Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: U.S. nuclear testing plans put spotlight on China’s growing arsenal, the United States and China agree to reestablish military communication channels, and the United Kingdom’s Chinese espionage drama continues.

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China’s Nuclear Ambitions

Moments before his highly anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States would begin testing U.S. nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with China and Russia. Though it’s not yet clear whether Trump means a test of a nuclear-capable weapons system—as Russia did last week—or a test of nuclear warheads, the latter would be the first such instance for the United States in 33 years.

Whatever Trump believes, China has not conducted a known nuclear test since its 1996 underground test in Lop Nor, Xinjiang—after which it signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and announced a formal end to its nuclear testing program. (Like the United States, China has not ratified the treaty, but both countries say they have abided by it.) There have been rumors of China conducting low-yield tests or subcritical ones, but they are unconfirmed.

China has been expanding its Lop Nor test site in recent years, suggesting possible preparations for renewed testing. That expansion has included sinking deep shafts of the type used for underground tests. As analyst Renny Babiarz, who has monitored the site closely, told me, this involves moving giant drill rigs, one standing nearly 90 feet tall and weighing as much as a hundred metric tons, to the site. “Altogether this indicates a significant investment of time and money, especially considering that this work is being done within a secured area of national strategic importance,” Babiarz noted.

If tests are planned, they may be partially driven by China’s desire to catch up to its geopolitical peers. So far, China has carried out only an estimated 45 nuclear tests, compared with the United States’s 1,030 and Russia’s 715.

China’s nuclear ambitions have long been considered relatively modest. Still, despite former leader Mao Zedong’s infamous bluster that nuclear weapons were a “paper tiger” and that China could afford to lose 300 million people if it suffered a nuclear attack, the young People’s Republic of China scrambled to acquire nuclear weapons in the early years of the Cold War.

It was a tough task for a poor country but one made easier when the brilliant rocket scientist Qian Xuesen was expelled from the United States in 1955, after which he returned to China and founded its missile and space program. The Soviet Union also provided considerable technical aid, but it pulled its advisors and scientists out of China in 1959-60 as relations between Moscow and Beijing soured.

By the time China tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964, the country saw the bomb as a deterrent aimed at the Soviet Union as much as the United States. Until the partial Sino-Soviet reconciliation in the 1980s, the Chinese public’s nuclear fears largely centered on the Soviet Union. (When an earthquake obliterated the city of Tangshan in 1976, many residents initially mistook it for a Soviet nuclear attack.)

China has always maintained an explicit no-first-use policy, meaning that it would only use nuclear weapons in retaliation for another nuclear attack. Partially for financial reasons, it also adopted a minimalistic approach for its force structure, seeking only enough weapons to deter an opponent.

China’s approach to nonproliferation, meanwhile, was less responsible. The country was a late holdout on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, joining only in 1992; in the decades prior, it was suspected of aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

However, China has recently walked back its modesty and engaged in an ambitious, expensive, and highly secretive nuclear modernization program. Since around 2020, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force, which oversees China’s nuclear weapons, has dramatically expanded its missile sites and the size of its nuclear arsenal, as well as developed new missiles—which were on display in a military parade in September.

China’s nuclear weapons program is opaque even by the standards of the Chinese military. There are no official numbers on how many nuclear weapons China has—only outside estimates, which vary widely and often get entangled in U.S. political debates. The general consensus is that China has several hundred nuclear warheads, far behind Russia and the United States, which have more than 5,000 each.

Whatever the true figure is, it’s an increase from even a few years ago, when China’s warheads probably numbered in the low hundreds. There are a few theories about China’s ultimate goals for its nuclear forces, from ensuring a reliable second-strike capability to achieving parity with the United States and Russia. China has aggressively pushed back against attempts to investigate its plans, including harassing researchers and deploying propagandists online.

One thing that can be said about China’s nuclear expansion is that it has likely been extraordinarily corrupt. Since 2022, the PLA Rocket Force has been one of the main targets of Xi’s military purges, with several former commanders and other high-level figures now in jail or awaiting trial. In any case, if the United States renews nuclear testing, China will be prepared to follow suit.

What We’re Following

U.S.-China military comms. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth adopted a conciliatory tone after the Trump-Xi summit last week, saying on Sunday that U.S.-China relations have “never been better” and that the two sides would reestablish military-to-military communications channels.

In recent years, the recurring collapse and revival of these channels have become almost routine. Military-to-military communications were suspended during Trump’s first term, resumed by former U.S. President Joe Biden, canceled by China after then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, reinstated once more under Biden, and severed again this year following Trump’s return to office.

In ordinary times, I’d assume that some unofficial lines of communication persist regardless of the status of formal U.S.-China military channels. However, given the current chaos and incompetence on the U.S. side and the paranoia about unauthorized contact with foreigners on the Chinese side, I don’t think that’s true today.

U.K.-China drama. There seems to be something in the water in the United Kingdom when it comes to questions about Chinese influence. Last Wednesday, the conservative Telegraph newspaper ran an full-throated attack against U.S. financier John Thornton for appearing in a photo with Chinese “spymaster” Cai Qi, linking Cai to the recent controversy over an alleged espionage case in the U.K. Parliament.

It’s a strange line of attack. Cai, a Politburo member, effectively serves as Xi’s chief of staff and has no direct authority over China’s intelligence agency. The espionage case—which involved sharing political gossip and speculation, not classified information—appears to be one of many Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts run informally or provincially.

Thornton, meanwhile, is a major figure in U.S.-China business relations; it is unsurprising that he met with a senior Chinese official. So, why the attack? The Telegraph is currently up for sale, and Thornton is a potential buyer. It appears that the paper’s current leadership is trying to sabotage his bid.

FP’s Most Read This Week

Tech and Business

New debt control office. China has established a new central government office to unravel the web of risky local debt accumulated in the last three decades. Fiscal reforms in 1994 shifted much of the country’s revenue toward the central government, forcing local governments to rely heavily on borrowing and land sales to compensate. With the boom years over, many of those debts are now coming due.

The key question is whether the debt control office has the enforcement powers and the expertise to rein in local governments. After Xi slashed their salaries, many skilled financial regulators left for the private sector.

The head of the new department, Li Dawei, is a veteran budget inspector, and he’ll need every bit of that experience: China’s local government finances are notoriously messy, with debts often hidden from central authorities.

Coffee wars. Starbucks has agreed to sell a majority stake in its Chinese operations to Boyu Capital, giving the firm a 60 percent share of local business. The U.S. coffee giant was an early entrant into China’s now-enormous coffee market, opening its first store in 1999 and growing to around 8,000 locations in the country.

In recent years, however, Starbucks has struggled in China. The market has become oversaturated, and low-cost competitors such as Luckin Coffee—despite surviving a massive fraud scandal—have become ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the allure of Starbucks as a symbol of the Western lifestyle has faded; the brand has often found itself in the crosshairs of nationalists.