Abstract
This authoritative study places the naval element of China’s current all-round military build-up firmly in its historical and strategic context, while also documenting issues of tactics and weaponry, and assessing how the whole fits into the current geopolitical scene.
The book rests on extensive research, including much in Chinese and Japanese language sources. It is divided into nine chapters. The first are historical, covering Chinese understandings of the strategists to whom they have turned, above all Alfred Thayer Mahan, and culminating in an illuminating comparison of China’s plans today to the attempt by imperial Germany, beginning in the late nineteenth century, to overcome Britain’s maritime superiority. Yoshihara and Holmes then turn to more operational questions: the historical origins of today’s Chinese fleet tactics, which they see as adding elements of the Chinese tradition of irregular warfare, from Sun Zi to Mao Zedong, to more conventional approaches; the interactions of offensive and defensive missiles in a maritime environment; and the development of China’s submarine-borne strategic deterrent force. At this point the authors shift focus yet again, examining how China presents as a symbol of peace and harmony none other than Zheng He, the Muslim eunuch admiral, who, through his seven voyages (1405–33) and some use of firepower, briefly manifested the maritime strength of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), but ushered in no abiding Chinese seaborne presence. The penultimate chapter looks at US naval policy. It is followed by a return to strategic analysis in the conclusion.
For readers of this journal the account of strategic debate in the early chapters will probably prove most interesting. The upshot is that Chinese grand strategy is at present entirely muddled, even as force structure grows by leaps and bounds. China clearly wants something – territory perhaps, economic advantage, prestige, status – that it is seeking militarily. Sea-power advocates are strong, and much impressed by Mahan. The American’s works are almost all out of print in the west, but in China several good and thoroughly annotated translations compete for an eager market.
Not all Chinese agree that sea power is the high road to national greatness, however. Bear in mind that China is surrounded by 14 land powers and shares maritime frontiers with 6 more, and a strong case can be made that, as it was for Bismarck’s Germany, simply avoiding hostile encirclement should be the primary goal.
Thus Professor Ye Zicheng of Beijing University argues that ‘land power can exist without sea power, but sea power cannot exist without land power development’ (p. 37). He envisions a ‘landward orientation would require China to further develop its interior territories and foster strategic partnerships with other major land powers of Eurasia, including Europe, Russia, and India’, and recommends that China ‘eschew maritime competition’, especially with the US (p. 38). The Chinese are reading Mackinder as well as Mahan. So threatening are Professor Ye’s views to sea-power enthusiasts that the official journal, Renmin Haijun or ‘People’s Navy’, has explicitly refuted them.
The sea-power advocates seem intent on a more risky and less controllable course in which the proximate goal is to secure control of the South China Sea (which the authors presciently identify as the most likely locus of conflict) and Taiwan, whose east coast is ideal for staging naval operations, with open access to the Pacific (which China otherwise lacks) and the kind of deep waters submariners like. To prepare the way for conquest of Taiwan, the Chinese navy is developing a variety of area-denial and anti-access strategies, such as an anti-carrier ballistic missile, to prevent the United States from coming to the island’s aid. Missiles are far cheaper than carriers and Aegis vessels. A Mach 2.5 missile has a 40 per cent chance of penetrating a battle group’s defences, so a saturation attack would almost certainly succeed. But how would the United States react to such a successful attack?
Like their western predecessors, however, Chinese naval enthusiasts seem so transfixed by Mahan’s famous evocation of ‘that overbearing power on the sea which drives the enemy’s flag from it, or allows it to appear only as a fugitive’ (p. 17) as to ignore its perils, even going so far as to imagine that access to the sea will bring ‘the great revitalization of the Chinese race’ (p. 18). They pay almost no attention to Mahan’s more fundamental injunctions that ‘Commerce thrives by peace and suffers by war’ and that ‘it follows that peace is the superior interest’ of seagoing nations (p. 33).
The archaic-seeming argument between Chinese Mahanians and Mackinderites is far from being resolved. In the meantime, stakes are steadily being raised. China is already building a string of naval bases that menaces India, at Gwadiar in Pakistan, Sittwe in Myanmar, and Hambantota in Sri Lanka, as well as listening posts in the Coco Islands near the Andaman islands (p. 174).
As for Taiwan, were the island actually to fall into Chinese hands, the whole security architecture of Asia would be changed. Not least, Japan would be stripped ‘of a buffer zone in place since it wrested Formosa from the Qing dynasty following the 1895 Sino-Japanese War. A century-long geostrategic advantage would evanesce’ (p. 67). How wealthy and technologically advanced Japan would react is something the Chinese should ponder.
This is an indispensable book for anyone who wishes to be accurately informed about China’s alarming maritime quest. Clearly written and impeccably documented, it analyses the full range of issues raised. The reader is left with a sobering sense of just how precarious is the balance of power in Asia, and how uneasy the peace.