Chinese break out to high seas

Projecting power

The ideological keel of Beijing’s modern bid to become a maritime power was laid down as China’s economic revival in the early 1980s flowed through into sharply increased military budgets. The starting point for China’s leading maritime thinkers is the trauma of European and Japanese colonization.

“The Qing Dynasty was badly defeated in naval warfare by overseas imperialist powers, leading to the decline and fall of the dynasty,” wrote Zhang Wenmu, a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in a 2010 article published in China’s official state media.

Another premier Chinese maritime strategist is Ni Lexiong, a professor at Shanghai’s University of Political Science and Law. He has documented how China’s failure to properly fund its navy was a factor in its 1895 defeat in the first SinoJapanese war and the subsequent loss of Taiwan.

Zhang and Ni are regarded as China’s leading advocates of the theories of the American naval officer, strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan. Both subscribe to one of Mahan’s principal ideas: A truly powerful nation must have thriving international trade, a merchant fleet to carry these goods and a strong navy to protect its sea lanes. Mahan’s works, considered visionary in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are still avidly read and absorbed in Chinese naval schools, Chinese military analysts say.

Powers

The rise of earlier seafaring and trading powers — Portugal, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, the United States and Japan — have also provided important lessons for strategic thinkers. The vision and influence of the late Admiral Liu Huaqing, known as the father of the modern Chinese navy, also remains strong.

Liu, who died in 2011, rose to become overall commander of the PLA and a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo standing committee, the country’s supreme ruling body. While Liu was head of the navy in the 1980s, it was an obsolete, coastal fleet. But Liu was determined that China needed a blue-water fleet and aircraft carriers if it was to match the power of the United States and its allies.

Fundamental to the thinking of many Chinese strategists and military and political leaders is the conviction that China would be foolish to rely on the United States to protect its shipping. They acknowledge that the US Navy has guaranteed freedom of navigation since the end of World War Two, underwriting an explosion in global trade to the benefit of most other countries, including China.

The figures bear this out. China last year overtook the United States as the world’s biggest trader, according to official data from both countries. Up to 90 percent of Chinese trade is carried by sea, including most of its vital imports of energy and raw materials, shipping experts estimate. But Beijing’s strategists fear the US could interrupt this trade at a time of crisis or conflict.

Almost all of China’s naval thinkers also agree that recovering Taiwan is crucial to realizing the dream of maritime power. Restoring “national unity” is a longstanding goal of the ruling Communist Party. But the self-governing island itself has immense strategic value, sitting astride sea lanes that are also vital for Japan and South Korea.

Control

Control of Taiwan would open a huge breach in the first island chain around China. PLA warships and aircraft based on the island could extend China’s military reach far into the Pacific and much closer to Japan, without the need to first pass through potential choke points or channels in the chain. “Taiwan is a part of the first island chain,” says Fudan University’s Shen. “Instead of being integrated into mainland China, it has been used as a part of the US first island chain strategy.”

China’s turn to the sea has boosted the status of the navy, long the poor relation of the armed forces. The PLA, traditionally a massive ground force, was built around the Maoist strategy of drawing an invading enemy deep into the hinterland, where it could be destroyed through attrition.

Military strategists say this was thinkable before the country industrialized. Now that the eastern seaboard is the throbbing engine of the world’s second-ranked economy, fighting a war here would be catastrophic for China, win or lose, they say. Far better to meet challenges at sea or on the territory of a hostile nation.

The late Admiral Liu is credited with sharply increasing the navy’s share of the defence budget, outlays that have paid for a rapidly expanding fleet. In its annual assessment of the Chinese military published earlier this year, the Pentagon said the Chinese navy, now the biggest in Asia, deployed 79 major surface warships and more than 55 submarines, among other vessels. And the PLAN last year commissioned its first aircraft carrier.

Wu Shengli, the powerful admiral who now leads this force, is widely regarded as the most influential naval officer since Admiral Liu. Wu is also a member of the Central Military Commission, China’s top military council.

PLAN warships are now highly visible in all major oceans, with an active schedule of ship visits to foreign ports. The Chinese navy is part of the international anti-piracy force in the Gulf of Aden. These deployments are heavily publicised in the state-controlled media as the navy becomes a symbol of China’s growing international prestige.

This openness also applies to combat exercises. The US and other major powers routinely chastise China for a lack of transparency surrounding its three-decade military build-up. But it is difficult to accuse Beijing of secrecy when it comes to recent naval operations near Japan. The state-run media and a stable of specialist military newspapers, journals, web-sites and television channels devote blanket coverage to the deployment of warships, submarines, aircraft and patrol vessels on missions near China’s neighbour.

Some military commentators say Japan shouldn’t overreact to these messages, as they are primarily aimed at a domestic Chinese audience.

“The PLAN is a relatively young organisation building up their capabilities and certainly not the ‘senior service’ in China,” says Alessio Patalano, a specialist on the Japanese military at King’s College in London. “It’s important for its leadership and its members to establish their credentials and increase their profile.”

For exercise Manoeuvre 5, the Chinese navy followed the US practice of embedding journalists. Regular television reports from the Type-052 guided missile destroyer Guangzhou showed the 6,500 tonne warship ploughing through heavy seas on route to the exercises. Officers and sailors were interviewed at battle stations while they tracked targets and prepared missile launches. Tokyo is keeping careful score. In its latest Defence White Paper, published in July, the Japanese military charted steadily expanding PLA deployments near Japan since 2008, documenting bigger visiting fleets, more powerful warships and increasingly complex exercises involving helicopters, support vessels and land-based aircraft.

Confined

After decades confined to its coastal seas, the PLAN began regular voyages from the East China Sea into the Pacific early last decade. At first, Chinese warships mostly used the wide Miyako Strait between Okinawa and Miyako Island, according to statements from the Chinese and Japanese militaries. Since then, in a series of firsts, they have transited all the other important channels between the Japanese islands, according to Japan’s White Paper. Then came encirclement. In July, five PLA warships steamed out of the Sea of Japan through the Soya Strait, known as the La Perouse Strait in Russia, which divides the Russian island of Sakhalin and Hokkaido. The Chinese fleet continued on around the Japanese islands and back to China. “The move marks the first trip by the Chinese navy circumnavigating the Japanese archipelago,” said a report on China’s official military website.

Some Chinese strategists reject fears that deploying a powerful navy increases the odds of conflict. “I am more confident than many outside observers that China will behave out of the nation’s fundamental interests, namely, to take a path of peaceful development,” says Ren. “There is no reason to change this option.”

For Japan, there might even be an upside. Chinese warships used to be mostly confined to home waters, and thus hidden. Now, they can now be monitored.

“The more exercises the PLAN conducts on the high seas around Japan, the better for the JMSDF to judge and collect the PLAN’s warfare capabilities and intents,” says Koda, the retired Japanese admiral. “The PLAN cannot intimidate Japan by these types of exercises.”