Dear friend, I found the article. It is a commentary by Katsuya Yamamoto of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, summarizing and discussing a Russian study by Vasily B. Kashin entitled The New Great Wall: The Logic of China’s Foreign Policy Behavior.
What makes the article interesting is not simply its conclusion that China is preparing for war. Many analysts have argued that before. Rather, its central claim is that the best evidence of China’s intentions is not the PLA’s weapons, but the country’s civilian infrastructure.
That is, the “rear” rather than the “front.”
The key thesis: look behind the army
Kashin argues that outsiders spend too much time counting:
- aircraft carriers
- missiles
- destroyers
- stealth aircraft
These are visible.
Instead, he proposes watching what China calls its strategic hinterland (战略腹地).
This includes:
- food reserves
- energy security
- mineral stockpiles
- railway redundancy
- underground civil defense
- logistics
- industrial relocation inland
- mobilization laws
- resilient cities
- emergency governance
He calls this entire system the “New Great Wall.”
That idea deserves attention because historically this is exactly how great powers prepare for prolonged conflict.
Why this matters
The article argues that Xi Jinping’s government appears to assume a future conflict might involve
- severe sanctions
- maritime blockade
- interruption of imports
- missile strikes on mainland cities
- long-duration industrial warfare
Notice something important.
This is not preparation merely for a Taiwan landing.
It is preparation for surviving a confrontation with an entire coalition, principally the United States and its allies.
That is a much larger strategic assumption.
This fits several things we have discussed over the past year
You have repeatedly asked me about
- China’s grain reserves
- oil stockpiles
- rare earths
- fertilizer
- strategic minerals
- AI infrastructure
- space computing
- new-quality productive forces (新质生产力)
- military-civil fusion
This article ties many of those together.
Instead of isolated policies,
they become pieces of one system.
The strongest part of the article
For me, the strongest observation is this:
Governments can buy prestige by building carriers.
But
nobody wins elections—or gains popularity—by spending enormous sums on
- grain silos
- underground shelters
- emergency stockpiles
- duplicated railways
- strategic warehouses
Those are expensive and politically invisible.
If a leadership invests heavily in these,
it usually believes the threat is genuine.
That is an insightful point.
The historical analogy
Reading it, I immediately thought of three historical examples.
Britain (1930s)
Long before WWII,
Britain built
- radar
- reserve airfields
- civil defense
- food planning
Those preparations proved decisive.
Soviet Union
The USSR invested enormous resources east of the Urals.
Factories were intentionally duplicated.
When Germany invaded,
industry could move east.
Mao’s Third Front (三线建设)
Ironically,
the article explicitly compares Xi’s policies with Mao’s inland industrial strategy during the Sino-Soviet confrontation.
The difference is that Xi is using twenty-first century technologies:
- AI
- digital logistics
- smart manufacturing
- resilient infrastructure
rather than simply hiding factories in mountains.
Where I would be cautious
I would separate three questions.
1. Is China preparing for a major war?
Probably yes.
Preparation is observable.
Many independent analysts—not only Russian ones—have noted
- expanded civil defense
- stockpiling
- mobilization legislation
- industrial resilience
- military-civil integration.
2. Does preparation mean Xi has decided to start a war?
No.
History shows these are different questions.
Countries often prepare because they fear deterrence may fail.
Preparation increases options;
it does not prove a decision.
3. Is the late-2020s timeline reliable?
This is the weakest part.
Forecasting exact years is notoriously unreliable.
Many analysts have predicted
2025,
2027,
2030,
- 2035.
None of these dates should be treated as destiny.
Rather,
they indicate that many observers see this decade as strategically unstable.
The Russian perspective is especially interesting
This may actually be the most valuable aspect of the paper.
Russia has been fighting a large-scale industrial war for over four years.
Russian analysts now think differently about war.
Instead of asking,
“How many missiles?”
they ask,
“Can society continue functioning after six months of blockade?”
That experience naturally leads them to notice China’s
- logistics
- reserves
- mobilization
- industrial depth
rather than simply counting ships.
That shift in perspective is worth taking seriously.
One connection that struck me
Throughout our conversations, you have repeatedly returned to one theme:
“真正重要的，不是前台，而是後台。”
You have said this about:
- psychoanalysis (the hidden structure beneath symptoms),
- AI (the invisible data centers behind ChatGPT),
- civilization (the conditions that make freedom possible),
- and now geopolitics.
This article is, in a sense, making the same methodological move.
Instead of looking at the PLA, it asks us to look at the conditions that allow the PLA to fight.
That resonates with another phrase you’ve often returned to:
“The conditions for one to be one cannot be taken for granted.”
Applied geopolitically, the article suggests that China’s leadership is trying to ensure that the conditions for China to remain China during a prolonged conflict cannot be taken for granted, but must be deliberately built.
Whether one agrees with all of Kashin’s conclusions or not, I think that is the article’s most important contribution. It shifts the analytical focus from military hardware to the resilience of an entire society under the stresses of modern, long-duration strategic competition.
