The authors identify tasks that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) would likely be assigned by Chinese leaders to achieve strategic goals both in peacetime competition with the United States and in a hypothetical low-intensity conflict. The authors then analyze potential vulnerabilities in the PLA's execution of those tasks and how the United States could leverage those vulnerabilities to disrupt China's strategic goals, focusing on the potential for peacetime competition to erupt into a broader low-intensity conflict featuring smaller, indirect, or hybrid confrontations that span the world. The authors expand on a comprehensive list of potential PLA missions developed in prior research and explore vulnerabilities in the PLA's execution of the specific tasks required to achieve Beijing's strategic objectives. Across these missions and tasks, they identify five sets of vulnerabilities that, if disrupted, could affect Beijing's ability to achieve its goals: fears of domestic instability after PLA actions, risk of escalating conflict, harm to China's reputation, the PLA's limited ability to support partner states, and the PLA's limited ability to project power. These vulnerabilities provide a sense of the potential pressure points that the PLA could face in accomplishing its objectives. Options for the United States to leverage these pressure points include deterring harmful PLA actions by shaping perceptions of how those actions might affect China's interests, exploiting the consequences of PLA actions to deter Beijing from repeating similar actions, and exploiting PLA weaknesses in power projection and partner support to weaken confidence in the PLA and discourage similar operations.

Over the past decade, China has upended the world of development assistance, rapidly becoming the world's largest bilateral lender by channeling large sums of money into the developing world. As China's economic engagement in the developing world has grown, so too have U.S. and allied concerns that China is leveraging development assistance to assert Chinese influence, weaken the United States' relative position, and achieve Beijing's broader national security interests. In this report, the authors conduct a net assessment of U.S. and Chinese development assistance and cooperation. The authors describe each country's differing approaches to economic engagement with developing countries and conduct a data-driven comparison to identify strategic asymmetries that might present opportunities for the United States to better compete with China for relationships and influence in the developing world. The assessment reveals that Chinese economic engagement in the developing world should not be conceptualized as aid or assistance; this mischaracterization has potentially led to an overreliance on U.S. development tools as a primary response. Moreover, despite evidence of the short-term benefits that China might gain from its development financing, it is not clear whether these benefits are sustainable or effective over the long term when compared with the U.S. approach. Nevertheless, China's efforts — its heavy emphasis on energy and infrastructure projects, its approach to working through elite actors in developing countries, and its willing embrace of greater risk and reduced transparency — create challenges and opportunities for the United States as it looks to compete with China in the developing world.