Of Food and Men

In case of war, Western sanctions must target China’s key strategic weaknesses

Guermantes Lailari

Many experts have written about the Taiwan Strait flashpoint, especially comparing it to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Most of the analysis is based on standard military comparisons of the two countries’ military order of battle—weapon systems and numbers of soldiers. However, in the words of General Omar Bradley, “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”

One such professional is Dr. Edward Luttwak, a strategy consultant to the US government. On December 7, 2022, Dr. Luttwak gave the keynote speech at Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies (NIDS) International Symposium on Security Affairs called “Can China Fight a War?” Most news outlets did not cover the NIDS conference, and almost none mentioned his speech. This was a missed opportunity to highlight some of the most important strategic weaknesses of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—weaknesses that should be ferociously pursued to defend against a military operation against Taiwan. The following article outlines Dr. Luttwak’s presentation as delivered in that keynote.

There is ample precedent showing that leaders of countries are capable of starting wars that, in Luttwak’s words, “they cannot possibly win.” The 2003 war in Iraq launched by US President George W. Bush, for example, and more recently Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. The view

Guermantes Lailari is a visiting scholar at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University and National Defense University. He is a retired US Air Force Foreign Area Officer specializing in strategy, counterterrorism, irregular warfare, and missile defense. He can be reached for comment at glailari2023@gmail.com that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be foolhardy to engage in military adventurism across the Taiwan Strait, and therefore Taiwan’s preparations for such a contingency need not be overly rigorous, is a dangerous position to hold.

Even short of Kinetic military action by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the CCP has demonstrated the willingness and ability to leverage its diplomatic and economic influence to achieve its territorial aims, even at the risk of losing said influence. For example, in 2010, Beijing forced a neutral Japanese government into being more pro-American due to a minor diplomatic conflict over fishing rights. Later, in 2020–2021, the CCP pushed New Delhi into the arms of the West through PLA aggression against India in Ladakh.

In both examples cited above, decision-makers in Beijing were quite happy to win the short-term contest at the expense of long-term interests, by further entrenching their regional neighbors into the Western orbit, and hence they further isolated China from the international rules-based order. This makes it more likely that Beijing will be willing to make a play for Taiwan, despite the long-term risks involved. This is especially true if they anticipate a quick victory.

The events playing out in Ukraine, however, would suggest that a quick victory may be more difficult to achieve than Beijing hopes, which begs the question: how long can China sustain a military campaign to annex Taiwan? In Luttwak’s estimation, if the war against Taiwan continues more than several months, the CCP would be in trouble. He bases this estimation on two key PRC strategic weaknesses regarding sustainability: food supplies and dead soldiers.

China lacks sufficient food to feed its population. Despite straining its domestic food-production ca- pacity to the limit to feed the 1.4 billion Chinese people, who represent one-fifth of the world’s population, the PRC is a net importer of food, annually importing several hundred million tons, mostly for animals. According to a 2023 report by the Council on Foreign Relations, China’s food self-sufficiency ratio plummeted between 2000 and 2020, dropping from 93.6 percent to a mere 65.8 percent. Meanwhile, in 2021, the import-dependency ratio on edible oil approached 70 percent—almost as high as China’s dependence on energy imports. This represents an exposure to Western sanctions that China does not share with the Russian economy.

This makes Russia’s war more sustainable than China’s will be, at least according to the numbers and Luttwak. In contrast to China, Russia does not import much food. According to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, while uncertainties exist over Russia’s capacity to export food under the sanctions regime—Russia exports barley, sunflower seed, fertilizers, and wheat—it is unlikely that the war will impact Russian crop production. Moreover, food and fertilizers are exempt from those sanctions.

Reliance on imports

China does not share this food self-sufficiency. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ China Power Project, China’s food imports between 2003 and 2017 swelled from US$14 billion to US$104.6 billion, leaving the country in a food trade deficit against its exports of US$59.6 billion. Imports of soybean alone reached US$38.1 billion in 2018, making the PRC the world’s largest importer of soybean and exceeding the production capacity not just of Brazil, but of most of the world. At present, US production makes up the difference— a fact that gives Washington some leverage.

This is a vulnerability for China, should the CCP launch even a small war that trips sanctions on the part of G7 countries. Once countries such as the United States and Canada stop loading ships full of soybean and other food staples destined for China, leaders in Beijing will have about three months before the country will have to start killing the domestic pigs, chickens, mutton, and beef to feed its population. As Luttwak noted, “There’ll be a lot of meat eating in China, but then it ends.”

The Chinese leadership failed to ensure that the PRC would continue expanding local sources of food. About 10 years ago, the CCP passed laws that prevented converting agricultural land to housing or industry. Regardless of this law, the PRC lost another six percent of its available agricultural land, primarily due to land erosion, industrialization, and urbanization.

The Chinese leadership appears to be aware of this vulnerability and is trying to take steps to shore it up. In 2020, Xi Jinping launched a “clean your plate” campaign to stop what he saw as a growing habit of wasting food. During the CCP’s 14th five-year plan (2021-2025), food security was one of the key features, and the plan referenced a food security law that the CCP was to implement.

Stockpiling food

More recently, Nikkei Asia reported that China’s food stockpiles have hit historically elevated levels, with a network of state-owned food processing companies such as COFCO Group storing beans, grains, and other staples in hundreds of huge silos, to be distributed when needed. According to the report, China’s soybean, maize, and wheat imports have ballooned over the past five years, in some cases twelvefold. Purchases of beef, pork, dairy, and fruit from supplier nations likewise soared up to fivefold.

In addition to stocking up on food, the Chinese government, through the state-run companies it controls, has also been on a spending spree buying up US and other countries’ farmland, as well as international food conglomerates. In a piece titled “China Is Buying the Farm,” The Wall Street Journal reported that the PRC’s ownership of agricultural land in the United States grew from US$81 million in 2010 to US$1.8 billion in 2020. However, of the 1.3 billion acres of private agricultural land in the United States, foreign entities fully or partially own 40 million acres valued at US$74 billion in 2021, or three percent. Of the three percent of the foreign owned US agricultural land, China owns only one percent.

The purchase 10 years ago of Virginia’s Smithfield Foods by Hong Kong-based WH Group (with a US$4 billion loan from the state-owned Bank of China) put that company in control of the lion’s share of the US pork market. This, according to China expert Gordon Chang, put the CCP in a position to be able to blight America’s food production. However, even if China stores extra food, it will still run out at some point if the military operation against Taiwan drags on and the world community boycotts food exports to China.

Next to food, the most valuable commodity during wartime is soldiers. As Luttwak noted in his speech, the Russians “can lose 25,000 soldiers in sev- eral months and it makes no difference. … Nobody is blocking the streets in Moscow in protest. It can continue like this for a long time.” Compared to the USSR’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Putin erred in only sending 135,000 troops into Ukraine: a country that is four times more populous than Czechoslovakia was, and almost five times its area. In the Czechoslovak invasion, 400,000 Soviet troops deployed in the first 24 hours; and within 48 hours, 800,000. Using similar population ratios, the PLA would need to deploy a minimum of 1.6 million soldiers within 48 hours of an invasion, since Taiwan’s population is about half of Ukraine’s. Fortunately for Taiwan, the entire PLA Army only has a million ground forces. The CCP would struggle with an inadequate number of ground forces in the same way that Russia struggles in Ukraine.

War, by its very nature, demands a supply of expendable soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Luttwak referenced his theory, published in the mid-1990s, called “post-heroic warfare,” which had a simple proposition: the wars of history were fought by spare male children. As the average size of the nuclear family declined in the West, to a degree that was roughly the inverse of the increased economic investment in each child, tolerance for casualties has gone down. Two American campaigns illustrate this phenomenon. On June 6, 1944, on Omaha beach, 2,200 Americans died in one morning, “but the war continued,” Luttwak pointed out. In contrast, it took more than 10 years for the casualty rate in Vietnam to reach 50,000, yet that was considered very traumatic.

Low tolerance for casualties

Today, the circumstances are even more pronounced, with much smaller American families, rarely having more than two boys. The following statistics for Afghanistan and Iraq support Luttwak’s argument. Almost 2,500 US soldiers died in Afghanistan during the 20-year war (2001–2020) and 4,400 US soldiers died in Iraq during the seven-year war (2003–2010). Additionally, 3,800 US private military contractors were killed in Afghanistan and 3,600 in Iraq during the same respective time periods. Even these relatively low numbers were a cause of great distress among the populace.

If we apply this theory to China, the situation is even more dire. Between 1980 and 2015, the CCP operated its famous one-child policy. The vast majority of Chinese families today have only one child and, due to a cultural bias towards male children, China has an excess of 30 million more males than females, according to Pew Research. The current CCP policy encouraging families to have multiple children is irrelevant, as those children will not reach military age for almost two decades. In other words, there are no spare male children. While the Russians can tolerate the loss of tens of thousands of sons, and the Americans several thousand, without any real blowback, every loss of a male Chinese child represents the potential crushing of an entire family lineage. This may not register deeply with people raised in a Western culture, but in the Chinese worldview, it signals failure in life, and portends a very distressing afterlife for the parents.

For evidence of this phenomenon in action, one may look to the cultural fallout from the 2020 skirmish in the Galwan River Valley of Ladakh. In that fight, approximately 20 Indian soldiers were killed, and shortly after the fighting, the dead were given military funerals, including a brigadier general. The CCP, meanwhile, delayed the announcement about the PLA servicemen (one officer and three enlisted men) that were killed in action for seven months after the fighting. After that seven-month period, the officer’s wife, a local music teacher, received a promotion to a position as a music professor at the Xi’an Musical Conservatory, and had a new house built for her. The enlisted soldiers were turned into heroes and their stories—embellished by CCP spin doctors—were used for propaganda value.

If it takes the CCP seven months to work out an acceptable way to spin the details of just four casualties, Luttwak argued, how well will it deal with the deaths of several tens of thousands? He estimated that 25,000–40,000 PLA soldiers would die in the first week of a war in Taiwan. Many would be killed on airplanes or ships advancing towards Taiwan, downed by Taiwan’s anti-air and anti-ship systems, and hopefully, by US and allied air, surface, and subsurface vessels.

Luttwak concluded his talk by thanking the CCP for provoking the Japanese and the Indians, because “American diplomacy could never have got the Indians allies,” or brought the Japanese on board. He added that the CCP would be unable to win a war in the near- to mid-term timeframe because it lacks sufficient domestic food supplies and enough extra sons.

Luttwak’s understanding of China is deep, his observations insightful, and they deserve greater attention not just by the international media, but by planners in Taipei, Washington, Tokyo, Delhi, and other potential allies. His recognition that exploiting the food and one-child soldier PRC weaknesses, this cuts to the heart of the Chinese identity, especially that of Xi Jinping, who behaves less like the president of a country and more like an emperor, in the dynastic Chinese mold. According to this belief system, any emperor whose policies lead to famine—or worse, to the snuffing out of entire bloodlines of ancient Chinese clans—has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and hence the right to rule. Xi knows this, and more importantly, it is also known by the Chinese people, whose implicit deal with the state thus far has been to tolerate living in a one-party dictatorship, if they continue to get rich. A PLA quagmire in Taiwan would change that calculus entirely. Xi Jinping is therefore especially vulnerable to Luttwak’s suggested pressure points. n

Strategic Vision vol. 12, no. 55 (April, 2023)