased 3,234 ICBMs. Indeed, China introduced its relatively modest capabilities “step-by-step.”. In sum, for several decades, China possessed a lean and relatively rudimentary nuclear force.
China also emphasized a cautious nuclear doctrine. In 1960, former Chairman Mao Zedong declared that China “may produce a few atomic bombs, but we by no means intend to use them,” emphasizing that they are strictly “a defensive weapon” and “useful only for [creating] pressure.” Similarly to Mao, in the 1980s former President Deng Xiaoping emphasized that China “did not require large numbers of weapons, [only] the power to be frightening.” And in a 2002 speech, former President Jiang Zemin reaffirmed the focus on maintaining a limited strategic nuclear force and a minimally credible deterrent.
Furthermore, China issued a “No First Use” policy, explicitly committing to not using nuclear weapons first in an armed conflict and only using them if an adversary launched a nuclear strike. In contrast, the United States and Russia have refused to adopt a “no first use” pledge, reserving the right to use nuclear weapons first in a conventional conflict. There has been occasional ambiguity in China’s “No First Use” policy, including the possibility that China might use nuclear weapons first in a conflict against another nuclear power such as the United States. Nonetheless, even at the turn of the century China’s national defense strategy publicly declared that “China has always kept the number of its nuclear weapons at a low level.”
However, in the last decade, China has pivoted away from this cautious stance with a rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal and a more assertive doctrine. The three ICBM silo fields being constructed will eventually be able to hold over a thousand nuclear warheads—adding a capacity exceeding Russia’s entire stockpile of silo-based ICBMs. Furthermore, China is dramatically growing its overall arsenal. According to the 2023 US Department of Defense report to Congress, China is expected to have a thousand nuclear warheads by 2030, double the estimated 500 it possessed in 2023. Notably, this is still dwarfed by the current American and Russian arsenals, which the Federation of American Scientists have estimated to be 3,700 and 4,309 warheads respectively. Such a dramatic quantitative expansion is a marked shift from China’s traditional “step-by-step” approach.
Not A Good Look: Alternative Explanations
One potential explanation for the rapid expansion of China’s ICBM capacities views the Chinese government as a rational actor. Such an approach would see China as a unitary entity, rationally conducting cost-benefit analyses in its policymaking processes. This view accepts that there are significant costs to arms races, including the opportunity costs of increased defense spending and the insecurity and instability generated by nuclear expansion. However, China has presumably balanced these considerations against the growing capabilities of its potential adversaries and rationally evaluated the heightened threat posed by other powers. Having assessed this threat, China has deemed that the benefits of nuclear force expansion outweigh the costs and thus pursued nuclear expansion to maximize utility.
For instance, US military capabilities have improved substantially since the end of the Cold War, leaving the Chinese nuclear arsenal increasingly vulnerable to a potential American strike. Improvements in navigation and guidance systems have dramatically boosted the accuracy of American missiles. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press estimated that American ICBMs have a forecasted “hit” rate of 74 percent on a hypothetical Chinese missile silo in 2017 (referring to the probability of an American missile landing within the lethal radius of the target and destroying it), up from 54 percent in 1985. Looking at American submarine-launched ballistic missiles, this “hit” rate increased from 8 percent in 1985 to 80 percent in 2017. Additionally, most of China’s current weapons stockpile requires lengthy preparation before launch, leaving them exposed to an adversary’s first strike. In this context, building more silos—especially “hardened” or reinforced silos—would increase the number of sites a potential adversary would have to destroy and boost China’s second-strike capability.
However, if these assumptions hold, then we might expect China to highlight the construction of the silo fields to signal its enhanced nuclear deterrent. To this end, Lieber and Press explicitly acknowledge that building reinforced silos entail the trade-off that they are difficult to hide, and it would therefore be futile to attempt hiding such silos from potential adversaries. Indeed, the scale of the silo fields and the proximity of the Hami silo field to the Hami “re-education” camp in Xinjiang suggests that Chinese authorities intended for, or had at least anticipated, the likely detection of the silo fields. To this end, China could have either announced the fields’ construction ahead of time or used the detection of these silo fields as an opportunity to signal its expanded capabilities. Yet rather than reinforcing the potential deterrent value through clear signaling Beijing downplayed the project’s existence.
The construction of the silo fields was not publicly announced by government or military authorities. After their discovery, Chinese state media dismissed the missile silos as windmills. As noted earlier, the Ministry of National Defense characterized the report as “exaggerat[ing] and sensationaliz[ing] the nonexistent.” These denials contradict the logic of deliberate signaling, making the policy appear internally inconsistent. China built something that appears designed to be seen, only to deny or downplay its existence once it was seen. What can explain China’s construction of new ICBM facilities, an endeavor unprecedented in scale and thinly-veiled but that is denied rather than used to fortify China’s nuclear deterrence?
Who’s in the Driver’s Seat?
An alternative explanation for the puzzling handling of the silo fields’ discovery is grounded in President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power. The political environment is less conducive to policy debate and internal deliberation, and expert opinion on nuclear policy is discounted. In turn, this raises the odds that subsequent policy may produce inconsistencies.
Most famously demonstrated by Xi’s third historical resolution enshrining his role in the Party’s leadership and history, Chinese politics is increasingly under the sway of a leader who has repeatedly demanded “absolute loyalty.” To this end, Fiona Cunningham concludes that China’s nuclear experts were not closely involved in recent nuclear policies, which “is a significant change for China, where the views of nuclear experts were closely aligned with those of decision-makers before the nuclear modernization picked up pace in 2019.” Concurring, Zhao argues that “China’s traditional nuclear policy experts have become increasingly sidelined in a policymaking system that is more closed-off and secretive.” Furthermore, as expertise and policy disagreements are not brooked under Xi, Zhao posits that “recognizing the changing domestic atmosphere, dissenting voices eventually became quiet.”
Traditionally, Chinese nuclear experts—academics at civilian universities or think tanks affiliated with the state—have largely advised moderate and qualitative changes to Chinese nuclear policy. Chinese experts Li Bin and Wu Riqiang suggested that Chinese leadership should seek to improve the survivability of its existing stockpile, for example, by hiding some of its nuclear weapons. Here, they even draw an explicit distinction: “The survivability of Chinese nuclear weapons are not sensitive to the sizes of the nuclear arsenals.” Put simply, they argue that increasing the size of China’s nuclear weapons arsenal is not the best way to address more pressing vulnerabilities, such as the arsenal’s exposure to a debilitating strike (as explored earlier). In this vein, in a survey of nuclear experts’ views, Cunningham argues that most advocate for the maintenance of an “asymmetrically smaller and less sophisticated nuclear force,” albeit with marginal improvements in the quality of its nuclear forces. This advice was clearly not heeded with the construction of the silo fields.
Indeed, Xi personally places great emphasis on Chinese nuclear abilities, which also helps to explain the timing of the shift in Chinese nuclear policy. From the start of his term, Xi has explicitly linked Chinese nuclear capabilities to the larger “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation. In this vein, he has assigned greater importance to nuclear capabilities than his predecessors. In 2015, Xi upgraded the Second Artillery from a military branch to a full independent service, renamed the PLA Rocket Force. In conjunction with the reduction in size of the PLA’s Ground Force, Air Force and Navy (and these services’ subordination to the newly-formed joint theater commands), this upgrade suggested the greater relevance of nuclear weapons and conferred the Rocket Force’s leaders with more powers within the military command structure. Zhao argues that by strengthening China’s nuclear might, Xi aims to “signify that China has emerged as a leading global power whose interests and status demand recognition and respect.”
However, Xi’s focus on nuclear abilities to assert China’s great power status leads us back to the same question. If nuclear force expansion is part of “national rejuvenation,” the silo fields could have been celebrated as an exemplar of this renewal. Why weren’t they? Zhao points out this increasing incoherence: “China thinks that its nuclear buildup can make things better … for itself but has not considered how other countries might react and respond.” He even speculates that “a more likely explanation is that the military … [is] trying to cater to Mr. Xi’s political instruction.”
Xi has emerged as a uniquely strong president of a kind unseen since Mao Zedong, seeking to unilaterally implement his personally preferred policies. Under this system, the disregard of expert opinion may reflect the weakening of informal guardrails in the policymaking process in favor of establishing China’s great power status. However, as the deliberative policymaking process is bypassed, this unleashes the potential for inconsistencies: the unparalleled expansion of nuclear abilities to strengthen China’s nuclear deterrent, further undermined by a mixed response of denial and finger-pointing when such efforts are uncovered, instead of leveraging an opportunity to strengthen China’s nuclear deterrent. Some possibilities also become more probable: Perhaps China sought to reveal its silo fields post-completion but was embarrassingly pre-empted by analysts. Ultimately, this bears dangerous consequences by creating perceptions that China is being obscurant. David Logan argues that “China’s opacity in the nuclear domain exacerbates dangerous misperceptions and misunderstandings between Washington and Beijing.”
The Chinese term for dilemma—“矛盾” (mao-dun)—originates from a story where a salesman claimed that his spears (矛) could pierce any shield, while his shields (盾) could withstand any blow. Perhaps this foreshadowed the paradoxes China would face in confronting the nuclear dilemma.