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Current Affairs

‘Surprising’ how quickly China’s military is closing gap with US: analyst Lyle Goldstein

Lyle Goldstein is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and director of Asia engagement at the…

By Samantha Johnson / August 3, 2026

Lyle Goldstein is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and director of Asia engagement at the Washington think tank Defence Priorities.

How do you assess the progress of the People’s Liberation Army’s modernisation drive in the past 10 years and its significance in modern military history? How do you forecast the PLA’s position in 2027, which it set forth as one of three vaguely defined modernisation benchmark years?

My view is that China’s military has made tremendous progress in the process of modernisation over the last 10 years. It’s almost like an aircraft going full throttle or a car that’s going into fourth gear. It really is the pace that has picked up a lot. We had an inkling that this was under way and that major results were going to be forthcoming. But here they are. I have to say, as a military analyst, it’s very impressive. I might even go as far as to say that it could even be unprecedented in its scale and dimensions, and also implications.

If we talk about history, what does it mean in modern military history? This is a very big moment. China has said for a long time it wants to be a world-leading military, a world-class military. Clearly, China is there. The areas where it has achieved that status seem to be increasing every day. In a sense, they have achieved what they’ve set out to do.

I know that a lot of people are very anxious about 2027, what it would mean and so forth. But I don’t think that’s the way to think about it. It goes without saying that, [10 years on] in 2037, China will be much, much stronger. Even so, this is part of a process. There clearly are programmes that are not really mature yet. Most obviously the aircraft carrier programme, but from what I can see, China has indeed a very formidable military.

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There are areas where there’s now emerged a big discrepancy between China and other countries, and ultimately that does hurt China because there is fear. You can sense it in the region. There’s quite a palpable anxiety about where the region is going in a world where clearly the United States is playing less of a role and China is playing much more of a role.

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