In many ways, China has been the biggest beneficiary of this system. History is full of examples of rising powers which have complained that the existing rules were rigged against them. In the first decades of the last century, Germany and Japan found themselves squeezed out of important aspects of the global economy as the major powers used their imperial networks to guarantee the essential raw-material supplies they needed for their economies. The roots of both world wars lay partly in this friction. However, since the late 1970s, China has been able to use the very openness of the U.S.-led order to promote its extraordinary growth. China has been allowed to insert itself into an international trading system which has clear and established rules, and it has been able to buy the oil, copper, and iron ore that it needs on global markets. Now the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods, China has a vast seaborne trade that is underpinned by the calming influence of American naval dominance.
Never written down or officially announced, this understanding between Beijing and Washington on America’s role in Asia is crumbling. China now wishes to recast the military and political dynamic in the region to reflect its own traditional centrality. Great powers are driven by a mixture of confidence and insecurity. China wants a return to the leadership position it has enjoyed so often in Asian history. It also frets about the security of its seaborne commerce, especially in the area it calls the “Near Seas”—the coastal waters that include the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas. The Yalong Bay naval base on Hainan Island is one part of the strategy that China is starting to put in place to exert control over the Near Seas, an effort to push the U.S. Navy ever farther out into the western Pacific. In the process, it is launching a profound challenge to the U.S.-led order that has been the backbone of the Asian economic miracle.
Although the Chinese navy’s name—the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN—betrays the fact that it was once the poor cousin of the army, for the last twenty years China has been undergoing a rapid military buildup, and the navy has been given pride of place. More important, China has been investing in its navy in a very specific way. China’s naval planners have focused on the warships, silent submarines, and rapid small boats which form the basis of what the U.S. Navy calls “access denial.” The clear implication of the investment plan is that China is trying to prevent the U.S. Navy from operating in large areas of the western Pacific. China’s new navy is both an expression of power and a means to a diplomatic end. By weakening the U.S. naval presence in the western Pacific, China hopes to gradually undermine America’s alliances with other Asian countries, notably South Korea, the Philippines, and maybe even Japan. As American influence declines, China would be in a position to quietly assume a leadership position in Asia, giving it much greater influence over the rules and practices in the principal arena of the global economy. Through its navy, China hopes to reshape the balance of power in Asia.
Countries compete for influence in all sorts of ways, over economic rules and political philosophies, but the military arena is the most important. If allowed to blossom, military rivalries have the capacity to calcify all other interactions between the countries. Compromise is hard for political leaders when senior generals are muttering dark warnings in their ears. That makes the emerging contest in the western Pacific one of the central global issues over the coming decades. It will be a crucial test for how the U.S. and China manage their emerging great-power rivalry. It will also be a laboratory for many of the questions about China’s rise—how Beijing intends to pursue its leadership aspirations in the region, and whether, in an era of fiscal retrenchment and political polarization, U.S. global influence still has staying power. The naval competition in the western Pacific will set the tone for a large part of global politics.
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Aspiring great powers have often taken to the high seas as a route to expanded influence. The U.S., U.K., Spain, Venice, and even ancient Athens all built powerful navies to defend their far-flung interests. In the late nineteenth century, Germany was gripped by the allure of constructing a grand navy, prompting Kaiser Wilhelm II to establish the special rank for himself of Großadmiral (great admiral). Sea power is not just about control of the seas; it is also a tool to influence other countries and to shape events. Superior sea power allowed the Europeans to begin asserting control over Asia in the fifteenth century, led first by the Portuguese, and it has enabled outside countries to dictate terms in the region ever since. It was through sea power that a small country like Britain, with only a modest army, could command an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. More recently, domination of the Pacific and Indian Oceans since the end of the Second World War has allowed America to be the preeminent power in Asia. American naval power, combined with the air superiority that comes from a large fleet of aircraft carriers, has been the backbone of its effort to spread free trade and democratic values throughout the region.
Navy building can explain a lot about a nation’s intentions, its ambitions, and its anxieties. Long lead times mean that naval planners are not thinking about tomorrow; they are placing bets on how the world will look in one, two, or three decades’ time. Navies can also provide a grandeur that beguiles some countries. Hu Jintao defined the development of Chinese naval power in 2006 as a “glorious task”; Rear Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the Chinese navy, described the quest for a strong fleet as part of “the great revitalization of the Chinese nation.” The same sentiments are echoed by popular military commentators. “When we look at history, we can see [that] whether a country is powerful or not is closely related with its naval forces,” writes Major General Luo Yuan of the China Military Science Society. “When its naval forces are powerful, then the country is strong; when its naval forces are weak, then the country is also fragile.” In 2009, the year when the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its sixtieth anniversary with the grand military parade in Beijing, the navy had their own parade earlier in the year. Fifty-two vessels took part in special review at the east-coast port of Qingdao, including previously unseen nuclear submarines. In many ways, it was a coming-out party for China’s new navy.
For anyone who grew up during the Cold War, it can be tempting to see all this as an ideological contest. There is a deep chasm in political values between Washington and Beijing that heightens the sense of competition between the two governments. The U.S. believes the Chinese political system is in some sense illegitimate, while the Chinese insist—not without some justification—that the U.S. would like to see a form of regime change in China. Yet one of the striking aspects of China’s turn to the seas is that it is rooted in history and geography in a manner that transcends its current political system. It was from the sea that China was harassed during its “century of humiliation” at the hands of the West. China was one of the most prominent victims of nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy, when Britain, France, and other colonial powers used their naval supremacy to exercise control over Shanghai and a dozen other ports around the country. The Opium Wars were principally a naval exercise: During the first war, in 1840, the British navy was able to deploy the Nemesis, a steamship made of iron whose large guns bombarded Chinese defenses. China learned the hard way that having a weak navy leaves a country vulnerable to pressure and bullying by others. The instinct to control the surrounding seas is partly rooted in the widespread desire never to leave China so vulnerable again. “Ignoring the oceans is a historical error we committed,” says Yang Yong, a Chinese historian. “And now even in the future we will pay a price for this error.”
This sense that China is under siege is aggravated by looking at a map. Chinese talk about the “first island chain,” a perimeter that stretches around the western Pacific from Japan in the northeast, through Taiwan, to the Philippines in the south, all allies or friends of the U.S. This is both a geographical barrier, in that it creates a series of channels that a superior opponent could block in order to bottle up the Chinese navy, and a political barrier controlled by governments
close to Washington. For a country that wants to start flexing a few of its muscles, this map makes China deeply uncomfortable; it is almost hemmed in from the sea. Chinese strategists talk about “breaking through the thistles,” the development of a naval capability that will allow it to operate outside the barrier of the first island chain they think the U.S. has constructed to keep China contained. The Science of Military Strategy, a 2005 statement of the PLA’s military doctrine, says that if the navy is kept within the first island chain, “the essential strategic space for China’s rejuvenation will be lost.” Zhang Wenmu, a well-known and hawkish writer on naval issues, argues, “Restricting China to the shallow seas west of the first island chain is both unfair and impossible and China simply cannot accept it.”
When China looks out to sea, it also quickly sees the U.S. According to Chu Shulong, an academic at Peking University, this grudge with the U.S. has grown stronger in recent years, as the Chinese navy has expanded. In the decades when China had little more than a coast guard, it was largely unaware that the U.S. Navy was patrolling waters near its shores. But now that its capabilities are more advanced, it witnesses on a daily basis that the American navy is superior, and operating only a few miles from many of China’s major cities. “For them, this is a major humiliation that they experience every single day,” says Chu. “It is humiliating that another country can exercise so close to China’s coasts, so close to the base in Hainan. That is the reason the navy wants to do something to challenge the U.S.”
Anxieties about history and geography have meshed with broader concerns about economic security. One of the key turning points in China’s push to the high seas took place when China became a net importer of oil for the first time, in 1993. By 2010, China had become the biggest consumer of energy in the world and the second-biggest consumer of oil, half of which is now imported. A Chinese company has built the largest oil tanker in the world, a 333-meter-long vessel called the Xin Buyang, which carries three hundred thousand tons of oil each time it travels from the Middle East. New great powers often fret that rivals could damage their economy with a blockade. Such warnings have become common in China over the last decade. For every ten barrels of oil that China imports, more than eight travel by ship through the Strait of Malacca, the narrow sea channel between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, which is patrolled by U.S. ships. Fifteenth-century Venetians used to warn, “Whoever is the Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.” Hu Jintao echoed similar sentiments when he warned in a 2003 speech that “certain major powers” are bent on controlling this crucial sea-lane. Until now, China’s maritime security has been guaranteed largely by the U.S. Navy. But, like aspiring great powers before it, China has been forced to confront a central geopolitical dilemma: can it rely on a rival to protect the country’s economic lifeline?
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China’s naval buildup may be directed at the U.S., but in lots of ways it has also been modeled on the U.S. At the very least, it should come as no surprise to the U.S. that an aspiring great power should seek to exert greater control over its regional waters. From the early days of the American republic, strategists in Washington fretted about the presence of the old European powers in the Americas. In 1823, these anxieties were given an official stamp when President James Monroe declared that the American continents were “henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” In effect, America put up a large “Stay Out” sign over the hemisphere. It is a natural instinct of rising powers to try and establish a buffer that prevents the more established powers from threatening their security. Like China today, America then worried about the risk of a blockade of its economy, or that a European power might organize a coalition among its neighbors to contain its rise. Like Chinese leaders today, American politicians in the nineteenth century took geopolitics very seriously while all the time professing disdain for the old European games of power politics. And, like China today, America was planning for the long term. The Monroe Doctrine was more bluff than fact for over half a century after it was announced. Britain continued to interfere in and occasionally colonize parts of the Americas for much of the nineteenth century. Even by the 1880s, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina all had larger navies than the U.S. It was not until the 1890s, when America started to establish a world-class navy, that it was able to genuinely enforce the Monroe Doctrine—a crucial point not lost on the Chinese today.
Indeed, China’s naval push is drawing heavily on American influences. In 1890s America, one of the most important evangelists of naval power was Alfred Thayer Mahan, an undistinguished naval captain who had started to plot a maritime history while whiling away some days at the English Club in Lima, Peru. The book he eventually wrote, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1680–1783, turned out to be one of the most influential of his generation when it was published in 1890, with the aid of a $200 personal loan from J. P. Morgan, and helped convince Washington of the need for a big navy. Mahan had two major themes. The first was about the virtues of building a naval force that could fight “decisive battles” against prospective rivals, thereby ensuring the command of the seas that can guarantee national greatness. The second was a more nuanced geopolitical theory about the importance of controlling the sea-lanes that are vital to a nation’s commercial life.
In the West, if Mahan is remembered at all today, it is largely for the first set of ideas, which have cast him as one of the warmongers of his age. The notion of applying “overbearing naval power” was taken seriously not only in the U.S. but also in Germany, where Kaiser Wilhelm was a big fan and ordered a copy of his great work placed in every battleship.
(“I am… devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,” he once said.) When the Kaiser met with his naval officers for drinks, they would make toasts to “The Day,” the chance they craved to show off their newfound naval strength in one do-or-die battle with the dominant maritime power of the age, the British navy. Mahan died just after the outbreak of the First World War, and his obituary in the New York Times said that his writings were
“really responsible for the German Navy as it exists today.” Sir Charles Webster, the British historian and wartime diplomat, once claimed, “Mahan was one of the causes of the First World War”—a charge from which his name has never completely recovered.
But in today’s China, it is the geopolitical aspects of Mahan’s writing that are greatly admired, the relationship between expanding commercial interests and naval power. Just as China worries about the Strait of Malacca and the first island chain, Mahan obsessed about building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama and about having naval capabilities in both the Caribbean and the Pacific to defend America’s new commercial arteries. He pushed for the U.S. to acquire bases in the Caribbean, to allow U.S. ships to control access to the Panama Canal. For Mahan, sea power was a crucial aspect of economic development. The ability to secure sea-lanes and the critical geographical locations that facilitate commercial traffic “affects the very root of a nation’s vigor.” Mahan’s ideas from the 1890s echo many of the challenges the Chinese see today, the mixture of a quest for national greatness and insecurity about economic lifelines at sea. The “Near Seas” is a formulation that has a strong Sinocentric ring to it, with its implication of a form of Chinese historical ownership, but it also embodies Mahan’s vision for a country to secure its vital maritime frontiers.
Neglected at home, Mahan has become deeply fashionable over the last decade in Chinese intellectual circles, including translations of his books, academic articles on their importance, and conferences on his ideas. He has inspired a generation of Chinese navalists.
“A big country that builds its prosperity on foreign trade cannot put the safety of its ocean fleet in the hands of other countries,” writes Ye Hailin, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Doing so would be the equivalent of putting its throat under another’s dagger and marking its blood vessels in red ink.”
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One publisher released an edition of Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power with a fold-out map of the Asia-Pacific that included all the U.S. naval facilities in the region. James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, two American historians who have tracked Mahan’s influence in China, write:
“His sea power philosophy remains hypnotic.… The Mahanian conceit that national greatness derives from sea power beguiles many Chinese strategists.” As a result, they conclude: “We should therefore expect China to attach extraordinary value to fighting and winning in the waters that fall within the near-seas.”
The U.S. and China have already indulged in some potentially dangerous sparring in the Near Seas—the sort of thing that in the Cold War was known as “nautical chicken.” In March 2009, the USNS Impeccable, a surveillance ship, was on an operation around seventy nautical miles from the new submarine base in Hainan when it was confronted by a flotilla of ten different Chinese ships. The Chinese crew dropped planks into the water to obstruct the American ship’s movements. When it braked, the Chinese sailors then used long poles to smash the surveillance instruments it was towing behind the ship. As the American ship retreated from the area, it was shadowed and harassed for some time. When the Chinese ships decided to take their leave, the crew of one boat dropped their pants and waved their bare bottoms in the direction of the Americans.
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