Last week, on Thanksgiving Eve, China’s government released its first arms control white paper since 2005 (Chinese version here, this analysis is based on the Chinese version). Titled “China’s Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in the New Era,” the document may disappoint many who want more detailed transparency from China surrounding its nuclear arsenal and strategic thinking.
Such transparency was never likely, nor would it necessarily have been a good sign. China abandoning its long-held secrecy around its arsenal could potentially entail a move away from its defensive nuclear posture. Rather, China is acknowledging, albeit tacitly, that it has embarked on significant arsenal upgrades and expansion in order to strengthen that defensive approach. At the same time, the paper re-emphasizes China’s desire for multilateral arms control in the form of treaties negotiated in the United Nations.
The heralding of a “new era” likely refers to what China sees as a new international multipolar order, as well as to its larger nuclear arsenal and the impact of new technologies on strategic stability. However, it may also suggest that China is more open to voluntary measures for reducing nuclear risks, commensurate with greater confidence in its arsenal’s ability to survive an opportunistic first strike.
How China interprets transparency
China’s references to its nuclear modernization are indeed vague, but that has long been Beijing’s style. Modernizing the nuclear force, the white paper says, is not only about protecting the nation’s strategic safety but maintaining global strategic stability. In other words, in the face of what Chinese government documents like this often refer to as “the complicated international security situation,” China feels that securing its own second-strike capability helps to stabilize global tensions, possibly by reducing the likelihood of a decapitating first strike.
As for the specific qualities of the force that helps to maintain that capability, the white paper describes it as “lean and effective,” which is a traditional descriptor, suggesting Chinese nuclear policy has not changed despite the growth of its arsenal. It goes on to highlight improving facets like strategic early warning, command and control, missile penetration, rapid response, and survival abilities as key points of focus. Missile penetration is important to note, considering the Trump administration’s focus on its Golden Dome missile defense program. Experts have argued that offensive capabilities have a huge advantage over missile defense systems, as it is much easier and more cost-effective to build more missiles, potentially with decoy warheads, to evade and overwhelm missile defense systems. Chinese analysts and researchers have long pointed to US missile defense efforts as one of the main reasons why Beijing has felt the need to grow its arsenal in recent years.
The white paper tries hard to square that growth with its characterization of China as responsibly pursuing arms control, which is “increasingly the common expectation of the global community.” The paper makes frequent reference to the importance of “building a community with a shared future for mankind,” a political concept that President Xi Jinping uses to guide Chinese foreign policy. While touching on arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation from nuclear to cyber to artificial intelligence, it consistently emphasizes the importance of avoiding overreach that prevents developing countries from harnessing these technologies for legitimate development needs. This has been China’s stance for a while, though the paper includes not-so-veiled jabs at Biden administration concepts like “small yard, high fence” and “decoupling” that were (and still are) intended to keep China at arms’ length on cutting-edge artificial intelligence development. Conversely, the paper casts China as the sole nuclear weapons state among the P5 (the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that is both responsibly pursuing arms control and trying to ensure that risk reduction measures focused on sensitive technologies don’t restrict peaceful development.
This distancing from the other nuclear powers is another common characteristic of China’s nuclear narrative. The paper re-emphasizes the conditions under which China’s nuclear weapons came to be, namely nuclear threats and blackmail by the United States during the Korean War and the Taiwan Strait Crisis in the 1950s. In response to those threats, the paper says, China broke the “nuclear monopoly,” but only in order to protect itself. China has been making this point since its first successful nuclear test in 1964. Its no-first-use policy and history of never threatening nuclear use against another country are proof, it says, of this exclusively defense-oriented nuclear posture.
China has always preferred multilateral arms control treaties and has consistently rejected making reductions to its arsenal, pointing to the vastly larger sizes of the Russian and US arsenals. The paper reiterates that point, calling for upholding the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, continuing to negotiate the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, and pushing for other nuclear weapons states to adopt no-first-use policies.
Beyond this is the question of whether China will engage more actively on nuclear risk reduction and crisis management measures. On that point, an article published this summer in the journal International Security by Tsinghua professor Wu Riqiang argued that China might be about to enter a “new era” where its confidence in the security of its arsenal allows it to engage on risk reduction. China has previously seen risk reduction measures as counterproductive, the argument being that since it has a no-first-use policy and has committed to not targeting non-nuclear states or nuclear weapons–free zones, most risk reduction measures would only reduce the security of its second-strike capability, which would be generally destabilizing.
With that in mind, the white paper emphasizes that transparency on nuclear weapons must “always be voluntarily implemented in accordance with national conditions.” The most important transparency, it goes on to say, is that of intentions and policies. In other words, it does not accept arguments that it should be more transparent about capabilities and locations of parts of its arsenal. The vast differences in the security environments, nuclear policies, and force characteristics of the different nuclear states, the paper argues, mean that there are no universally applicable risk reduction measures for all states. China is saying that it will continue adopting risk reduction measures in a voluntary manner that aligns with its national security environment, not necessarily adopting transparency for transparency’s sake.
A fundamentally different approach to crisis management
The paper goes on to make an important point that China has emphasized in the past: Crisis prevention is more important than crisis management. This is often brought up when discussing the US–China relationship in more general terms. The US side often calls for guardrails and escalation management, saying that progress in those ways will help improve ties overall. China disagrees, preferring to improve the foundation of the relationship in order to prevent crises from emerging in the first place. China “firmly opposes the hypocritical action of stoking crises and causing confrontation on the one hand and calling for nuclear risk reduction measures on the other.”
Overall, this is a clear reiteration of China’s traditional stance on nuclear weapons, as well as its requirements for achieving productive arms control and disarmament. “When the conditions are ripe,” the paper says, “all nuclear weapons states should come together for a multilateral nuclear disarmament process.” But, it cautions, that will only be possible once states with the largest nuclear arsenals, namely Russia and the United States, take “comprehensive, verifiable and irreversible” steps towards reducing the size of their arsenals.