To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, the city of Shenzhen organized a drone show over Bijia Mountain Park. A swarm of more than ten thousand autonomous drones illuminated the night sky in shifting shapes and colors. The display morphed between iconic images: a charging bull for the city’s stock market, soaring skyscrapers for its modern skyline, a cargo ship for China's manufacturing and export might. Shenzhen, whose transformation from a fishing village to a technology hub in just 50 years, has made it a poster child for the success of China's economic liberalization. The drones told that story, too.

Beneath the precision of ten thousand synchronized drones is another story. The true significance of China’s drone mastery lies in the military applications. As drones become increasingly central to warfare, the elegance of Shenzhen’s drone dance foreshadows future battle.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) asserts its identity as the military arm of the Communist Party in every aspect of strategy. Under the “Party must always control the gun” principle the PLA is the armed force of the Party, and in name the armed force of the State. While the PLA has evolved significantly in organization, capabilities, and technological sophistication since Mao’s ragtag band of armed peasants took over the Chinese mainland, Mao’s ideas still shape many of China’s military doctrines.

Mao did not invent guerrilla warfare, nor was he the first Marxist to theorize about the "small war," but he remains the most influential thinker in the field. As Carl Schmitt argued in Theory of the Partisan, Mao became the icon of the Third World guerrilla fighter even before Fidel Castro or Võ Nguyên Giáp. One trait that Schmitt celebrated from Mao’s military doctrine was its adaptability and capacity to integrate modern technology; today, the PLA is bringing Mao’s Red Book to drone warfare.

A key concept of Mao’s strategic thinking is the idea of “People’s War,” which can be understood as a Marxist interpretation of total war. Mao recognized that success in modern warfare meant eliding civilian and military domains, and mobilizing all available resources in society to wage war. "The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people." Mao’s People’s War focused on the total mobilization of the masses to fight the enemies of the Party. This approach allowed a poorly trained army to overcome superior forces by entangling the opponent in a protracted conflict that drained their resources and will to fight.

Mao’s People’s War played in two dimensions. The first one, was operational: guerrillas in the countryside and undercover agents in cities were to blend into the population and “move like fish among the masses.” The second was numerical: Mao sought to leverage China's massive population against numerically inferior forces. This idea became even more significant after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took control of the mainland and established the People’s Republic of China. Mao’s nonchalant view of nuclear war reflected this perspective: "I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left." Mao proved his words during the Korean War, where he sent millions of Chinese soldiers, including his own son, to fight against the technologically superior U.S.-led coalition. 

Both dimensions of the People's War can be found in the PLA doctrine on advanced technological warfare. First, the military-civilian connection that one finds in Chinese dual-use technology and the potential installation of backdoors in advanced technological products that Western countries consume. Second, and closely related, is China’s overwhelming industrial capacity, which could drag the U.S. or any other adversary into a prolonged war of attrition. 

In Ukraine, both dynamics have played out. Chinese drone components originally designed for civilian use have been repurposed for military applications able to supply Russia’s armed forces. One also sees it in the Chinese response to U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductor imports: Beijing imposed export controls on key drone components—such as engines, batteries, and communication equipment—in late 2024. This move directly impacted Ukraine’s ability to source critical supplies for its defense.  In the 21st century, instead of sending waves of human bodies to be ground down on the battlefield, the PLA aims to leverage China’s industrial power to overwhelm its deindustrialized Western rivals. 

Several leaked reports over the past few years have outlined China’s reasoning. For example, a detailed plan published in the Chinese military journal Fire Control & Command Control described a hypothetical small-scale conflict with a neighboring nation. In this scenario, Chinese strategists laid out an ambitious military modernization plan centered on drone warfare, projected to be fully realized by 2035.

According to the leaked report, the PLA intends to replace human operators with autonomous systems for high-risk overseas missions. The vision for these specialized drones includes capabilities for both solo and swarm operations, low-altitude flight, advanced navigation, and surveillance systems. Their primary purpose would be to conduct swift, covert strikes against installations deep inside enemy territory. To achieve this, China plans to develop long-range and high-end unmanned aerial vehicles, similar to the American MQ-9 Reaper. 

At the same time, China has adopted a distinct approach to drone swarm technology, which has raised significant concerns among Western military strategists. Rather than focusing on expensive, individually advanced drones to complement existing aircraft, Chinese military planners are prioritizing mass-produced, inexpensive drones designed to operate in coordinated groups—much like those in Shenzhen’s drone dance.

The broader industrial strategy fits this, too — China has flooded global markets with low-cost electric vehicles. Chinese drones that cost three to five times less than comparable U.S. models could help quantity to become a quality of its own in both military and economic competition.

China could use its manufacturing muscle to mass produce cheap drones for kamikaze attacks ––like the Russian Lancet-3 or the Iranian Shahed-136–– as well as medium-range tactical drones for target strikes and localized surveillance, similar to the Turkish Bayraktar TB2, which has been used extensively by the armed forces of Ukraine. For instance, China’s DJI's drones, designed for civilian use, have been modified and extensively used in the battlefields of Ukraine.

This strategy reflects Mao's principles of asymmetric warfare: overwhelming adversaries through sheer numbers rather than mere technological sophistication. While drones are becoming the standard for modern militaries, China's approach leverages AI-driven autonomy and inter-drone coordination to create battlefield scenarios where swarms of relatively simple drones could defeat more advanced but numerically inferior opponents. Drone swarms could neutralize traditional air superiority advantages by saturating defensive systems with massive simultaneous threats.

In contemporary warfare, the combat pilot may best embody the classical conception of the individual warrior. Since their emergence in modern wars, pilots have been surrounded by an aura of romanticism akin to medieval knights—ranging from the Red Baron, the Kamikaze, or Top Gun. If successful, China’s swarm tactics could erase the last vestiges of the romantic warrior in modern industrial warfare.  As the use of drones is becoming much more ubiquitous, the future is moving toward "man on the loop" rather than in the cockpit. Drones are increasingly doing the dirty work, and pilots will progressively take more strategic roles instead of being lone aces in dogfights from the movies.  Chinese planners are betting on the transition from the figure of the pilot as an Olympic hero to the E-Sport star, seeking to fundamentally change air combat.

While Mao's original military doctrine of Protracted People's War focused on land-based guerrilla warfare, his influence can also now be seen in the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) strategy on the seas. In the past two decades the CCP Navy has successfully adapted Maoist principles, embracing asymmetric warfare, like advancements in anti-ship ballistic missiles and submarines that rely on China’s material superiority.

The core of China’s naval strategy still revolves around facing foreign invasion, leading to the concept of creating a "maritime Great Wall" along China's coastline. To this end, in recent years, China has become the world’s top shipbuilder, and the PLAN has grown into the largest navy on Earth. More than an actual wall, the maritime Great Wall consists of hundreds small vessels designed to intercept much larger – and much more expensive – ships of the U.S. or another fleet. In adapting Mao’s concept of People’s War to the maritime domain, the PLAN also combined both military and civilian operatives. For example, the PLAN has used fishing fleets and even tourist cruises to expand China’s effective control in contested waters such as the South China Sea and the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. (Those uninhabited islands were once administered by the United States, and are the subject of dispute between China, Taiwan, and Japan; just 250 miles to the east are 25,000 American troops on Okinawa)

It is not difficult to see how China’s drone doctrine in aerial warfare could also be applied to the maritime domain. China has been expanding its unmanned capabilities to include land and sea vehicles.

In November 2024, during Airshow China 2024 in Zhuhai, China introduced a 500-ton unmanned surface vessel called JARI-USV-A, known as "Orca." The Orca is well armed, equipped with a Vertical Launch System (VLS), a 57mm gun, SeaRAM missile defense; it also possesses a rear deck capable of launching and recovering aerial drones. China is closely watching Ukraine’s deployment of boat drones in the Black Sea, where kamikaze strikes have inflicted significant damage on the Russian navy. In response, Beijing might be exploring the development of smaller, lighter, and more cost-effective unmanned vessels that could replicate these kamikaze-style attacks to overwhelm enemy naval forces. However, Beijing’s interest in Ukraine’s autonomous systems may also reflect a growing need to defend against such threats. Taiwan, drawing lessons from Ukraine’s asymmetric naval warfare, unveiled in late March 2025, its first attack drone boat, the Endeavor Manta—capable of carrying light torpedoes, anti-jamming technology, and conducting kamikaze and swarm operations.

The ideological dimension of automated warfare 

Beyond the fact that China can flex its industrial muscle in a war of attrition against the US, there are other practical explanations for China’s push for military automation. One is a lack of combat experience of its soldiers. Despite China’s participation in a few peacekeeping missions in Africa, its clashes with Indian patrols in the Himalayas, or its anti-piracy operations in the Red Sea, the PLA has not fought a proper war since its 1979 conflict with Vietnam—a war that many believe China actually lost (the technical result was stasis).

Given the PLA’s shortage of real combat experience, the Chinese optimism for automated warfare is understandable — especially when compared to the U.S. military, which has been engaged in near-continuous conflicts since 1941. Moreover, in a country where many families still have only one child and where society is unaccustomed to receiving body bags from overseas wars, fully automated warfare presents an attractive alternative to the fear of domestic backlash from combat casualties.

There may also be an element of political mistrust. The CCP, and particularly Xi Jinping, fears any power structure outside its own party authority—especially an armed force with a powerful officer corps. One of the key lessons the Chinese Communists learned from the Soviet collapse is that the military must remain the army of the Party, not the army of the People (this despite its name, of course). And to this day, the PLA upholds the Party-Army principle, ensuring absolute CCP control over the armed forces, just as it was in Mao’s time. Xi has reinforced that principle. 

In the long run, eroding the human element from military operations aligns perfectly with Xi’s centralizing tendencies. To Communist Party authorities, an algorithm may seem far easier to control than human generals. And as is the case in nearly everything the Chinese leadership does, ideology matters. A useful comparison is with the US drone strategy. 

The U.S. bases its drone strategy on what it calls Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which focuses on the integration of autonomous systems with human pilots. Under this doctrine, unmanned vehicles serve as sophisticated "wingmen" to traditional manned aircraft, augmenting rather than replacing human-piloted operations. American strategy leverages its established dominance in air superiority and sophisticated fighter technology, deploying unmanned systems as force multipliers that extend the capabilities of traditional air combat rather than substitute for them. This approach maintains human oversight in the decision-making loop while expanding the reach and effectiveness of manned aircraft. It empowers the classical warriors.

One could argue that America is not innovating enough, and that American strategists are following the same mistakes as World War I generals, encountered with the new technologies of mechanized warfare that they really did not understand. If that is the case, and China’s approach proves better, the realities on the battlefield will force the U.S. to change its doctrine – the U.S. is indeed developing its own equivalent to drone swarms, although America will unlikely ever have the cost advantage that China does. 

Human will vs the rule of the algorithm 

The current tensions between China and the U.S. may not be driven by the same ideological conflict as the Cold War, but ideology remains important. Debates over military doctrine and forms of warfare are never purely technical—they often carry significant political weight. The fact that Mao’s doctrines align so well with strategies of automated warfare, despite his not having imagined such technology, is proof of how ideology shapes the way we wage war—something Mao himself would have agreed with.

The different instinctive approaches to drone warfare reflect fundamentally different perspectives on the relationship between technology and human life. The U.S. approach demonstrates a broader philosophical trust in human judgment in warfare, while China’s strategy leans toward fuller autonomy, reinforcing technocratic centralized control and minimizing reliance on human decision-making.

Since the Cold War, China has embraced the consumer economy, and in many ways, the dominant logic driving its society has become closer to that of the U.S. than ever before. But Chinese authorities remain partial to homogenization and standardization to govern their population; they swiftly suppress resistance. In the U.S. and the West at large, there are similar tendencies among managerial authorities, who desire a great flattening of our culture and politics. Against this, the American sense of individuality remains strong.

Facing China’s overwhelming industrial capacity, Western nations may be tempted to copy their adversary’s approach in order to defeat it. And while an industrial renewal is indeed needed in both America and Europe,  it is unlikely that the West will be able to outmatch China in a symmetric industrial war of attrition. The best bet for the West is to invest in the skills of its people, giving them space for freedom and technological creativity to design and produce superior technology that can counter China’s swarm strategies. As in many occasions throughout history, the West will have to counter numerical disadvantage with superior quality and ingenuity of its individuals. 

To this day, the effectiveness of China’s drone swarms remains untested in real-world combat. The U.S. strategy of human-machine teaming may prove more reliable and adaptable. Humans can't be jammed or hacked, and as no plan survives contact with reality, humans can improvise in ways that machines may not – there is nothing comparable to the accuracy of one's survival instinct when their skin is in the game. More importantly, it may serve as a symbolic ideological counterweight to the flattening tendencies of full automation. 

In fact, rather than eliminating the role of the individual warrior, automation could create new opportunities for its resurgence.  A single soldier could coordinate multiple autonomous systems gaining the strength of a numerically superior force. While automation handles routine tasks, the individual warrior can focus on strategic thinking, where initiative and creativity become even more important in outmaneuvering predictable algorithms. In a sea of machines, the human spirit might still make the difference. 

Ultimately, which form of warfare prevails will be representative of a larger ideological battle for the future: human will vs. the rule of the algorithm.