Red Star Over the Pacific

This book represents the culmination of more than five years of collaborative research and publishing on China’s seaward turn. We conceived of revisiting geostrategic analysis and sea-power theory while poring over a map of Asia in the summer of 2004 in landlocked Athens, Georgia, an unlikely place to think about affairs on the high seas. Since that brainstorming session, we have presented papers at international conferences, written numerous journal articles, and published two books on Chinese sea power and maritime strategy in Asia. Our first major work, Chinese Naval Strategy in the Twenty-First Century: The Turn to Mahan, was an attempt to discern an intriguing intellectual anomaly in China. In the early 2000s, we noticed that Chinese scholars were paying homage to a long-dead American sea-power theorist reviled by Maoist China. The apparent popularity of Alfred Thayer Mahan caught our attention because it signaled to us that Chinese strategists were studying and internalizing his writings in anticipation of China’s entry into the nautical domain. Our thesis was that China would draw from and reshape Mahan’s theories for China’s unique maritime circumstances. Since then the study of Mahan has matured considerably, and policy statements from officials at the highest levels of government in Beijing bear out our contention.

We consider this book a companion volume that validates, refines, and expands upon our survey of Chinese interpretations of Mahan’s theories. But it goes far beyond strategic theory. International politics is a competitive enterprise; interaction between competitors vying for important interests determines its nature. The United States needs to think seriously about its side of the interactive relationship with China if it is to sustain a strategic position that has benefited itself and Asia for many decades.

In short, we believe that China’s maritime capacity—as measured not only in hardware terms but also in terms of seamanship and warfighting skill—has reached a point where Chinese strategists’ theorizing will be put to the test. In other words, Beijing is on the brink of commanding the seas “with Chinese characteristics,” to borrow a phrase common among Chinese officials and scholars. Why China is going to sea has been well documented. What capabilities China needs to fulfill its maritime ambitions is also a well trodden research area. Indeed, our colleagues at the Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) publish excellent studies of the Chinese navy as a matter of routine. But how, specifically, Beijing will make its entry into the nautical arena remains largely unexplored. We intend to fill this gap in Westerners’ understanding of Chinese sea power. In particular, this volume examines how Chinese strategy, operations, and tactics may interact with U.S. naval power in Asia, and it considers nonmilitary implements of national power likely to play a defining role in Chinese sea power in the coming years.

We employ a research methodology pioneered at CMSI, of which we are affiliate members. The chapters in this volume reference a variety of Chinese open-source literature. The sources come from the impressive collection accumulated by the CMSI library in recent years, the China National Infrastructure Knowledge online database, which houses more than 7,200 full-text journals, the Open Source Center (formerly the Foreign Broadcast Information Service), and personal purchases at bookstores in China and Taiwan. The periodicals we cite include scholarly work on international and regional affairs, writings on the intersection between strategy and operations, surveys of advanced weaponry around the world, and scientific and technical journals. We analyzed and interpreted the content of several hundred discrete articles in the course of this research. Only a small percentage of this exhaustive literature survey is cited in this book. Unless otherwise noted in the citations, all translations of Chinese works are our own, and we alone are responsible for translation errors.

Given the explosion of publishing outlets and sources in China, it is often impossible to verify the expertise and the institutional affiliation of Chinese authors. As a result, China specialists are increasingly preoccupied with quality control and managing bibliographical integrity. As such, the sources used in this study reflect a careful vetting process based on five benchmarks. First, we make a good-faith effort to identify the authors’ expertise, and we rank the periodicals based on institutional credibility. For example, we give priority to publications from the Academy of Military Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Social Science, and other university-based journals. Second, articles that produce sloppy analysis or far-fetched conclusions are excluded from the analysis. If a source contains technical analysis beyond our expertise, we consult active-duty or retired naval officers with engineering backgrounds or with ample operational experience. Fortunately, such individuals are in abundant supply at the Naval War College.

Third, we use studies that seem to parrot Western, especially American, writings, so long as they are helpful in tracking the degree of original intellectual thought in China. Chinese translations of American writings are used sparingly, and only to highlight interest in a particular topic. Fourth, frequent, sustained discussions and debates on specific subjects are attractive candidates for citation and constitute the vast majority of the sources used in this study. Ongoing discourses lay down markers that let us track whether similar debates are taking place in officialdom or are being picked up by policymakers. Finally, signs of divergent thought or, more importantly, consensus on a concept or policy prescription are among the most highly prized sources in this volume. Sustained consensus suggests that an intellectual critical mass has been reached on a particular topic—which allows for strong findings and predictions.

The intent of this extensive literature survey is to gauge intellectual development and sophistication within China’s naval community. We make no particular claims about the authoritativeness of the articles or the degree to which these writings influence policy decisions in Beijing. However, this bottom-up assessment of contemporary Chinese strategic thought provides a basis for capturing potential interactions and exchanges between China’s chattering classes and officialdom. After all, “popular” or professional military journals in the United States, such as the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, have produced articles with deep, lasting impact on the U.S. Navy and on the Pentagon at large. We must not discount the influence that forums unaffiliated with government institutions may exert on Chinese strategic thought.

It is our judgment, furthermore, that official sources often suffer from rigid ideological correctness and unimaginative analysis, but outlets in the unofficial domain exhibit superior intellectual vitality and creativity. Indeed, we have been continually impressed with the learning, candor, and independence displayed by Chinese thinkers. Those who lump “the Chinese” together as an undifferentiated mass do themselves a disservice.

The helter-skelter change convulsing the Chinese state and society will amplify the battle of ideas in the coming years, making it harder for the government to crowd external voices out of strategy making. Nor may it see the need. Indeed, Beijing may be looking to outside sources for inspiration. Thus, we maintain that measuring the influence of external intellectual stimuli on Chinese policymakers and planners substantially benefits our understanding of how China’s defense community conducts debates over strategy and operations. Such an evaluation is simply not possible without a thorough knowledge and mastery of China’s burgeoning open-source literature.

Over the past five years, our work on Chinese sea power has benefited from the generosity of many friends and colleagues. We would like to extend our thanks to those who have taught and mentored us, informed our thinking, and furnished important venues for disseminating our ideas. We express our gratitude to Peter Liotta, the executive director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, who first gave us a platform to air our ideas about Chinese maritime strategy and shepherded us through sea-power panels at two International Studies Association conferences. Geoffrey Till of King’s College London and Ralph Sawyer reviewed our previous work on China’s turn to Mahan and offered guidance and kind words of encouragement. Alan Wachman of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy allowed us to share our research with his students. And finally, many editors opened their doors to our work.

We convey our heartfelt appreciation to John Maurer, the chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College, a great boss and colleague but an even better friend who has lent our research unstinting support. Lyle Goldstein and Andrew Erickson of the China Maritime Studies Institute have generously shared CMSI’s resources, in particular those of the CMSI library, home to a collection of maritime-related publications unmatched in the United States. The annual CMSI conferences at which we presented papers, moreover, offered forums crucial for developing and fine-tuning the ideas put forth here. We thank Commander William Murray, USN (ret.), for his expertise on undersea warfare, and Commander Peter Dutton, USN (ret.), our teaching partner on Chinese Statecraft, for subjecting our ideas to at-times pungent scrutiny.