The Implications Of China's Increasing Electrification For A China-United States War
🇨🇳 🇯🇵 🇺🇸 Commentary
Commentary-themed posts are intended to broach or highlight a specific issue, not limited to recent and ongoing events. These posts will typically be much shorter and less detailed than my analysis-themed posts.
China’s ability to undertake maritime imports of oil and natural gas in time of war has long been the subject of analytical attention as to how a war between China and the United States may play out. While China’s economy—at least its pre-war peacetime economy—and the Chinese military will continue to rely on the combustion of petroleum products for the foreseeable future, a major transition is presently underway across China: mass electrification. Electric cars, electric trucks, buses, and construction equipment, electric trains, riverine and coastal electric vessels, and even—smaller, lower payload, and shorter-range—electric aircraft are being used across China in ever-increasing numbers. At the same time, industrial robots and similar are becoming increasingly commonplace across the Chinese economy, whether in terms of so-called dark factories or automation, whether physical or otherwise, in the service sector.
In a major war between China and the United States, China’s adversaries cannot simply count on the effects of a maritime blockade to grind the Chinese war economy to a halt. In a world of increasing electrification, the targeting of electricity generation and transmission facilities is likely to take on ever-increasing importance. Beyond applications in the transportation of persons and objects, a reliable supply of electricity is increasingly non-negotiable for the day-to-day functioning of advanced economies. There is no practical way to access the internet without a reliable supply of electricity. Increasingly electrified high-tech factories that rely on industrial robots cannot function without a reliable supply of electricity. Much of the Chinese economy will, in other words, likely grind to a halt in the event of local, let alone nationwide, disruptions to the supply of electricity.
It goes without saying that even the United States is poorly positioned to take the entirety of China’s electricity generation offline. The scope for severely degrading the electricity infrastructure—both generation and transmission—in specific sectors, such as the industrial clusters found in the Pearl River Delta (i.e., Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc.) and the Yangtze River Delta (i.e., Shanghai and nearby cities) is, however, much greater, not least as a result of the coastal nature of these critically important parts of Chinese territory. While China is and will likely forever be something of a “strike munition sponge” for the American military, no matter how many strike munitions the United States comes to deploy, the increasing electrification of the Chinese economy results in additional vulnerabilities that the United States may seek to take advantage of, at least in a very high-stakes protracted conflict scenario.
For China, the vulnerabilities resulting from increasing electrification are, of course, some of the many trade-offs that come with economic development. All industrial and advanced economies are, in important respects, far more fragile than their agricultural predecessors, but are nevertheless far more capable, and few leaders are likely to even countenance turning back the clock. Chinese decision-makers are unlikely to deviate from the current trajectory of increasing electrification, no matter the vulnerabilities this generates. Chinese decision-makers will, however, need to figure out how their country will defend against and, more importantly, how to deter attacks on China’s electricity generation and transmission infrastructure.
Defending Chinese airspace from strike munitions approaching from the country’s maritime frontiers alone constitutes an immense and, in many respects, non-viable undertaking. There are simply far too many geographically dispersed potential targets and far too many potential discrete aim points to protect with line-of-sight kinetic and non-kinetic systems. Until recently, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could focus its efforts and resources on intercepting American combat aircraft and, more generally, denying American combat aircraft secure sanctuaries within a practical flight radius of the Chinese mainland from which to operate. While the United States had other strike munitions, such as Tomahawk cruise missiles, that were not reliant on the availability of airbases, there existed a far greater number of potential targets in China than there existed Tomahawk cruise missiles and similar. As a result, lower-priority targets, such as an electric substation in Shanghai or a small factory in Shenzhen, were unlikely targets of the large but nevertheless finite number of strike munitions at the disposal of the American military.
The situation is fast-changing as of 2025, however, and the United States is poised to be able to service a target bank composed of several tens of thousands of discrete aimpoints. This dynamic is, for the most part, being driven by the American military’s pursuit of a series of new and fairly inexpensive—largely as a result of offering greatly inferior payload-range—strike munitions. This poses an immense challenge to China in multiple respects, including in terms of how large-scale American attacks on a wide range of targets, such as electricity generation and transmission facilities in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta—two coastal areas along China’s maritime frontiers—will be a much more practical undertaking for the American military.
While Chinese decision-makers are likely to allocate the resources required to bolster defences in the aforementioned areas, as well as other sectors, there is another option available to China: symmetrical escalation. That is, tit-for-tat strikes on targets such as adversary electricity generation and transmission facilities with the aim of deterring such attacks or, failing that, deterring additional attacks against this particular type of target. Through a robust and very deep magazine of long-range strike munitions—a magazine that will likely have to be somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude larger than publicly available estimates of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force’s (PLARF) arsenal of long-range strike munitions, China will be able to attack both a very deep target bank of military targets while holding at risk other target types in adversary countries.
Perhaps the biggest military challenge that China faces vis-a-vis the United States is that large-scale strikes targeting the continental United States, excluding Alaska, are an extremely difficult undertaking as a result of the immense distances that separate the two countries. As a result, the most practical way for China to deter and, failing that, retaliate against attacks on its electricity generation and transmission infrastructure is to carry out like-for-like, tit-for-tat strikes on the electricity generation and transmission infrastructure of more proximate adversaries, which is to say Japan and the Philippines—for Beijing, retaliating against Taiwan for attacks undertaken by the United States, as opposed to attacks undertaken by Taiwan itself, essentially amount to acts of self-harm. In other words, China’s response to the target of electricity generation and transmission infrastructure in the Yangtze River Delta (i.e., Shanghai and its environs) would be to target electricity generation and transmission infrastructure in, for example, the Kanto Plain (i.e., Tokyo and its environs). As things stand, the Chinese military is not ready to undertake such attacks on a sustained basis, at least not while also attacking purely military targets across the Indo-Pacific in a major conflict scenario. This may, however, change in the coming years in a context in which the United States is leading the way in expanding its strike munition arsenal so as to attack a far greater number of targets across the Chinese mainland—China may emulate this American approach if it has not done so already.
This post began by highlighting how the increasing electrification of China’s economy is creating new vulnerabilities that China’s adversaries may take advantage of in a major conflict scenario. Defence is not, however, China’s only option when it comes to deterring and, failing that, retaliating against attacks on its increasingly important electricity generation and transmission facilities. Given the geographic asymmetries at play between China and the United States, China’s more proximate adversaries, namely Japan and the Philippines, are likely to bear the brunt of Chinese retaliatory strikes in a major conflict scenario.
The post was written to highlight how impoverished purely military analyses of the potential course of a major war between China and the United States can be. The many types of new military equipment that are being developed and deployed by each country are, of course, important, but the world in which new types of military equipment will be used is fast-changing. The increasing electrification of the Chinese economy is but one relatively high-profile example of this, and is, of course, a dynamic that would have justifiably received little attention in an analysis written a decade ago, let alone two decades ago.