Is China preparing for war?

This post is inspired by a post by Noah Smith^[1] and many of the citations come from the Sentinel Newsletter, which I highly recommend.

Even if China is not deliberately preparing for war, its actions are effectively making it better-prepared for war. China is becoming independent in terms of:

Fuel/Energy: China's dominance in battery and electric cars helps protect them against a possible oil supply blockage. China now has 100 nuclear power plants and installs hundreds of GW of solar every year.^[2] It's getting fossil fuels from its partners Russia and Iran which are internationally isolated and heavily dependent on trade with them.
Food: China is boosting food self-sufficiency, likely aiming to prevent food import blockades in a war.
Finance: China is stockpiling gold and urging trading partners to use the yuan more to reduce the impact of future financial sanctions.

But more crucially, China's military buildup is massive relative to the US and the Chinese defense industrial base is increasingly on a wartime footing.^[3] The failing US defense-industrial base, plagued by production issues, shortages, supply chain problems, and an inadequate workforce, weakens deterrence against China and other adversaries.

China is investing heavily in high-end weapons and equipment much faster than the US. After ~7% yearly increases for the last few years, China now spends as much ~$.5T on defense, the US spends ~$1.3T.^[4] They spend this on:

Nukes: a rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal with 600 nukes (1k by 2030)^[5] and a nuclear triad, plus trucks with nukes driving through the Chinese hinterland,
Hypersonic missiles and glide vehicles — The US seems behind on this.^[6]
The world's largest navy by number of ships with 400 battle-force ships and aircraft carriers on par with the US.^[7] China has become the world's largest shipbuilder, with a shipbuilding capacity ~230x larger than the US.
Airforce: China's air force operates a growing fleet of stealth jets^[8]
Drones: Drone warfare is rapidly changing the theories of offense–defense balance and is leading to what is called an 'offense-dominated' world.^[9] They've built 1M kamikaze drones and also revealed a tiny mosquito-sized drone designed for spying.^[10] Chinese civilian manufacturing could retool in under a year to produce 1B weaponized drones annually, utilizing under 1% of assembly capacity, less than 5% of battery output, and a fraction of its printed-circuit-board capacity, without slowing the rest of China's economy.^[11]
Infrastructure: Building the world's largest wartime military command center, 10x bigger than the US's Pentagon^[12] and a $50B military base in the South China Sea that could be used as a base during an invasion or blockade of Taiwan.^[13]
Space and Satellite Systems: China deployed the first satellites of a planned 12,000-satellite network. Each satellite contains a computer running an AI model, forming an independent, in-orbit supercomputer network for data processing.^[14] China is also developing satellites for physically targeting other satellites and long-range ballistic missiles in space.^[15]
Cognitive warfare capabilities, such as propaganda using radio broadcasts and deception through the dissemination of disinformation^[16]
Cyber and AI Warfare: The CCP and PLA leadership view AI as key to the next military revolution and aims for 'intelligentized warfare'— where AI-enabled systems for reconnaissance, command, and strike overwhelm human decision-making speed and complexity. The PLA very likely rapidly adopted DeepSeek's generative AI models in early 2025.

In September 2025, a Chinese state-sponsored group was detected using an autonomous AI "agent," Claude Code, to infiltrate approximately 30 global targets (including tech, finance, and government). This was a new type of attack where the AI performed 80-90% of the work, with humans intervening only at 4-6 critical decision points. The AI's speed (thousands of requests per second) was unmatched. It worked by "jailbreaking" Claude—tricking it to bypass safety guardrails—and then autonomously performing reconnaissance, identifying vulnerabilities, writing exploit code, harvesting credentials, extracting data, and documenting its actions. the barrier for sophisticated, large-scale cyberattacks has dropped significantly. Less-resourced groups may now be able to conduct operations that previously required entire teams of experienced hackers.^[17]

Finally, Xi has recently ousted or probed nearly one-fifth of the generals he personally appointed- in what has been called the greatest purge of military leaders since Mao.^[18]