China’s People’s Liberation Army has exploded from a small military into one of the largest and most powerful in the world.

When one of Pakistan’s Chinese-made fighter jets fired a missile over the Kashmiri mountains and shot down one of India’s French-built Rafale fighters, Western officials took note.

It marked the first time the West had seen the Chinese JC-10 aircraft and PL-15 missiles be deployed in active combat.

Western officials have since pored over the details of this clash, asking what this means about China’s military capabilities and whether Xi Jinping’s nation has finally caught up with the West.

Over the past 25 years, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has exploded from a small military that had to generate its own revenue by growing crops to one of the largest and most powerful in the world.

“China is the strongest it’s ever been,” said Brigadier General Doug Wickert, the 412th Test Wing commander in the United States air force. “It has fairly aggressively built a very large force that’s been specifically developed to counter our strengths.”

Today, the PLA boasts almost a million more troops than the United States and over a thousand more tanks. It has built its navy into the largest in the world with approximately 400 warships and stacked its air force with nearly 2,000 fighter jets.

Beijing has also drastically expanded its intelligence capabilities to the point where deputy CIA Director Michael Ellis claimed earlier this week that China has become an “existential threat to American security in a way we really have never confronted before”.

However, while China is stronger today than it has been previously, a look into its actual capabilities show that the PLA still lags in skill and experience and has a tendency to fall one step behind its more seasoned competitor.

“The numbers don’t tell the whole story,” noted Gen Wickert. “China’s military has grown in numbers as well as sophistication, but there are still some areas where we have technological advantage.”

Every year, a wide array of expos and shows are held across China, which show off the arsenal of one of the most opaque and secretive armed forces in the world.

In November, China hosted its annual Zhuhai Air Show where it showcased the J-20 stealth fighter jets, seen as direct competitors to one of the US’ strongest fighters, the F-35 Lightning II, and capable of carrying air-to-air missiles like the PL-15s used by Pakistan against India.

The HQ-19 anti-ballistic missile system was also on display, as was the new SS-UAV ‘Jiu Tan’ drone carrier, capable of releasing swarms of Kamikaze attack drones at once, which will set sail on its maiden voyage next month.

More recently at the World Radar Expo last week, China trumpeted a new JY-27V radar, which state media claims can detect American fifth-generation stealth fighters, including the F-35 Lightning II.

China’s navy is also rumoured to be developing a new supercarrier, similar to the USS Gerald Ford, which would be larger than any existing vessel in its fleet.

And the army is said to be developing a new 4th generation light tank, which would host cannons capable of firing multiple ammunition types.

However, most worrying to the US is Beijing’s rapid advancement of its nuclear capabilities.

From 2023 to 2024, it added 100 more warheads to its arsenal, rising from 500 to 600, and the country is expected to have more than 1,000 by 2030.

According to experts, at least 400 of these are intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the US from the Chinese mainland, including the DF-41, which can travel between 12,000 to 15,000 kilometres.

While the US, with 3,700 warheads in its arsenal, continues to hold an advantage, the American government has expressed concern over Beijing’s rapid speed.

During a senate address in April, US Senator Roger Wicker noted that China’s nuclear expansion is now “at a pace that far outstrips our own”.

Timothy Heath, a senior defence researcher and China expert at RAND Corp, explained that Beijing’s nuclear progress is likely part of its “deterrence posture”.

“It’s a sign that they don’t want to get into a conventional fight with the US,” said Mr Heath. “Having a nuclear inventory is a way to warn the US not to start a fight.”

Beyond its nuclear inventory, there are areas where Chinese advancements are rivalling the US.

According to Mr Heath, hypersonic missiles could be one domain in which the PLA has “surpassed the US in technology”. He also noted that Beijing has become a “world player in the world market” for military drones, though other experts like Gen Wickert don’t agree that there is yet any technology “where China is ahead”.

The PLA’s developments have been particularly concerning in the context of a potential conflict over Taiwan – the only possible scenario in which the US and Chinese armies could face one another.

Credit: PLA Eastern Theatre Command

Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan, which the government in Taipei rejects, and has threatened to invade the island on numerous occasions. As a key arms supplier to Taiwan, former US president Joe Biden had said that the US would come to the country’s defence, but Donald Trump has refused to offer a clear position on the issue.

Mr Heath explains that China’s proximity to Taiwan gives it an advantage because Beijing would have immediate access to “all ground-based systems”. Meanwhile, the US would have “to project power from an ocean away”.

At the senate address in April, Mr Wicker noted that China is now “capable of denying US air superiority in the first island chain,” referring to the string of islands in the Pacific, which include parts of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Borneo. This means that China’s surface-to-air missiles are now capable of shooting down any US aircraft in the event of a war.

Washington has also sounded the alarm over China’s cyberwarfare capabilities. In a recent speech at a university in California, Gen Wickert said China had managed to infiltrate the US’s electrical grid and plant malware on SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, which monitor critical infrastructure like electricity, water and gas distribution.

“China has gained access to those systems and mapped them, and that is certainly concerning. It’s considered an act of war,” Gen Wickert told The Telegraph.

The PLA was not always such a fierce competitor. In the 1990s, when Western countries were investing trillions of pounds into their armies, the PLA didn’t even have enough money to sustain itself.

“It had a very small budget from the government and was essentially dependent on money-making activities to fund itself,” said Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the former Director for China at the US Department of Defence.

“This meant the PLA was investing in factories and services and logistics businesses and in rural areas they would even grow their own food.”

While it has come a long way in the decades since, the PLA continues to face significant challenges, which experts say have stopped it from reaching parity with the US.

For one, the US military is tried and tested on the battlefield, having fought in several conflicts around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan, while the PLA has not fought a war in decades.

China’s armed forces also struggle with integration. While the US military is a fully joint force, meaning the different services – from the air force to the navy – work closely together, the PLA remains disjointed.

Kitsch Liao, the associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, noted that the PLA’s readiness levels, which measure preparedness for active combat, are also lower than the US’s.

“If the US wants to bomb one site, they can assign one aircraft. They don’t need another aircraft on standby in case the jet breaks down. The US used to do this in the 1960s and China still has to do that,” said Mr Liao.

The US’s air force readiness for the last year was just over 60 per cent, which is “relatively poor”, according to Mr Liao, but China’s score, which is not made public, is believed to be even lower.

Imitate rather than innovate

China’s defence limitations stem in part from the PLA’s inherent structure as an extension of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Unlike militaries in the US or the UK, which are separate from any political entity, the PLA was established to serve the communist party and its primary objective today is to keep the party in power.

Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, explained that it would be equivalent to if in the US “the Republicans had their own army and the Democrats had their own army”.

Given the PLA’s role in the party, it often focuses its development on political issues rather than security concerns, as evidenced by its fixation on Taiwan, which does not pose any immediate threat to China.

The PLA is also hampered by its tendency to imitate rather than innovate. Rather than developing its own cutting-edge hardware, China relies on following closely behind its American counterparts, which makes it very difficult to match or overtake the US.

“They’re always one step behind because their methodology for catching up has been technology theft and acquisition,” said Mr Thompson.

“China has always benchmarked itself on other forces and ironically that means that in many cases it can’t actually catch up.”