Recommendation 2

The Committee supports the Government’s assessment that China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “an epoch-defining and systemic challenge”. China seeks to erode the current rules-based international order by exploiting weaknesses in the system. Rather than looking to act as the world’s policeman in a mutually beneficial system, China’s interest is in establishing dominance over its wider region to purely Chinese advantage. In military terms, China’s publicly stated ambition to “fight and win” global wars by 2049 illustrates the threat it poses to international security. An important waypoint is China’s goal of establishing a fully modernised military—and a peer adversary of the United States—by 2027. The Government should carry out an assessment of China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to consider whether it should be labelled as a threat to national and international security.