The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  “Deng had to explain over and over again to disappointed officers why it was in the national interest first to develop the civilian economy and then to modernize the military,” notes Ezra Vogel, author of an authoritative biography on the Chinese leader. “Deng was probably the only leader of his time with the authority, determination and political skill to keep these officers from launching serious protests against this policy.”

  But over time, patience wore thin, and the military has started to receive the sorts of resources that it had long been clamoring for. After Deng was forced to call up units of the PLA from outside of Beijing to fire on the Tiananmen protesters in 1989, spending on the military started to increase, including salaries and housing. If Tiananmen was a key turning point, another was the first Gulf War, in 1990–91. The campaign to push Iraq from Kuwait had a profound psychological impact among the Chinese leadership. Watching the images of destruction on their televisions, Chinese military officials were acutely aware of both their own limitations and the vast technological superiority of the U.S.

  At the start of the naval buildup, Taiwan was the primary focus. China wanted to have sufficient forces to take control of the island if it ever tried to declare independence formally, and to prevent any other power from intervening in a conflict if it did break out. In the early days of the People’s Republic, almost all the viable ships were given to the northern and eastern fleets, which operate near Taiwan, while the southern fleet was considered a poor cousin. Taiwan remains a priority, but over time, the scope of China’s naval ambitions has expanded. One of the reasons the opening of the new naval base on Hainan Island was so significant was that it demonstrated the new priorities of China’s naval push, the ability to project power not just east, toward Taiwan, but also down into the South China Sea and beyond.

  “Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?” The questions were raised by Donald Rumsfeld in 2005, when the then defense secretary was visiting Singapore for a conference. Iraq was still engulfed with violence at that time, and his comments seemed another exercise in neocon scaremongering. But nearly a decade later, the questions have not gone away. The uncomfortable truth is that China’s military investments are focused largely on the United States’ presence in the region. There should be little surprise that an aspiring great power would choose to invest more in its military as its interests and power expands. Yet China is not investing in the sort of navy that could be used for policing the world’s sea-lanes for pirates and terrorists. Instead, its principal target is the U.S. Navy. According to Dennis Blair, the retired admiral who was head of the U.S. intelligence services early in the Obama administration: “Ninety percent of their time is spent on thinking about new and interesting ways to sink our ships and shoot down our planes.”

  American strategists sometimes talk about

  a Chinese “anti-navy”—a series of weapons, some based on land, some at sea, which are specifically designed to keep an opposing navy as far away as possible from the mainland. China has a large and growing fleet of submarines, including nuclear-powered vessels and a group of Russia-supplied diesel submarines which are quiet and hard to detect. It is developing two different versions of stealth fighter jets (including the airplane that was tested the day Robert Gates was in Beijing), as well as its own unmanned drones that can deploy missiles. The navy is developing a new type of destroyer battleship which will have some of the missile defense capabilities of American Aegis ships.

  Pride of place in the anti-navy, however, goes to the Second Artillery Force, which operates most of the more than one thousand missiles that China has built up over the last two decades. There are missiles that can take out facilities on land, missiles for targeting satellites, and missiles for attacking ships. One technology in particular has attracted a lot of attention. China has invested heavily in a new generation of so-called carrier-killer missiles, designed to destroy aircraft carriers at sea. Larry Wortzel, a former American military attaché in Beijing, recalls a jocular warning he once received at a diplomatic reception. A Chinese officer put his arm around Wortzel’s shoulder and said, “We are going to sink your carriers with ballistic missiles.” The missiles, which supposedly cannot be detected by radar, have a range of fifteen hundred to two thousand kilometers. They are the modern equivalent of an “assassin’s mace,” the weapons used in Chinese historical novels that can undermine a technologically superior enemy. The implicit threat is that commanders of American aircraft carriers would have to think carefully about operating anywhere within that radius from the Chinese coast—a fundamental challenge to the way America projects military power in the region. It is the first weapons system since the end of the Cold War that both is potentially capable of stopping American naval-power projection and was specifically designed for that purpose. The strategy also represents good economics. Each of its carrier-killer missiles cost around $11 million; a new aircraft carrier now costs $13.5 billion.

  With any new, untried weapons, there is always an open question as to whether it will actually work. The carrier-killer missile is no exception. Hitting a moving ship at long distance is an incredibly difficult task. The U.S. Navy would have plenty of options to defend its carriers, such as shooting the missile down with Aegis missile-defense cruisers, or trying to jam the “seeker” technology that missiles deploy when they get near a target. Yet American commanders cannot guarantee that their defenses will work.

  “We want to spoof them, preclude detection, jam them, shoot them down if possible, get them to termination, confuse them,” Admiral Jonathan Greenert, chief of U.S. naval operations, once said on being asked about the Chinese carrier-killer missiles. Can they be jammed? “Yes, no, maybe so?” he said.

  The carrier killer is a technology whose potency will become apparent over the next decade. A more immediate threat comes from another innovation that has started to attract a lot of attention in Washington—China’s growing fleet of fast, mobile patrol craft that carry cruise missiles designed to attack ships. This is another technology that fits the pattern of fighting “asymmetric” warfare against U.S. carrier groups operating near the Chinese coast. These patrol craft use a catamaran hull that was initially designed in Australia for passenger ferries, but which allows the attack craft to skim across waves at high speed. The Houbei-class vessels, as they are called, also copy many of the same features as stealth fighter jets, such as windows with jagged edges and a sloped hull, which help it avoid detection by radar. The Chinese fleet now has around sixty of these catamaran craft, and each vessel carries eight anti-ship missiles. Chinese strategists describe them being used in “wolf pack” operations, in which they can swarm a target group of vessels, attacking in numbers from different directions. Their limited fuel tanks mean that they cannot operate at long distances from the mainland, but they could be very effective in any exchange nearer to the Chinese coast.

  The other string of China’s “asymmetric” fighting capabilities is cyber- and space warfare. Whereas Chinese hacking of commercial secrets has won a huge amount of attention in the U.S., the potential use of cyberattacks during a conflict is less discussed. This could include attacks on infrastructure in the U.S., designed to inflict damage on the economy, but it could also involve attacking the information systems that the U.S. Air Force and Navy rely on. By taking out U.S. satellites, China could hamper the ability of U.S. fighter jets to operate effectively.

  China’s navy still has many weaknesses, including the inexperience of its sailors in combat conditions. But the era of the “million-man swim” is long gone. China is quickly acquiring the capabilities to start challenging U.S. power projection in the western Pacific. In the process, the U.S. and China are embarking on an epic tussle for who will have the upper hand in the Near Seas. How that contest plays out will depend on three factors, which we will see in the next chapters. It will depend on how t
he rest of Asia reacts to China’s new ambitions, and on how America responds to the challenge, too. But it will also be heavily influenced by what China tries to do with its new navy in areas far away from its coastal waters. The rivalry between the U.S. and China in the western Pacific will be shaped partly by how China decides to approach the Indian Ocean.

  2

  The Lure of the Indian Ocean

  yOU DID NOT BRING any hundred-dollar notes?” the Yangon bank teller asked. There are all sorts of signs of just how detached Burma has become from the modern world after decades of sanctions and military-led incompetence, but the simple things are the most striking. Burma is one of the few countries in the world where visitors need to take large wads of dollar bills if they want to buy local currency. Forget ATMs; even travelers’ checks have passed it by. I handed the teller a collection of $20 notes I had withdrawn shortly before leaving the U.S. She scoured each note carefully, sometimes taking several seconds at a time, handing back any that were marked or even slightly frayed with a polite “tut,” as if I had been trying to cheat her. A few days later, as we were driving along rickety back roads on Burma’s Indian Ocean coast, the sense of stagnation was even harder to ignore. The poorer houses still had thatched roofs, and in some cases the walls were thatched, too. In many of the villages we passed through, the market consisted of a few piles of bananas and coconuts laid out on plastic sheets on the ground, alongside a few consumer basics. There were very few other cars and only a handful of motorbikes, the road being mostly occupied by bicycles and bike-rickshaws. The buzzing metropolis of Bangkok was just one hour’s flight away, and within three hours you could be in Singapore, whose vapid but impressive modernity is an unforgiving benchmark for just how far Burma has fallen behind.

  Such a powerful sense of being stuck in time can also have its own allure, of course. The main road threaded through dense forest, but after a while weaved back to the coast. We passed golden beaches backed by palm trees and bougainvillea, empty but for the driftwood left by the tide. The monsoon had already passed through this part of the country, and there was a cool breeze off the Bay of Bengal. A century earlier, Rudyard Kipling wrote part of The Jungle Book at a resort just a bit farther south. At the time, both India and Burma were part of the British Empire, and the coast was a popular vacation spot for the Calcutta imperial class, just across the other side of the Bay of Bengal. It probably had not changed much since then.

  After several hours of driving north, we came to a vast clearing that had been cut out of undulating forest and vegetation. The sense of timelessness ended with an abrupt shock. An area of several square kilometers had been surrounded by high fences, but there were plenty of telltale signs about what lay behind the locked gates. In the distance were a series of large tubular metal tanks suitable for storing oil. I counted three large red cranes of the type that I had seen on countless construction sites in China. The real clincher was in one corner of the site, where there were several long lines of portable buildings, their white walls and blue roofs marking them out as the dormitories for construction workers, some of whom I could make out in the distance by their orange hard hats. For anyone who had spent time on mainland China, these were the unmistakable sights and sounds of industrial development with Chinese characteristics.

  We had arrived at Ramree Island, an isolated peninsula on the north of Burma’s Indian Ocean coast, which is quietly becoming one of the geopolitical hot spots of the twenty-first century. The fenced-off construction site I was able to glimpse is part of the single most ambitious overseas project that China has yet undertaken. Ramree boasts a natural deep-water port that looks onto the Bay of Bengal. It is also the starting point for a 2,806-kilometer oil-and-gas pipeline that stretches all the way across northern Burma, over mountain ranges and through tropical jungles, until it arrives at Kunming, one of the main cities in the southwest of China. The plans include a port, a railway line, and a major oil storage-and-treatment facility. A video presentation about the project adopts the kind of breezy management-speak that often accompanies Chinese investments, gushing about “a concept of one development zone, three clusters, and six bases.” The presentation includes a designer’s drawing for a high-rise housing project and a shopping mall, identical to the sort of development you can now find in the suburbs of a thousand Chinese cities.

  Ramree was the site of an important battle in the later stages of World War II: the Allies battled for six weeks in early 1945 to defeat the Japanese forces stationed there, with Indian soldiers doing most of the fighting. The Battle of Ramree Island is better known for the fate of the retreating Japanese soldiers, who tried to escape at night across a mangrove swamp; many of them ended up eaten by saltwater crocodiles. The reported deaths of nearly a thousand soldiers is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest-ever loss of human life to animals. Ramree was strategically important for the Allies, because it was easily accessible by sea and because it provided an ideal airbase to support the rest of the Burma campaign. In the early twenty-first century, Ramree has again become a crucial geographical node, a place where commercial ambition and geopolitical calculation are colliding. By building a pipeline all the way through Burma, China is attempting to subvert the realities of its geography and to gain direct access to the Indian Ocean.

  The basic idea is simple: As a result of the pipeline, some of the oil and gas that China buys from the Middle East will no longer need to travel through the chokehold of the Strait of Malacca. Instead, it can be transported overland from Ramree to China’s urban centers. The pipeline gives China a direct outlet to the Indian Ocean that it has never enjoyed before. It is a way of avoiding all that complicated geography at the mouth of the South China Sea, an engineering solution to the “Malacca Dilemma.” Why worry about sending ships down those narrow sea-lanes to the South China Sea, which can be blocked by opponents, when China can use a pipeline that starts at the Bay of Bengal?

  That, at least, was the strategic thinking that helped win approval for the $2.5-billion pipeline project. But the law of unintended consequences has a way of turning such plans on their heads. The project was sold as a way of reducing risks to China’s supply routes. Yet, by avoiding the Strait of Malacca, China has created a new problem for itself in the Indian Ocean. “If we are going to have a big port and a terminal and a pipeline all on the west coast of Burma, then we are going to need some military protection there,” as one Chinese academic, who was deeply skeptical about the pipeline project, told me. “The result is the opposite of what people thought. It means that we are going to need a navy that can operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.”

  The contest with the U.S. over the Near Seas is already a reality. But as China’s power and ambitions expand, it is only natural that its gaze will start to stretch farther afield, toward the Indian Ocean. Ramree Island is potentially the herald of a very different, long-term project to develop the sort of navy that can operate in the Indian Ocean and beyond. China is already the biggest consumer of oil in the Middle East and is tentatively starting to build political relationships in the region—just as the U.S. did a century before when Britain and France were the dominant outside powers. If China is really serious about securing the sea-lanes on which its economy depends, it will need the sort of “blue water” navy that can contest seas all the way from the Strait of Malacca up through the entire Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf, home of America’s Fifth Fleet. If China decides to go that route over the next two decades, it has the potential to alter fundamentally the nature of competition with the U.S. The challenge that China currently presents to the U.S. is intense but localized, restricted to China’s immediate maritime periphery. China’s immediate ambitions are regional, not global. But as it casts its sights across the Indian Ocean, the stakes become much higher, raising the prospect that China could pursue a much more sustained and broader challenge to the U.S.

  Yet it is far from inevitable that the U.S. and China will end up as co
mpetitors in the Indian Ocean. China’s approach will depend in part on a number of key decisions that China’s leaders will need to take over the next decade, which will involve massive investments and will be crucial barometers of their long-term intentions. Distance from home drastically changes the military calculation for China. In the Near Seas, the geography is on China’s side: it has missile sites along its coast, which it can use to exert control over sea-lanes. But in the Indian Ocean, those advantages disappear. If China wants to have the ability to contest the seas well beyond its periphery, and to project power in the Indian Ocean, it needs to invest heavily in two areas. It will need to have bases in and agreements with friendly countries that will allow it to use their ports and airfields to support its forces. And it will need the sorts of warships that can provide some form of air cover across wide expanses of ocean. In other words, it will need aircraft carriers. The bad news for China is that, although both projects are superficially attractive, they will be politically difficult and economically costly to implement.

  THE “STARTER CARRIER”

  “Without an aircraft carrier, I will die with my eyelids open,” Liu Huaqing, the former commander of the Chinese fleet, said in 1987—a Chinese phrase that implies a deep, unfulfilled desire. In the modern era, Liu was the first official to push the case for a bigger fleet; he is often referred to as “the father of the modern Chinese navy.” It was Liu who introduced the concept of “Near Seas” and “Far Seas” into Chinese strategic thought, and also he who, in the 1980s, led the navy’s transformation from a glorified coast guard into a modern fleet. China, he argued, needed to stake its claim as a great power, and an aircraft carrier was the vital platform for projecting naval power over long distances. When he outlined these ideas in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when most Chinese were not able to eat meat regularly, his plans seemed quixotic. But by the time he died, in early 2011, they had become mainstream: a few weeks before his death, Chinese officials acknowledged for the first time that the country was building its own carrier. All nine members of the Communist Party Standing Committee turned out for Liu Huaqing’s memorial service, the only time in recent memory that this has happened for a military leader. A distraught-looking Hu Jintao presented a bouquet of white carnations to his widow. Xi Jinping gave a speech saying that China had to step up the development of its naval capabilities to match its new position in the world.