India keeps asking the wrong question about China.
The question is not whether Beijing is preparing for war with India. The question is whether India is prepared for a strategy designed to weaken it without one.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2025 assessment of China’s military development offers an uncomfortable answer. China is not building its armed forces for dramatic battlefield victories alone. It is building them to impose control while keeping escalation firmly on its own terms. Slowly, persistently, and across multiple domains.
The Pentagon report makes clear that while Taiwan remains China’s primary military contingency, the strategy guiding the People’s Liberation Army is not geographically limited. Beijing’s approach integrates military power with cyber operations, space surveillance, logistics dominance, and political signalling. It is meant to shape behaviour, not just defeat armies.
India has already been living under this strategy since 2020. Along the Line of Actual Control, China has not sought a decisive clash. Instead, it has imposed prolonged pressure—forward deployments, infrastructure build-up, episodic disengagement, followed by fresh friction. The pattern confuses outside observers because it is not meant to resolve the dispute. It is meant to manage it in China’s favour.
The Pentagon’s assessment explains why. Beijing treats territorial claims, including those against India, as “core interests” tied to regime legitimacy. That framing leaves little space for compromise. China’s military reforms reflect this logic. The report highlights improvements in joint command, logistics, mobilisation systems, cyber warfare, and space-based surveillance.
These are not tools designed for a short Himalayan war. They are tools designed for endurance—for sustaining pressure over years rather than winning battles in weeks.
What China is attempting along the LAC today resembles, in form if not scale, the Cold War practice of creeping pressure along contested frontiers in Europe—Berlin included—where the objective was not invasion but exhaustion. The goal was to normalise disadvantage, to make resistance costly and accommodation tempting, without triggering open conflict.
Cyber and space are central to this strategy. The Pentagon describes China as the most persistent cyber threat it faces, noting intrusions into critical infrastructure networks. These operations are assessed not merely as spying, but as preparation for disruption during crises. India’s power grids, communications systems, ports, and defence networks are not immune to the same methods.
Space poses an even quieter risk. China now operates hundreds of surveillance satellites, giving it the ability to monitor military movements across land and sea. The report also details China’s development of counter-space weapons: lasers, jammers, and other systems designed to disrupt satellites while controlling escalation. In a future India–China crisis, pressure may arrive not as artillery fire, but as sudden blindness.
The Pentagon assessment also sheds light on Beijing’s alternating posture toward New Delhi. Periods of military pressure are often followed by diplomatic engagement, border talks, and gestures of calm. As a Chinese analyst explained to this author long ago, the idea is to keep both your friends and your enemies guessing: “If you see a snarling dog with a wagging tail, which end do you believe?”
This is not inconsistency. U.S. analysts assess that China seeks to stabilise relations just enough to prevent deeper strategic alignment between India and the United States.
China’s growing partnership with Russia further complicates India’s strategic environment. The report describes Beijing as a critical enabler of Russia’s war effort through diplomatic backing and dual-use support. While this relationship stops short of a formal alliance, it weakens the assumption—still common in Delhi—that Moscow can act as a neutral balancer in Asian security dynamics.
None of this means war is inevitable. In fact, the Pentagon’s assessment suggests China is actively trying to avoid wars it cannot tightly control. Its expanding nuclear arsenal, long-range strike capabilities, and cyber forces are designed to deter intervention while applying pressure elsewhere.
Preparing for war is politically and institutionally easier than preparing for endurance. The real challenge India faces is whether it can sustain prolonged deployments, absorb economic and cyber disruptions, protect its space assets, and maintain political resolve when pressure is constant but casualties are low.
India is already operating inside the strategic framework China has built. The question is whether New Delhi recognises this in time—and whether it adapts its planning, partnerships, and investments accordingly. Control, after all, succeeds best when the target realises too late that the contest was never about war in the first place.
In a career spanning three decades and counting, Ramananda (Ram to his friends) has been the foreign editor of The Telegraph, Outlook Magazine and the New Indian Express. He helped set up rediff.com’s editorial operations in San Jose and New York, helmed sify.com, and was the founder editor of India.com.
His work has featured in national and international publications like the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Global Times and Ashahi Shimbun. But his one constant over all these years, he says, has been the attempt to understand rising India’s place in the world.
He can rustle up a mean salad, his oil-less pepper chicken is to die for, and all it takes is some beer and rhythm and blues to rock his soul.
Talk to him about foreign and strategic affairs, media, South Asia, China, and of course India.
