RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT THE LEADERSHIP of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has no doubts about the sort of naval and air force they need to accomplish their national geostrategic objectives over the next two decades. In fact, the PLA has been uncharacteristically open about the importance of its naval and air forces, and therefore by implication its maritime strategy.
U.S. strategists and senior commanders also appear to be quite well informed regarding where the PLA navy seems to be headed. Ever since the 1995–96 PLA missile tests near Taiwan, and the subsequent dispatch of two aircraft carrier battlegroups to the region, the U.S. military has recognized that war with China over Taiwan was a real possibility and, as a result, has been paying close attention to PLA modernization.
The comprehensive and generally well-balanced July 2005 and 2006 Defense Department Reports to the Congress on the topic of PLA modernization are the most recent public manifestation of this focus. The 2005 report made clear that the PRC is making a substantial investment in submarines, both conventional and nuclear-powered. Since 2000, twenty-one new submarines, two of them nuclear, have been commissioned by the PLAN.1 The objective of this chapter is to provide a context for these developments and to suggest how all of the PRC’s maritime-oriented modernization efforts—especially its submarine force—will contribute to an effective PLAN maritime strategy.
The Defense Department reports, and other public manifestations of military strategy such as the 2001 and 2006 Quadrennial Defense Reviews, are very clear evidence that ongoing PLA modernization, especially its branches with projection potential—the navy, air force and 2nd Artillery—are being watched very closely because they could pose a threat to the region and to the long-standing U.S. military mission of maintaining stability.
Any discussion of the PRC’s maritime strategy must be informed by an understanding of long-term PRC strategic goals or ambitions. In his recent book on China’s grand strategy, Avery Goldstein argues that Beijing has adopted a strategy focused on a “peaceful rise,” or more recently, “peaceful development,” that is intended to cover China’s period of strategic transition—that is, the period between today and the time that China has finally risen—whenever that might be. If Goldstein is correct, then it is also possible to argue that the maritime component of China’s national military strategy is also one that is intended to cover the decades-long transition to “fully developed” status. Not surprisingly, no one can predict how Chinese grand strategy might change once the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party determine that it has reached its fully developed stage as a well-rounded great power. Beijing’s great power ambitions are not spelled out in any systematic way in any kind of official PRC document such as a national strategy. They have to be derived from a variety of official, semi-official, and academic sources.2
That being the case, it is an interesting exercise to attempt to divine how Beijing would like the security dimension of this future world to be at the end of its period of transition. The points below reflect this author’s interpretation.
•Recognition and acknowledgement by other Asian nations as Asia’s leading power
•Diminution, if not elimination, of the U.S. bilateral alliance architecture in East Asia with Beijing’s “New Concept of Security” becoming the organizing principle for East Asian security
•Continued access to global markets for Chinese goods
•Unimpeded access to energy, especially from the Middle East
•Political and military stability on its periphery
•A clear, agreed-upon path to peaceful reunification with Taiwan, if not already achieved
•Neither Japan nor India will become an avowed strategic rival
•Either peaceful coexistence between the two Koreas, or a reunited Korea that assumes a grand strategy of strategic independence
•Continued strategic partnership with Russia
•An end to the U.S. presence in Japan and Central Asia
•A secure second-nuclear-strike capability that is relatively immune to U.S. missile defense capability
Clearly a number of these aims have direct implications for the capabilities that the PLA Navy must possess if these goals are to be achieved.
Moving from these geostrategic aspirations to a focus on where the PLA wants to go is an easier task. However, the exact size, the precise organization, and the operational capabilities of the PLA in the distant future are impossible at this point to detail with precision. The PLA is still not a very transparent military when compared to western militaries that are required to rationalize virtually all aspects of their goals and ambitions before congresses or parliaments that represent the public. But the PLA has helped to inform outside students of its intent in a number of ways:
•A series of ever-more-informative defense white papers (the fourth, and most recent, was published in December 2004)
•Publishing a tremendous amount of open-source Chinese-language material related broadly to military modernization
•A willingness to allow both active duty and retired PLA officers to participate in sustained track-II discussions with a small number of U.S. research institutions regarding modernization of the PLA
As a result, it is possible to speak with a bit more assurance about where the PLA wants to be in the next few years. For example, research by Dr. David Finkelstein at the Center for Naval Analyses suggests that by 2025:
•The PLA3 will certainly be a more professional force in the corporate and institutional sense, and a more operationally capable and sustainable military force in the war-fighting sense than it is today.
•The PLA will still likely be a force tooled for sustainable regional force projection; not global force projection.
•The PLA will still probably be a large organization in terms of numbers. It will be larger than it needs to be or would prefer to be—with most units of uneven quality in terms of equipment and qualified personnel, but with a relatively small core of highly trained and well-equipped units that will make it one of the premier regional military forces in Asia.4
•The PLA will be able to coordinate joint operations beyond the littoral of Asia. Although today’s PLA is only in the early stages on its road toward joint operations, recent Chinese training activities are now actively exploring how to increase the character of joint operations within its forces and activities. While this does not extend to the entire force, nonetheless the premier units which were once merely going through the motions, or simply trying to get forces to operate in the same area, are now mixing it up much more.
•The PLA will almost certainly have enhanced capabilities to utilize outer space for C4ISR functions—certainly for new architectures to enable new command and control relationships, and probably for enhanced battle space awareness.
•The leadership of the PLA will aspire to have a force capable enough to fight and defeat other regional militaries, and a military that is credible enough to deter outside military intervention in conflicts with regional adversaries.5
What exactly has the PLA done to realize these ambitions? Overall, research indicates that the PLA is “a learning organization” that has a voracious appetite for information on Western war-fighting and transformational concepts.
In 1999, after years of study and experimentation, the entire body of the PLA’s official doctrinal literature focused on the operational (campaign) and tactical levels of warfare was reissued. Doctrine dating from the mid-1980s was retired and new operations manuals and regulations were published.
Informed by lessons learned from the Gulf War and other Western local wars, such as the United Kingdom’s Falklands campaign, and dictated by a shift of China’s main strategic direction away from the land borders to the north and out to the sea off the Chinese littoral, the PLA is now engaged in attempting to retool its war-fighting concepts. The new PLA doctrine is shifting this massive defense establishment from its previous orientation toward ground-force-centric, positional, defensive, combined-arms operations to offensive mobile joint service operations that that will take place in maritime, air, and space arenas.
The most important construct at the operational level of war to come out of the new doctrinal guidance is what is known in the PLA as “the campaign basic guiding concept” that calls for “integrated operations and key point strikes.” This guidance will inform China’s maritime strategy.
Integrated operations speaks to the need to integrate: (1) all services (joint operations to include reserves and militia), (2) fighting in all battle-space dimensions (to include the electromagnetic spectrum), (3) all campaign phases to focus on the main operational objective, (4) the newest PLA capabilities to focus on the most important enemy targets, (5) all modes of operations (simultaneous offensive and defensive operations, and front and rear operations), and (6) both mobile and static operations.
Key-point strikes is the operational expression of integrated operations. It calls for the concentration of the PLA’s most powerful capabilities to destroy or degrade the enemy’s best capabilities in order to (1) level the technological playing field at the inception of hostilities, and (2) disrupt the enemy’s campaign before it can achieve operational momentum. The PLA’s approach rests upon the correct selection of enemy vital targets and key-point application of force against those targets.
In a change from past doctrine, in which the focus was on concentration of one’s own forces (mass) against weak enemy sectors, the new doctrine calls for the PLA to concentrate its best capabilities against the vital capabilities that most enable the enemy to prosecute its campaign. In other words, concentrate on what the United States would term centers of gravity. There is no question that in a Taiwan scenario, or in any other conflict scenario that matches the United States against China, the United States would depend upon naval power operating in the vast western Pacific to be a main factor in any U.S. application of force. In short, U.S. maritime striking power is one of America’s military centers of gravity. As a related point, the PLA has also decided that an enemy’s operational center of gravity includes C4ISR architectures, its most lethal weapons systems, and its operational sustainment capabilities.6
In sum, emerging PLA doctrine has shifted from a long-standing emphasis of ground-centric “campaigns of annihilation” (a traditional PLA expression) that focused on force-on-force attrition, to campaigns of paralysis in which offensive and preemptive strikes at the operational level of war deny the technologically superior enemy the ability to conduct its campaign. This has obvious implications for how the PLA thinks about war in the maritime domain, suggesting the need to attack and defeat enemy naval forces before they can reach a position to attack China or its forces.
China has done a good job over the last fifteen years of securing its land frontiers by resolving territorial disputes with Russia, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and India; and by negotiating strategic partnerships with most of these countries. However, the strategic outlook off its eastern seaboard and maritime approaches is replete with problems and vulnerabilities. This is not a new issue for China. Weakness along the maritime frontier has historic resonance for Beijing. The Chinese are still smarting from the Century of Humiliation when they suffered significant losses of sovereignty from Western nations (including Japan) that came from the sea.
The reality that Beijing faces is that the vast majority of China’s outstanding sovereignty and unresolved strategic issues are maritime in nature:
•Taiwan is an island. It is the U.S. military that effectively keeps the Taiwan Strait a moat rather than a highway.
•Territorial dispute with Japan—over islands and seabed resources—has become even more serious, and are maritime in nature.
•Territorial issues remain with respect to the Spratly Islands and the South China Sea.
•China’s economic center of gravity is on its east coast—quite vulnerable to attack from the sea.
•Trade largely depends upon maritime commerce. Most of China’s oil comes by sea. Most of its exports reach markets by way of the sea.
•Beijing’s primary military competitor and the one country that can thwart Chinese ambitions is a maritime power that controls China’s littoral—the United States, which is also closely allied with a historic antagonist (Japan), which also has an excellent navy and a formidable maritime tradition.
Beijing understands that control of the western Pacific by the United States is currently the greatest potential spoiler to any ambition to resolve by force or intimidation these outstanding strategic issues.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the latest Chinese Defense White Paper (December 2004) breaks with the tradition of land-force dominance and clearly states that the PLA Navy, PLA Air Force, and its ballistic-missile force—the 2nd Artillery—are to receive priority in funding. Further, it explicitly lays out its ambitions for the navy, air force, and 2nd Artillery: “While continuing to attach importance to the building of the Army, the PLA gives priority to the building of the Navy, Air Force and Second Artillery force to seek balanced development of the combat force structure, in order to strengthen the capabilities for winning both command of the sea and command of the air, and conducting strategic counter strikes” (emphasis added).7
Finally, it is useful to note that all the service chiefs (army, navy, air force, and 2nd Artillery) are now part of the Central Military Commission, the highest level of military authority. This means that the navy’s perspectives are being heard at the highest levels of military decision making.
Because of America’s five-decade-long commitment to the defense of Taiwan, U.S. defense officials recognize the implications of emphasizing naval and air power by the PLA, and how this increased emphasis would supplement the PLA’s already massive missile buildup opposite Taiwan. It is Taiwan that makes the overall Sino-United States relationship unique, very different from any other bilateral relationship that Washington is party to. On many different levels—political, economic, trade, academic, and personal—the Sino-United States relationship is normal, sometimes difficult, sometimes cordial, but overall, mutually productive and central to the peaceful development of Asia and the economic health of the world. At the same time, the black cloud of war, because of Taiwan, is so real that the respective militaries of both countries are actively planning, exercising, and war gaming with the aim of defeating one another.
So long as Beijing insists on keeping the use of force against Taiwan as a central element of its declaratory policy toward Taiwan—keeping its finger on the trigger so to speak—the possibility of conflict cannot be ruled out. As a result, another military dynamic comes into play: long-range planning that informs military and naval modernization and future concept development in both Beijing and Washington.
This has already set in motion a long-term capability competition between an improving PLA and a U.S. military dedicated to being able to sustain regional stability, by maintaining a force capable of frustrating PLA force projection goals. A capabilities competition is defined as an effort by the United States to maintain its current advantages on the Asian littoral by continuing to improve as the PLA improves. As the latest 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) implies, while the PLA continues to improve, so too does its American counterpart. Both militaries are rising on the same tide. The U.S. response is characterized as both shaping and dissuading.8
A good way to speculate about how the maritime component of China’s national strategy might be translated into PLAN force structure is to consider what sort of capabilities the PLA will need in order to achieve the stated PLA White Paper objectives of command of the sea. What would PLA forces capable of commanding of the sea look like? One alternative would be a replay of the Imperial Japanese Navy. This example is conceptual shorthand, a way to characterize a truly blue-water navy able to operate independently on the high seas, equipped with balanced capabilities that could actively contest the U.S. Navy for regional maritime dominance.
Such a navy would require aircraft carriers for power projection, a realistic air defense capability, an amphibious force for the Taiwan scenario, an effective ASW capability against U.S. Navy and Japanese submarines, and perhaps, a significant sea-based ballistic-missile force.
Wholehearted adoption of this option by China is unlikely for three reasons. First, it has no real counters to a modern submarine force, something the U.S. and Japan both possess. The ASW problem will be too difficult for the PLAN to overcome for many years, if ever. U.S. attack submarines are simply too fast and too hard for the PLA to detect—its surface fleet could easily be sunk by submarines.
Second, the cost and effort associated with taking militarily significant numbers of tactical aircraft to sea will be prohibitively expensive and time consuming. A small carrier or two like that of Thailand, Italy, or Spain, or even of India for prestige value should not be ruled out. After all, China is the only member of the UN Permanent Five without one. However, a genuinely capable aircraft carrier (CV) force like that of the U.S. Navy does not appear likely, because of the submarine problem mentioned above. The asymmetric advantage the United States and its allies possess in submarines is likely to dissuade the PLAN from attempting a blue-water carrier force that has a substantial military capability.
Third, the reaction of the rest of Asia, especially Japan, to an avowedly power projection PLA Navy would be counterproductive to China’s broader strategic objectives of not creating powerful enemies in the region, especially since such a naval force would not be essential to satisfying the PRC’s strategic objectives. In this context, diesel submarines are much preferable to nuclear submarines. They are quieter, very hard to find, and create the image of being defensive in nature. They fit within the template in East Asian naval developments that has seen South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia join Japan, Taiwan, and Australia as nations with conventional submarines.
The more likely option, and the one I believe that the PLA is pursuing, is a variant of the Soviet Union’s sea denial strategy of the 1980s—updated, of course, with Chinese characteristics. This is a capability that will satisfy the vast majority of PRC strategic requirements on Beijing’s maritime frontier, and is within the PRC’s ability to execute.
It will focus on sea control within the first island chain (which includes both the East China Sea and the South China Sea), and sea denial beyond Taiwan in the open ocean approaches to China. It will be a joint force—composed of navy, air force, and ballistic-missile capabilities:
•Land-based air power mated with air-launched cruise missiles. PLA naval aviation and the PLAAF are working on these tactics.
•Offensive use of submarines against U.S. Navy surface forces. A word on conventional versus nuclear-powered submarines: if the PLA had the capability to build acoustically competitive nuclear submarines at a reasonable cost I would expect them to do so. But Beijing currently does not, and therefore the focus on modern conventional submarines, which don’t come with the built-in vulnerability of being noisy, makes good sense for the PLAN in the near term. Over the long term, it is reasonable to expect the PLAN to try to master modern quieting techniques, since the vast distances in the Pacific combined with the logistic limitations of conventional submarines makes nuclear-powered submarines a better weapons system option.
•Land-based conventionally tipped ballistic missiles with maneuverable reentry vehicle (MaRV) warheads that can hit ships at sea. This would be a Chinese “assassin’s mace” sort of a capability—something impossible to deal with today, and very difficult under any circumstances if one is forced to defeat it by shooting down ballistic missiles. Such a capability is dependent on Beijing’s ability to put together the appropriate space-based surveillance, command, and targeting architecture necessary to make this work.
Beijing must also be able to preserve this architecture, or network, from U.S. disruption. Regardless of whether or not they can make maneuvering ballistic missiles work, they absolutely require an open ocean surveillance capability that can locate approaching naval forces in order to cue relatively slow moving conventional submarines and land-based aircraft. This is the long pole in the tent for the PLA. Without a reliable surveillance capability, PLA ambitions of gaining sea control and denying the approaches to China will remain just that—ambitions.
•This PLAN is also going to require some sort of amphibious capability so long as Taiwan’s status remains an unsettled issue, but this capability need not be able to project land power over vast distances. Taiwan is only one hundred miles away from the mainland, and it is hard to imagine that the PRC would actually be interested in trying to invade another country—Japan for example—from the sea.
•Like Imperial Japan, China could also depend upon offshore islands to extend its defenses in the South China Sea—using the Paracels, for example.
While a sea-based nuclear deterrent is not an essential prerequisite for command of the sea, it could form an essential part of a broader maritime strategy. To do so, however, would require the PLAN to overcome its acoustic disadvantage vis-à-vis the U.S. submarine force. It is well known that the PLA has a voracious appetite for any information related to the employment of modern weapons systems.
The combination of close contacts for the past decade with the Russian navy and the growing body of unclassified studies on Cold War naval operations must have made it abundantly clear to PLA planners that unless PLAN SSBNs could operate undetected by U.S. forces, it would be foolish to make substantial investments in a sea-based leg of their nuclear retaliatory capability. SSBNs would be vulnerable if operating on the high seas, and be a resource sump if it was necessary to create a Soviet-like bastion defense to protect them. This is especially true given the vastness of the Chinese mainland, where the 2nd Artillery’s new solid-fuel road-mobile systems are far more survivable.
What could be a far more attractive option for the PLAN would be SSNs armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Not only would these systems circumvent U.S. ballistic-missile defenses, but even if loaded on noisy SSNs operating in the eastern Pacific they would become a magnet for U.S. ASW forces, and create serious resource allocation problems. One need only recall the tremendous national effort involved in keeping track of Soviet submarines operating off the east and west Coasts of the United States during the Cold War. In this case, as Chinese quieting technology improved, the problem would become increasingly difficult for U.S. forces.
The absence of discussion above regarding the PLAN’s growing destroyer and frigate force is not meant to suggest that these ships have no overall role, despite the fact that their contribution to denying the approaches to China to the U.S. Navy would be marginal. These are the warships that today, and in the future, will continue to be valued symbols of China as a great power, operating and exercising around the world. Showing the flag is an important peacetime mission. They also have the capability to perform escort roles and would have some functions in a Taiwan scenario operating against the Taiwanese navy. However, in a conflict against the U.S. Navy the poor antiaircraft and antisubmarine defenses of these ships would make them very vulnerable to U.S. tactical air or U.S. and allied submarines. The PLA has spent considerable time studying the United Kingdom’s 1982 Falklands campaign. The sinking of the Argentine cruiser Belgrano is a dramatic illustration of surface ship vulnerability to submarine attack.9
As a continental power only recently coming to grips with defending itself from a serious attack from the sea, Beijing has apparently made a series of sensible decisions regarding how best to solve its outstanding strategic issues, all of which are maritime in nature.
By electing to mimic the Soviet approach, Beijing has opted for a maritime strategy that is at once affordable, militarily practical, and comprehensive. It is comprehensive in the sense that its combined naval, air force, and strategic missile force is well suited to dealing with the long list of Beijing’s outstanding strategic issues that are maritime in nature. Not only is this approach to strategy sensible from an operational perspective, it is also on its face inherently defensive, which fits perfectly with Beijing’s putative grand strategy of peaceful development.
It would be a mistake, however, not to recognize that while being sensible, it also embodies some serious technical challenges that Beijing must overcome. Effective and timely open ocean surveillance is an essential prerequisite, as it has been for any continental power faced with a foe approaching from the sea. In today’s terms that means the PLA will increasingly become dependent on space-based surveillance and communications—becoming over time a mirror image of the United States.
It also means that it must master the difficult feat of being able to hit moving ships with ballistic missiles. This is not a trivial problem, and is one that is dependent on reliable real-time surveillance and communications. If Beijing can actually accomplish this, it can present the United States with two incredibly difficult war-fighting challenges—hunting down very quiet submarines, and somehow negating the ship-killing potential of ballistic missiles.
Of course, nothing in the approach that Beijing is pursuing prejudices its future options, once risen, on deciding that that the PRC should create a genuine power projection navy. As conceptual shorthand, this is the Imperial Japanese Navy model. This is unlikely for a very long time, because the United States holds a decided asymmetric advantage in the form of its nuclear submarine force. Until, and unless, Beijing gets very good at finding submarines, U.S. submarines can hold at risk every warship the PLAN sends to sea.
Finally, let me offer a word about resources available to execute the PRC’s maritime strategy. The recently released DoD report makes clear that the resources for modernization should be available to the PLA. The report forecasts respective national GDPs in the year 2025. According to the DoD report, China’s GDP forecast is $6.4 trillion, Japan’s $6.3 trillion (slips to third place), and the United States’ is $22.3 trillion. So while the PRC may have the second largest economy in the world in 2025, the U.S. economy will likely still be almost four times as large.10
What this suggests is that the United States will also have the resources to be easily able to stay militarily ahead of the PRC should it elect, or be required, to do so. Economically there is no reason why the United States should not be able to continue to play its stabilizing role in East Asia for the foreseeable future, so long as Washington believes it is in the national interest of the United States to do so. The key is that, in terms of capability, as the PLA gets better so too must the United States improve. We must “rise on the same tide” to preserve today’s advantages.
1. Ronald O’Rourke, “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background Issues for Congress,” CRS Report for Congress, November 18, 2005 CRS-7. CRS website. Order Code RL33153, www.crs.gov.
2. Avery Goldstein, “China’s Grand Strategy and U.S. Foreign Policy,” an essay based on his book Rising to the Challenge: China Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). Essay distributed by FPRI enotes September 27, 2005, www.fpri.org. Apparently, PRC leadership thought that talking about China’s rise could be construed as to too threatening to the region, so over the last eighteen months the current term of art preferred by Beijing is peaceful development. The important point is that Beijing is very sensitive to anything that could alarm its neighbors and perhaps trigger bandwagoning with the United States against China.
3. The PRC’s armed forces are composed of three components: the active and reserve units of the PLA, the Peoples Armed Police, and the militia. According to China’s 2004 Defense White Paper, the active PLA will number 2.3 million personnel, while the militia accounts for another 10 million. “PLA” refers to the entire armed forces of China: the ground forces, navy, air force, and strategic rocket forces (also known as the 2nd Artillery.
4. The sociopolitical challenge to the government in Beijing associated with the demobilization of massive numbers of soldiers is a regime stability issue that is handled with great care. Since 1985 the PLA has downsized by cutting more than 1.5 million troops. Another 200,000-person reduction is underway. The economic burdens on local governments of placing demobilized troops and their families back into the civilian sector is likely the greatest factor that inhibits the PLA from scaling down to a much leaner military—one that can be evenly trained and equipped for excellence across the board.
5. The characteristics of “PLA 2025” cited above are derived from long-term analysis of the PLA’s ongoing and impressive reform and modernization efforts, a careful reading of Chinese professional military literature, the statements of key Chinese civilian and military leaders, and a subjective sense of the future geostrategic environment that Chinese military and civilian strategists foresee for the PRC in the next two decades. Dr. David Finkelstein has led this work with great distinction for the past five years.
6. This entire section drawn from David M. Finkelstein, with Kenneth Allen, Dean Cheng, and Maryanne Kivlehan, Evolving Operational Concepts of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army and Navy: A Preliminary Exploration, (Alexandria, Va.: CNA Corporation, October 2002).
7. PRC Defense White Paper, December 2004, Information Office of the State Council of the PRC, December 2004, Beijing, english.people.com.cn/whitepaper/defense2004.
8. Quadrennial Defense Review Report, U.S. Department of Defense, February 6, 2006, 29–32, 38–39. In addition, on page 47 the QDR is rather specific regarding changes in the U.S. Navy’s posture in the Pacific. “The fleet will have greater presence in the Pacific Ocean, consistent with the global shift of trade and transport. Accordingly, the Navy plans to adjust its force posture and basing to provide at least six operationally available and sustainable carriers and 60% of its submarines in the Pacific to support engagement, presence and deterrence.”
9. LTC Wu Jianchu, “Joint Operations—the Basic Form of Combat on High-Tech Terms,” Junshi Kexue no. 4, 1995. Zhou Xiaoyu, Peng Xiwen, and An Weiping, New Discussion on Joint Campaigns (Beijing: National Defense University Publishing House, January 2000), 21–22.
10. Department of Defense, “Annual Report to Congress: The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2005,” The Office of the Secretary of Defense, July 2005, Executive Summary, www.defenselink.mil/news/july2005/d20050719china.pdf.