During Xi Jinping’s decades-long rule, China has built the world’s largest navy, transformed the world’s largest standing army, and amassed a nuclear and ballistic arsenal to trouble any enemy.

With China’s neighbors now rushing to catch up, Xi’s next five-year term is likely to see an accelerating arms race in the Asia-Pacific region.

From South Korea developing a blue-water navy to Australia buying nuclear submarines, arms purchases have surged across the region.

According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, defense spending in Asia Pacific exceeded $1 trillion last year alone.

China, the Philippines and Vietnam have roughly doubled their spending over the past decade. South Korea, India and Pakistan are not far behind.

Even Japan is proposing record-high defense budgets and nearing the end of its long-standing “no first strike” policy and pointing to an “increasingly tightened” security environment.

“All key players in the Indo-Pacific region are responding to China’s military modernization, basically as fast as they can,” said Malcolm Davis, a former Australian defense official now with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

For years, the People’s Liberation Army was considered poorly equipped and ineffective – denigrated by one historian as “the largest military museum in the world”.

Armed with aging Soviet-made weaponry, riddled with corruption, it was a predominantly infantry force with a less than outstanding record in foreign campaigns.

The PLA’s participation in the Korean War cost the lives of nearly 200,000 Chinese. A 1979 invasion of Vietnam cost tens of thousands more and was largely erased from official history books.

When Xi became commander in chief of the PLA in 2013, some reforms were already underway.

They began in the 1990s when Jiang Zemin, shocked and intimidated by US military prowess during the Gulf War and the third Taiwan Strait crisis, took action.

But “it wasn’t until Xi Jinping came along that those efforts began to translate into capabilities,” strategic adviser Alexander Neill told AFP.

The PLA had just launched its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning – a refurbished Ukrainian ship – and the J-15 multirole fighter based on a Sukhoi prototype.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Beijing’s military budget has increased for the 27th year in a row.

Today, China has two active aircraft carriers, hundreds of long- and medium-range ballistic missiles, thousands of warplanes, and a navy that even surpasses that of the United States.

After China imposed a brief and partial blockade of Taiwan in August, a senior US military officer tacitly acknowledged that preventing reality would not be easy, even for Washington.

“They have a very large navy and if they want to harass and place ships around Taiwan, they can very well do that,” Karl Thomas, commander of the Seventh Fleet, told US media.

Meanwhile, China’s nuclear stockpile is growing exponentially and — according to the Pentagon — can now likely be launched from land, sea and air, an echo of the US nuclear triad.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, China has about 350 nuclear warheads, twice what it had during the Cold War.

US intelligence services predict that this stock could double again to 700 by 2027. New nuclear missile silos are being built in the northwest of the country.

Washington has made no compromises in describing the extent of the power and ambition of the People’s Republic of China.

“The PRC is the only competitor capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological might to sustainably challenge a stable and open international system,” according to a Pentagon report last year.

“Beijing is attempting to reshape the international order to better align with its authoritarian system and national interests.”

As with any hardware, it’s this perceived global intent that has China’s neighbors startled.

Many of the large-scale military projects in the region clearly have deterrence in mind – whether to thwart the “little blue men” of Beijing’s naval militias or to thwart a conventional attack.

South Korea plans to build a naval power capable of operating far from coastal waters, which experts say has little to do with the threat of North Korea’s rapid arming.

Australia plans to acquire eight nuclear-powered submarines – which can stay submerged for long periods and launch retaliatory strikes – with British and American help, part of the so-called AUKUS deal.

Canberra is also discussing the procurement of hypersonic weapons, longer-range ballistic missiles and even state-of-the-art B-21 stealth bombers that can strike virtually undetected anywhere in the world.

For Davis, all of these projects point to a realization that China has increasing power to shape the region to its will.

“The days when the US Navy ruled the seas of the western Pacific are fast approaching an end,” he said, and Asia-Pacific allies are beefing up their own defenses accordingly.

“Without Xi Jinping, we would not have had AUKUS. He has done us a great favor in that regard.”