Captioned 'China-US war unlikely despite rising hostility' an article in Global Times (May 10) said Washington's hostility toward China and escalated concern that worsening bilateral ties might lead to a China-US war, had prompted Chinese experts to assert that Beijing has sufficient nuclear capacity to assure mutually assured destruction (MAD) and create deterrence to reduce the risks of any direct conflict. It said a series of "anti-China" expressions by some senior US politicians have provoked discussion about the potential for a nuclear war with China. in reply to a question about the US attacking China, Hua Chunying, a spokesperson of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted (May 9) on Twitter that "China won't be Iraq." Hu Xijin, Editor in Chief of the Global Times, on Twitter reinforced his call for China to strengthen its nuclear arsenal to deter the US. He said now, as the US is treating China as its major or even top strategic competitor and strengthening the US arsenal, so China's nuclear strength should not stay indifferent. His two posts on Friday and Saturday received about 300,000 likes on Sina Weibo. Lü Xiang, a research fellow on US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times that "The performance of the Trump administration forced Chinese elites and the public to think more about the worst scenario." Diao Daming, a US studies expert at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, said the two countries were still far from a direct military conflict. He added China should prepare for all possibilities, but there was no need to overemphasize preparation for war. Jin Canrong, Associate Dean of Renmin University of China's School of International Studies in Beijing, expressed his concern over China-US decoupling. "The decoupling unilaterally pushed by the US side risks increasing strategic conflicts between the two major powers, and Taiwan, the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula could become potential conflict zones." Yang Chengjun, a Chinese expert on missile technology and nuclear strategy and chief scientist of quantum defense, told the Global Times that once we detect any nuclear attack from the US, our warheads are enough to destroy the US in the counterattack. This is the effective nuclear deterrence.
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