China is in a hurry. It’s in a hurry because the Chinese Communist Party entertains ambitions of breathtaking sweep yet has fewer and fewer resources to tap to fulfill them. A chasm has opened between political ends and the means necessary to acquire them. Coveting unaffordable goals spells peril for China or any other strategic actor. Political and military leaders have been known to roll the iron dice anyway.

So might Beijing.

At any rate, that’s the gist of what Admiral John Aquilino, the outgoing commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told reporters in Tokyo last week. (Admiral Samuel Paparo is slated to relieve him as commander on Friday.) Admiral Aquilino mocked party magnates’ claim that the Chinese economy is growing at 5.3 percent per annum, pronouncing the statistic “not real.” He went so far as to portray it as a “failing” economy.

This might sound like a feel-good story for Indo-Pacific powers competing against China in the Taiwan Strait, in the China seas, and along the Sino-Indian land frontier. A failing economy makes a rickety substructure for military aggression. That notwithstanding, Aquilino warned that Beijing is sluicing money into military coffers with abandon. The official figure given for this year’s annual increase in the defense budget is 7.2 percent. He opined: “I think it’s drastically more than that.”

If the INDOPACOM chief has it right, party leaders are hyping China’s economic performance, presumably to burnish its image as an economic partner of choice, while lowballing an arms buying spree, presumably to soothe Asian societies’ forebodings about their domineering neighbor. Nor should anyone be agog at the party’s lying-with-statistics gamesmanship. After all, government statistics in China are worth precisely what you pay for them.

In other words, Communist Party magnates hype or muffle official numbers as a matter of routine to suit their interests. But while they may be able to mask China’s decline by obfuscating, it’s doubtful they can sustain a glaring mismatch between means and ends for long. Few competitors can. And an economy in freefall eventually drags military power down with it.

Ends, ways, and means need to be in sync for a nation to flourish: that’s Strategy 101. Seldom is it sound strategy for politicians to write checks the armed forces can’t cash.........

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