CHAPTER FOUR

CHINA’S STRATEGIC WILL TO THE SEA

As we have pointed out more than once, sea power is a conscious political choice. A society must decide to contend for high-seas mastery and the political and economic fruits that go with it and must make that decision again and again to sustain the oceangoing enterprise over the long term. To all appearances, China resolved to venture out to sea decades ago. Hardware, doctrine, and strategy are now catching up with aspirations, helping the Chinese state and society make good on their dream of national rejuvenation and grandeur.

Vice Admiral Wolfgang Wegener, Imperial Germany’s most gifted naval thinker, devised a formula for estimating whether a prospective seafaring society boasts the resources and culture to strive for sea power with real prospects of success. Wegener served as a midgrade officer in the High Seas Fleet during World War I, first as a gunnery officer and later as a cruiser captain. Disillusioned with the strategic ineptitude he saw around him, he wrote an indictment of German naval strategy and its framers that appeared after the war under the title The Naval Strategy of the World War. It ranks among the classic treatises on maritime warfare.

Sea power, wrote Wegener, derives from (1) “strategic position,” a geographical factor; (2) the naval fleet, a tactical factor; and (3) a society’s “strategic will” to the sea. Strategic will stands above the other two; it “breathes life into the fleet” while spurring strategic and political leaders to better the nation’s strategic position.1 If a society has little hankering for the sea, it accomplishes little in saltwater endeavors—no matter how large and well endowed its territory, how abundant its personnel and natural resources, and how efficient its government. An apathetic society makes little effort to marshal these resources to bolster its geostrategic position and construct a strong navy. A steadfast society vaults itself into the marine enterprise.

We borrow Wegener’s evocative phrase “strategic will” to gauge how well China’s leaders have breathed life into Chinese sea power. To be sure, the concept of will is abstract. It is a human quality difficult to define and harder still to measure. It is no less important for all that. On this the greats of strategy agree. Carl von Clausewitz portrays war as a reciprocal clash of wills whereby each antagonist strives to impose its will on another by force. Sun Tzu singles out “moral influence”—namely that which “causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders”—as the most crucial factor in war. Alfred Thayer Mahan holds that the “character of the government,” whether the government is an autocracy, a democracy, or something else, helps yoke the popular will to the pursuit of sea power.²

The galvanic effect of political resolve has not escaped notice in China. Nautical enthusiasts are finely attuned to its importance—and elusiveness—as their nation turns seaward. Chinese commentators commonly bemoan a supposed deficit of “maritime consciousness” (海洋意识), a broad term encompassing not just knowledge but the attitudes and behaviors of the elites and the public alike toward marine matters ranging from national security to law to science to history.³ CCP officials have launched campaign after campaign to make the populace aware of seaborne endeavors while rousing popular passions for them. Analyst Zhao Zongjin notes that officialdom has exhorted “more people to care about and participate in our nation’s maritime power construction.”4

For our purposes, we concentrate on how China’s civil and military leadership has sought to rally the nation’s will to sea power, amassing support for a forceful naval strategy backed by high-tech ships, aircraft, and armaments. We survey statements from top CCP leaders as well as from uniformed commanders of the PLAN, the chief executor of Chinese foreign policy at sea. We also consult policy and strategy directives that divulge insights into how Chinese strategic thought about marine affairs has evolved.⁵ We reach back to the earliest days of the People’s Republic, showing how policy makers strove to align China’s naval strategy with the nation’s interests, purposes, and ambitions.

We conclude that China’s leaders have harnessed national will thoughtfully and methodically, positioning China well for maritime ventures over the long term. No longer are we prognosticating about one potential future among many. Maritime China poses challenges now that America, its allies, and its friends overlook at their peril.

Chinese Leaders Look Seaward: From Mao to Xi

Xi Jinping’s maritime ambitions have captured Westerners’ attention since he assumed the presidency in 2012, but Communist China’s quest for sea power predates him. President Xi may be today’s most vocal proponent of China’s pivot to the Pacific, but he is only the latest among five generations of CCP leaders to gather rudiments of sea power. Even during the time of Mao Zedong, a leader not normally associated with maritime undertakings, Chinese Communists appreciated the strategic value of the navy and fellow instruments of maritime might. Far from being apathetic toward the seas, they worked hard to narrow the gap between China’s backward material foundation and its burgeoning military and commercial needs at sea.

The maritime prowess on display under Xi thus owes much to his predecessors’ investment of intellect, energy, and political capital in high-seas exploits. To capture how officialdom has fanned China’s strategic will to the sea, we canvass Chinese leaders from Mao to Xi. By no means is this an exhaustive study of everything Chinese leaders said or did. Our goal is to spotlight directives exerting meaningful influence on maritime development. We focus in particular on pronouncements that Chinese scholars and practitioners cite for inspiration and direction despite the passage of time. Such documents command intellectual staying power.

For example, we sometimes refer to calligraphic inscriptions (题 词, tici) from senior Chinese political leaders. While pithy, these literary devices exert wide-ranging influence. An inscription signifies a leader’s endorsement and protection of the organization to which he dedicates it. Its content emboldens members of the organization while imparting broad policy guidance. This literary tradition remains in common practice today. As such, we pay special attention to inscriptions about sea power drawn up by successive generations of communist leaders.

Mao Zedong

Despite his background as an agrarian revolutionary, and despite intense pressure to look inward for national revival following the Chinese Civil War, Mao acknowledged that an independent, strategic naval service was fundamental to China’s security and unity. Indeed, he looked out to sea before he took power. As Nationalist resistance collapsed during the endgame of the civil war, the Communists prepared a massive offensive that was in part a waterborne undertaking. People’s Liberation Army forces would cross the Yangtze River and seize the rest of China. They would enter coastal provinces and cities such as Shanghai that acted as epicenters of Nationalist maritime power. Mao understood that the CCP needed to rapidly reintegrate—and make use of—the seagoing and riverine forces and support infrastructure Chiang Kai-shek left behind.

Moreover, Mao foresaw the need to amass naval power to crush Nationalist remnants that were retreating to Taiwan and other offshore islands. In the months leading up to the founding of the People’s Republic in October 1949, Mao and his colleagues issued a series of directives and declarations telegraphing the CCP’s intent. On January 8, 1949, as the civil war’s end drew nigh, the Political Bureau determined that “between 1949 and 1950, we should strive to establish a usable air force and a navy that can defend our rivers and coasts.”6 The bureau’s communiqué constituted the first sign that the CCP meant to fashion a new naval service to defend the new China.

The Political Bureau’s statement set loose a scramble to construct such a force. In some cases the CCP inherited intact units from vanquished foes. In February 1949, for example, the crew of the Nationalist cruiser and flagship Chongqing mutinied on the Yangtze River. Hoping to encourage more defections, Mao Zedong and Zhu De, the commander in chief of communist forces, sent a telegram congratulating the warship’s officers and sailors. In the text Mao and Zhu proclaimed that “the Chinese people must build its own powerful national defense. Besides the army, we must build our own air force and navy.”⁷ Their telegram broadcast another signal that the Communists intended to accumulate sea power.

Nor did CCP chieftains stop there. On September 21, 1949, Mao delivered a speech titled “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!” during the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a multiparty meeting convened to establish a new state under communist control. He held forth with passion about forging a navy and an air force: “Our national defense will be consolidated and no imperialists will ever again be allowed to invade our land. Our people’s armed forces must be maintained and developed with the heroic and steeled People’s Liberation Army as the foundation. We will have not only a powerful army but also a powerful air force and a powerful navy.”⁸

On January 1, 1950, the official PLA Navy newspaper, People’s Navy, carried an inscription from Mao to commemorate the publication of its inaugural issue: “We must build a navy. This navy must be able to protect our coasts and effectively defend against the possible invasion of imperialism.”9 In February 1952, following his first tour of PLAN surface combat ships, Mao dedicated another inscription to the navy, insisting that “to oppose the invasion of imperialism, we must build a powerful navy.”¹⁰ In December 1953, after reviewing the Chinese navy’s five-year construction plan, Mao enumerated the missions entrusted to the naval service: “To end the harassment of bandits at sea and protect the security of sea transport; to prepare the capability to take Taiwan at the appropriate time and finally unify the entire nation; and to prepare the capability to oppose the invasion of our country from the sea by imperialism, we must build a powerful navy over the long term in a planned and gradual manner and in accord with the conditions of our industrial development and finances.”¹¹

Unfinished business from the civil war loomed large in Mao’s calculus, as did great-power rivalries taking shape during the early Cold War. Nationalist forces operating from offshore islands could disrupt sea traffic along the mainland coast so long as Taiwan eluded the Communists’ hands. America’s hostility, inflamed by the Korean War, also posed a potential threat to Communist China’s national existence. The manifestly nautical character of the Taiwan problem and the American danger demanded naval remedies. Mao thus considered a strong navy essential to steadying China’s maritime periphery, fulfilling its goal of unification, and confronting a powerful foreign navy that bestrode Asian waters.

Mao also understood that a naval buildup would demand capital in bulk, and thus patient investment over the long haul. Given China’s economic backwardness, its road to sea power was bound to be long and winding. He clearly did not expect China to make itself a naval power overnight. Indeed, for years to come, the PLA Navy would remain primarily a coastal-defense force reliant on Soviet technologies and assistance. Nevertheless, Mao Zedong laid down a marker for naval development. As Dalian Naval Academy professor Du Yiping puts it, Mao “established a firm foundation for our nation’s naval development and drew a magnificent blueprint for constructing a powerful navy.”¹² Like all societies Communist China had to heed economic and political realities. But it resolved to construct a high-caliber navy once circumstances turned favorable.

Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping deserves plaudits for masterminding a coherent and durable naval strategy for the post-Mao era. Deng was the principal architect of China’s reform and opening to the world starting in the late 1970s. To stimulate development and growth, the paramount leader enacted economic reforms that borrowed elements from capitalism. For instance, Deng established special economic zones along the coast to attract foreign investment while joining the Chinese mainland to the global economy.

Seaborne trade and other maritime activities, including exploiting China’s fisheries and extracting its natural resources, became central elements of China’s national development. In August 1979 Deng made clear that his strategy was inextricable from a seaward orientation on the part of the Chinese state and society. Elites and ordinary citizens must face outward. Maritime undertakings must become a matter of course for them. “The oceans are not a moat,” Deng asserted. “Presently, countries around the world are competing to turn their technological focal point, economic development focal point, and strategic deterrence focal point to the oceans. We cannot be complacent. For China to be wealthy and powerful, it must face the world, and it must go to sea.”13

For Deng there was no turning back. Moreover, he conceived of sea power in sweeping terms. It incorporated all implements of national power, not just ships of war. PLA Naval University of Engineering professor Zhang Kehui sums up Deng’s accomplishments: “Under the regulation and guidance of national will, China’s maritime strategy, comprising political, economic, military, and technological components, gradually emerged during the Deng Xiaoping era.”¹⁴ In short, Deng was a grand strategist with a nautical bent. Mahan would nod in approval.

Deng also anticipated correctly that it would take “hard power” manifest in physical forces to protect the proliferating maritime interests he saw. A navy embodied hard power at sea. In this area, too, Deng left a lasting intellectual and policy imprint on the PLA Navy. Speaking in different settings over a span of years he spelled out the nature, geographic scope, operational parameters, and force-structure requirements of China’s gestating maritime strategy.

First, Deng repeatedly played up the Chinese navy’s defensive nature. In June 1978, while serving as vice chair of the Central Military Commission, he attended a two-day meeting with the navy leadership. After listening to a series of reports, he announced that China’s “strategy will always be defensive. It will be defensive twenty years from now. The nuclear submarine will also be a strategic defensive weapon…. Even when we have modernized in the future, the navy will still be for strategic defense.”15 At another PLAN conference the following month, Deng reiterated that “unlike hegemonism, we will not extend our hands everywhere. Our navy buildup is basically defensive.”¹⁶

Second, Deng demarcated the general geographic area where the Chinese navy would operate. In April 1979 he reminded the naval leadership that “our navy should be used for near-seas operations. It is defensive. We will not seek hegemony. From a political standpoint, we cannot seek hegemony. In navy construction, everything must obey this directive.”¹⁷ While Deng declined to specify exact boundaries for the “near seas,” he insisted that the PLAN would “only operate in the Pacific Ocean. We will never have ambitions to go to distant places. We stand for near-seas operations.”¹⁸ (Admiral Liu Huaqing, the architect of the PLAN’s modernization program and Deng Xiaoping’s executor of maritime strategy in the 1980s, later delineated the near seas more intelligibly as a theater of operations. See “Liu Huaqing and Near-Seas Defense” below.)

Third, Deng infused concrete meaning into the idea of near-seas operations. He transposed Mao Zedong’s concept of “active defense” deftly to the maritime domain. Like Mao, Deng insisted that the Chinese navy refuse to assume an exclusively passive, defensive posture. He asked rhetorically: “For future wars of counter invasion, what kind of policy should we adopt?” Deng answered his own question, replying, “I agree with the term ‘active defense.’ Active defense itself is not solely defensive. There is offense within the defense.”19 As detailed below, Admiral Liu took Deng’s cue, refining near-seas operations into a durable concept.

And finally, Deng Xiaoping furnished guidance as to the scope and velocity of China’s naval buildup. While inspecting the Chinese navy in August 1979, Deng went on a six-hour cruise on board a destroyer. To commemorate the visit and inspire the naval service, he wrote an inscription that read: “Build a powerful navy equipped with modern combat capabilities.”²⁰ Thus, he transmitted a clarion call to the service, directing mariners to think more imaginatively about equipment, personnel, training, engineering, and research and development. And indeed, his words helped give rise to a thoroughgoing modernization process that bore fruit in the 1990s.

At a PLAN conference in July 1979 the paramount leader explained that his vision of a modern force eschewed navalists’ obsession with bean counting. Maintained Deng: “In the past, our navy comrades were daily concerned about tonnage, talking only about numbers and not talking about quality. Now things have changed. We talk about quality, and we talk about real combat power. We go for fewer yet finer things that are truly useful.”²¹ On another occasion, Deng repeated his mantra that quality must take precedence over quantity, stating: “To confront a powerful, hegemonic navy, not having adequate power is no good. This power must be useful. We don’t need too much, but it must be capable. We need things that are truly modern.”²² The terms “capable” and “useful,” meaning high quality and effective, became bywords for the PLAN’s buildup.

Like Mao, then, Deng helped blazon the PLA Navy’s pathway to modernization. Wegener claimed that saltwater flowed through Britons’ veins, goading the British Empire into a strategic offensive spanning centuries. He would likewise hail these founding fathers of Chinese sea power for attempting to embed maritime ideas in governmental practices, naval culture, and popular folkways.

Jiang Zemin

Deng superintended naval affairs through the end of the Cold War, leaving it to the third-generation leadership under Jiang Zemin to oversee the Chinese navy’s post–Cold War transition. Jiang did not distinguish himself in the realm of naval affairs, but he excelled as a caretaker. He kept the PLAN on its path of modernization. He had ample reason to do so. In particular, the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crises, during which President Bill Clinton dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to Taiwan’s vicinity to stage a show of force, underscored the importance of naval preparedness. Under Jiang’s tutelage, China’s leadership came to regard the U.S. Navy as both a competitor and a pattern for China’s own maritime success.

Under Jiang Zemin, China commenced trying to close the chasm separating the PLA Navy from its superpower rival. In February 1990 Jiang wrote an inscription beseeching the navy to “construct the motherland’s great wall at sea.”23 In 1992, in his report to the CCP’s 14th Party Congress, Jiang declared that China must “protect the nation’s maritime rights and interests.”²⁴ This marked the first time senior leadership had codified China’s maritime rights and interests in one of these all-important CCP documents. Jiang thereby confirmed Deng’s judgment that China’s mounting maritime interests would beget demands for naval power to protect those interests.

Jiang Zemin regularly accented the saltwater dimension of Chinese foreign policy. In October 1995, after observing a naval exercise, Jiang stated: “The new situation poses new and higher demands on navy construction. We must place navy construction in an important position and accelerate the pace of naval modernization to ensure our nation’s security in the maritime direction and to complete the great work of unifying the motherland.”25 In December 1996, during the 8th CCP Congress of the PLAN, Jiang reaffirmed that “the navy carries an important responsibility for protecting the motherland’s territorial integrity, safeguarding the motherland’s unification and maritime rights and interests, and ensuring the stability of the peripheral environment.”²⁶ Jiang’s repeated references to unification reflected the trauma of the 1995–96 crises, during which Jiang and his lieutenants struggled without effect to counter the U.S. naval presence near Taiwan.

In April 1999, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the PLAN’s founding, Jiang dedicated an inscription instructing the naval service to “strive to build a modern navy equipped with powerful, comprehensive combat capabilities.”²⁷ Jiang stressed that China’s navy “must strengthen preparations for defensive operations in the maritime direction and ceaselessly enhance the navy’s modern technologies, and especially combat capabilities under high-technology conditions.”²⁸

His advocacy of employing high-technology weaponry to fight and win in sea combat accelerated China’s naval modernization program substantially. It also mirrored the latest thinking about warfare, including the idea popular in the 1990s that information technology stood poised to unleash a new revolution in military affairs (RMA). Admiral Yang Huaiqing, at that time the political commissar of the PLAN, explains: “Combat under high-technology conditions is in essence a confrontation between systems, between architectures, and between networks. Comrade Jiang Zemin accurately grasped the essence of modern combat power, emphasizing repeatedly the need to raise the navy’s comprehensive combat capabilities. This demands that the navy possess capabilities for stronger reconnaissance and warning, effective command and control, rapid response and mobility, integrated strike and defense, and powerful logistics.”²⁹

Admiral Yang’s language constitutes a clear outgrowth of the RMA debate then in vogue. That the Chinese leadership could contemplate replicating essential elements of American naval prowess testified to the PLAN’s progress. Jiang Zemin, then, lent urgency to the PLA Navy’s modernization project while designating the U.S. Navy both as the standard for naval excellence and as a potential opponent to be outcompeted.

Hu Jintao

Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, took the first steps toward making China’s navy a globe-spanning force for the new millennium. In December 2004, for instance, Hu delivered a much-quoted speech titled “See Clearly Our Military’s Historic Missions for the New Stage in the New Century.”30 The speech signaled to the PLA that it must gird for contingencies beyond the homeland. To fulfill these “new historic missions,” Hu ordained that the PLA (1) guarantee the survival and authority of the CCP; (2) safeguard the conditions for continued national development; (3) protect China’s national interests beyond the homeland, including in the maritime, aerospace, and cyber domains; and (4) buttress world peace so as to facilitate joint development. While the PLA had always been responsible for the first two missions, the latter two were new.

Of the maritime domain, Hu remarked that “the oceans are a great thoroughfare for international exchange and a treasury of strategic resources for continued human development.”³¹ He added, “We must expand our horizons on security strategy and military strategy. Not only do we need to pay close attention to and defend our national survival interests, but we must also pay close attention to and defend our national development interests.”³² Hu regarded China’s national interests and its overseas interests as increasingly indivisible. What happened abroad would exert a direct impact on China’s welfare at home, and hence the PLA had to go global.

Hu’s call for China to reorient itself outward proved prescient. In December 2008 Beijing dispatched its first naval flotilla to conduct counterpiracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden. The PLA Navy has rotated escorts to and from the region constantly since then, protecting merchant shipping while staging a standing if modest naval presence in the Indian Ocean. During the Libyan civil war in early 2011, moreover, the PLAN deployed a modern surface combatant to help evacuate Chinese nationals from Libya. These unprecedented expeditionary operations all took place on Hu Jintao’s watch.

Unsurprisingly, Hu explicitly linked the PLAN to the new historic missions. At the 10th CCP Congress of the PLA Navy in December 2006, Hu asserted, “Our nation is a maritime power. The navy’s place is important, and its missions are glorious in defending the nation’s sovereignty and security and in safeguarding our nation’s maritime rights and interests.”33 Hu implored the service to “forge a powerful people’s navy that meets the demands of carrying out our military’s historic missions in the new century” and to “spur the all-round transformation of navy building in line with the demands of the revolution in military affairs with Chinese characteristics.”³⁴

In April 2008, while touring the Sanya naval base on Hainan Island, Hu reiterated that “the navy is a strategic, comprehensive, and international military service. It occupies an important place and delivers an important function in defending our national sovereignty, security, and territory and in safeguarding our national maritime rights and interests.”³⁵ He insisted that the navy “enhance the capacity to win local maritime wars under informatized conditions as its core. It must continuously increase the ability to cope with multiple security threats and to fulfill diversified military missions.”³⁶ (By “informatized” Chinese commentators mean the process of using advanced information technology to gather, process, and distribute information to fighting forces, helping them coordinate their efforts.)

Hu’s most noteworthy contribution to sea power, however, came as his parting act as president. Late in 2012, as part of his report to the CCP’s 18th Party Congress, he echoed his 2004 historic missions speech: “We should attach great importance to maritime, space, and cyberspace security. We should make active planning for the use of military forces in peacetime, expand and intensify military preparedness, and enhance the capability to accomplish a wide range of military tasks, the most important of which is to win local wars in an information age.”³⁷

Most significantly, Hu asserted, “We should enhance our capacity for exploiting marine resources, develop the marine economy, protect the marine ecological environment, resolutely safeguard China’s maritime rights and interests, and build China into a maritime power” (our emphasis).38 It was the first time that a Chinese leader used the term haiyang qiangguo (海洋强国, meaning “great maritime power”) at the all-important Party Congress in order to sum up China’s strategic aims. The phrase speedily found its way into the official lexicon, and its usage was passed on to Hu’s successor, Xi Jinping. Hu was stating the obvious—by 2012 China was already a maritime power of some consequence—but codifying that status in CCP statements of purpose consolidated the navy’s place in China’s quest for national greatness.

Xi Jinping

On July 30, 2013, less than a year after assuming office, Xi convened a collective study session bringing together members of the Political Bureau. At the meeting he set forth his own vision for Chinese sea power. Notwithstanding the stilted prose that typifies communist directives, Xi’s message foreshadowed his policy and strategy for his first term of office. Although a full transcript is not publicly available, an official summary paraphrases the speech’s key elements. We quote the summary at length because Xi’s remarks continue to be relevant and influential. The CCP chairman first pledged to carry forward his predecessor’s aims: “The 18th Party Congress has set forth the important task of building China into a maritime power. It is of great significance to implement the important task for promoting China’s economic development in a sustainable and healthy way, safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and development interests, realizing the objective of building China into a well-off society in an all-round way, and realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”³⁹

Xi viewed sea power as integral to China’s economic well-being and thence to its long-term strategic success. But there is more to maritime power than attaining concrete interests: maritime power is inseparable from China’s dream of national regeneration. Xi went on to describe the comprehensive importance of the seas: “The ocean’s function for national economic development and opening up to the world has become more important, the ocean’s place for defending national sovereignty, security, and development interests has become more prominent, the ocean’s role for the civilized building of our nation’s ecology has become more apparent, and the ocean’s strategic position for international, economic, military, and technological competition has clearly risen.”40

The sea is not just an enabler for economic development but also, increasingly, a cockpit for competition involving all elements of national power. Even as China engages with the world, therefore, interstate struggles among the great powers will accompany its campaign for sea power. Xi Jinping next sized up China’s ability to fulfill its seaborne ambitions: “Our nation is a continental power and an oceanic power, possessing a wide range of strategic maritime interests. After many years of development, our maritime enterprise has, on the whole, entered the best development period in history. These accomplishments have set a firm foundation for our pursuit of maritime power.”⁴¹

Xi’s plea for the CCP leadership to grasp the historic moment sounded remarkably confident for a new leader. His claim that there was no better time to cement and advance China’s position at sea hinted at his ambitions, including the construction of islands in the South China Sea. Xi outlined a broad strategy to hasten China’s arrival as a maritime power, saying China must “insist on the development path of relying on the seas for wealth, using the seas for power, maintaining harmony between people and the seas, and cooperating for mutual benefit. We must solidly push forward our maritime power buildup through peace, development, cooperation, and win-win approaches.”⁴²

Beneath the mild words about nautical concord, however, Xi’s strategy displayed a keen edge as he expressed his willingness to exercise hard power should circumstances or rivals infringe on Chinese interests as China construes them. While China treasured peace, Beijing would not seek peace at any price. Xi warned his colleagues not to “abandon our legitimate rights and interests, still less sacrifice our nation’s core interests” for the sake of peaceful development. He then identified major priorities, responsibilities, and possible tensions associated with his policy: “We must balance the goals of maintaining stability and of safeguarding our rights, persist in protecting national sovereignty, security, and development interests on equal footing, and ensure compatibility between safeguarding our maritime rights and interests and strengthening comprehensive national power…. We must prepare for different types of complex situations, enhance capabilities for maritime rights protection, and resolutely defend our maritime rights and interests.”43

In this passage Xi acknowledged that Beijing must strike a delicate balance. On the one hand, China must actively exercise its prerogatives at sea. On the other, it must do so without fanning regional tensions that could work against its strategic position. For example, if China’s maritime assertiveness prompted its neighbors to make common cause or otherwise provoked hostility to China’s purposes, that would constitute a strategic failure. That Xi acknowledged the trade-offs between policy choices suggests that the president and his lieutenants started thinking critically about strategy and its dilemmas from their earliest days in office.

The president sounded these themes regularly. On May 24, 2017, speaking before the 12th Party Congress of the PLA Navy, Xi affirmed that a “powerful and modern navy” is necessary “for the realization of the Chinese Dream and the dream of a strong military.”⁴⁴ He continued: “Building a powerful navy is an important symbol of building a world-class military, a strategic pivot for building the nation into a great maritime power, and an important component of realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”⁴⁵

This statement represented the first time a top CCP leader had avowed unambiguously that China aspires to the first ranks of military power. In order “to push forward the navy’s transformation,” Xi added, “it is necessary to uphold a systematic buildup.” Such a buildup would involve “an overall building of mechanization and informatization; an overall building of near-seas and open-seas capabilities; an overall building of surface, undersea, and air forces; and an overall building of combat and support forces, so as to conduct ‘system of systems’ operations.”46

Like Jiang and Hu before him, Xi committed the Chinese navy to a comprehensive modernization program meant to enable the service to fight and win modern wars. If his directive is any guide, the PLAN will develop a balanced seagoing fleet capable of projecting power to distant theaters.

On October 18, 2017, Xi Jinping addressed the CCP leadership at the all-important 19th Party Congress. Xi’s report looked back on his administration’s achievements over the previous five years while peering ahead to his second five-year term and beyond. During his retrospective Xi listed several important maritime accomplishments. Among them, that China had “actively carried forward construction on the islands and reefs in the South China Sea.” He applauded the PLA for “effectively conducting such major missions as maritime rights protection, counter terrorism, disaster relief and rescue, international peacekeeping, Gulf of Aden escorts, and humanitarian assistance.”⁴⁷ Virtually all of these missions involved elements of Chinese naval power. It is notable that Xi ranked “maritime rights protection” first among equals while more or less acknowledging that the Chinese navy played a direct role in maritime disputes in the near seas alongside paramilitary forces.

President Xi reaffirmed his earlier pledge to construct a “world-class military” by midcentury. In the meantime, the PLA would “build a powerful and modernized army, navy, air force, rocket force, and strategic-support force” that would fulfill the Chinese Dream and the strong-military dream. “Our military,” Xi continued, “is built to fight. All work must insist on combat power as the criterion, directing focus on the ability to fight and to win.”⁴⁸

With regard to maritime affairs, Xi repeated directives he had issued at the collective work session four years before. He called on his colleagues to “accelerate border area development, consolidate the border areas, ensure border security, insist on coordinated development of the land and seas, and hasten the construction toward a great maritime power.”49 Xi clearly understands that economic development, homeland defense, territorial integrity, maritime security, and sea power are inextricably connected to one another. Without the means to protect China’s territory, security for the nation’s vast borderlands and seas is impossible. Without security along China’s periphery, economic development in those areas is impossible. Without development and the wealth that comes with it, sea power is impossible; hence Xi’s call to pay attention to all of these interrelated factors at once. At the 19th Party Congress, in short, the president explicated the logic of sea power.

Our survey of statements from five generations of Chinese leaders reveals several themes. Each man grappled with maritime power in accord with the unique circumstances and challenges confronting the nation during his tenure. Mao saw the navy as a tool to consolidate the new regime’s control over coastal China, consummate national unification, and confront hostile imperialist powers. While homeland defense and Taiwan independence remained top priorities in the 1970s and 1980s, Deng foretold that many maritime interests would emerge from reform and opening. As a consequence, he reoriented the navy toward an outward-looking economy.

Successive leaders implored the PLAN to safeguard China’s countless rights and interests in the nautical realm. Beginning with Deng, Chinese leaders began to conceive of sea power in grand-strategic terms. Maritime power at once represented a component and a source of comprehensive national power. Leaders from Deng to Xi came to view the navy as a means to fortify national security while nourishing economic development.

As China’s power waxed, so did the CCP leadership’s ambitions for the navy. Mao’s humble riverine and coastal-defense force gave way gradually to a local navy under Deng. In turn Deng’s vow never to operate beyond the Pacific Ocean gave way when his successors directed the PLA Navy to gird itself for global missions. As such, China’s current quest for sea power constitutes no break with Communist Chinese history; the world is simply witnessing decades of Chinese maritime development come to fruition.

And finally, the foregoing themes suggest that China’s turn to the seas is not some passing phase. Indeed, Chinese sea power is now entrenched within the CCP leadership’s larger scheme for national rejuvenation, as manifest in Xi Jinping’s metaphor of the Chinese Dream. Wolfgang Wegener would salute the strategic resolve China has exhibited since the age of Mao—resolve that has brought China and its navy to where they stand today.

Uniformed Naval Leaders and the Making of Strategy

PLA Navy commanders have displayed similar acumen and resolve. Nine commanders have headed the Chinese navy since the founding of the East China Navy, the PLAN’s predecessor, in April 1949.50 For the purposes of this book, we focus on three admirals—Xiao Jinguang, Liu Huaqing, and Wu Shengli—who exerted outsize influence on strategic requirements, strategy, and force structure for the naval service. All three officers left behind a paper trail documenting their thoughts and decisions in memoirs, articles, and speeches. Their writings give outsiders a glimpse of how China’s navy sought to align its strategy and fleet design with decrees from its civilian masters and to cope with the strategic circumstances profiled above.

Xiao Jinguang and Sabotage Warfare at Sea

China’s navy learned by doing. Following the civil war in the early 1950s, the navy undertook a series of mop-up campaigns. It fought pitched sea battles; cleared rivers, lakes, and coastal areas of bandits; executed amphibious operations to wrest islands from Nationalists; and broke blockades imposed by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. The navy’s early exploits are arguably the most combat-intensive period in its history to date. Indeed, they add up to a legend that is integral to the Chinese navy’s “glorious history.” Victory over hated foes left an indelible mark on the naval service’s institutional memory and corporate identity, firing passion in the ranks while pointing the way to future endeavors.51 Thus, the 1950s represent a logical starting point for tracking the evolution of China’s naval strategy.

However rousing the navy’s early years, it was not until the mid-1950s that strategy and doctrine caught up with accumulated combat experience. Post–civil war battles, the Korean War, and the 1954 Taiwan Strait crisis preoccupied Chinese strategists before then. In March 1956, however, the Central Military Commission issued military strategic guidance under the rubric of “active defense, defend the motherland.” Active defense, a concept Mao developed and refined during the 1930s, called for employing offensive operations and tactics to achieve strategically defensive goals. The navy’s role was to support the army and air force in ground campaigns. Under active defense, the PLA Navy would “conduct joint counter landing operations with ground and air forces; wreck the enemy’s sea lines of communications, severing the supply of materiel and manpower; weaken and annihilate the enemy’s seaborne transport tools and combat vessels; jointly operate with ground forces in contests over key points and locations along the coast, guaranteeing the security of the coastal base system and strategic locations; support ground forces in littoral flanking operations; and act in concert with ground forces to recover offshore islands and all territories.”⁵²

In 1957 Admiral Xiao Jinguang, the PLAN’s first commander, compiled more systematic operational guidance for the navy. Xiao was a Long March veteran and a corps commander of the Fourth Field Army during the Chinese Civil War. In other words, he was an army officer with no training or background in naval affairs, and one with little affinity for the sea. The general reportedly demurred when Mao personally entreated him to take up the new post, calling himself a landlubber (旱鸭子). Once he accepted the offer, however, he and his comrades quickly set about adapting to an operational domain where China’s adversaries—the Nationalists aided by the United States—held the upper hand. And like any warrior, Admiral Xiao applied what he knew best to his new mission.

After consulting Mao Zedong’s military writings from the 1920s and 1930s, along with treatises from Soviet experts, Xiao formulated an operational concept he termed “sabotage warfare at sea” (海上 破袭战). Confronted by better-armed enemies, China was in no position to fight head-on. Calling on his own battlefield experience, Admiral Xiao reasoned that inferior Chinese forces must instead “use suddenness and sabotage and guerilla tactics to unceasingly attack and destroy the enemy, accumulate small victories in place of big wins, fully leverage and bring into play our advantageous conditions, exploit and create unfavorable conditions for the enemy, and implement protracted war.”53 Mao doubtless recognized these ideas as his own.

Sabotage warfare had four basic characteristics. First, Xiao called for deploying all available weaponry to deliver all possible types of attacks against the enemy. Second, his concept placed great weight on hatching covert actions and sudden surprise attacks to overpower unsuspecting or unprepared adversaries. The PLA Navy could wrest the initiative from superior foes through deceptive measures. Third, sabotage warfare unleashed offensive campaigns and tactics in constant assaults on the enemy’s effective strength. And fourth, the concept demanded nimble use of troops and combat styles to preserve Chinese forces while annihilating opponents.

In effect, Xiao codified what his ground forces had practiced out of sheer necessity in past years. In contrast to a formal naval strategy that purported to align maritime means with larger strategic and political aims, the admiral sketched a concept that was largely operational and tactical in nature. In other words, Xiao prescribed methods for winning battles. Surprise, deception, unorthodox tactics, offensive spirit, and small incremental victories formed the core of Xiao’s ideas about naval battle. According to the official PLAN encyclopedia, sabotage warfare at sea involved

offensive operations at sea in which naval forces employ destructive and surprise attacks against the enemy. It is also known as guerrilla warfare or irregular warfare at sea. It is a combat style that relies on small groups of naval forces to carry out covert surprise attacks…. To achieve the operational objectives, it uses unconventional combat methods to attack the enemy’s critical targets. In coordination with conventional operations on the strategic and campaign levels, it seeks to annihilate, weaken, deplete, tire out, and divide the enemy in order to pin down the enemy or throw into confusion the enemy’s deployment of forces.54

Opportunism suffused the concept. Sabotage warfare at sea sought to exploit China’s complex maritime geography, notably its convoluted 18,000-kilometer coastline and the offshore islands that dot the approaches to the mainland. Agile naval forces could disperse and hide along shorelines and around islands—awaiting orders, deploying and redeploying, launching and coordinating attacks, and operating under the cover of shore-based artillery and naval aviation.⁵⁵

PLA naval sabotage targeted weak enemy assets such as transport vessels, isolated warships, and feebly defended naval bases and seaports. Specific tactics for pummeling these soft objects included laying mines, staging rapid raids, employing high-speed vessels and aircraft, dispatching hunter-killer submarines to strike from below, and infiltrating enemy harbors to mount sneak attacks. In keeping with Mao’s strategy of “people’s war,” moreover, conventional saboteurs would tap support around the margins. The fishing fleet and the coastal populace would act as a maritime militia, an auxiliary to traditional military action.

Xiao’s operational concept supplied an organizing principle around which the Chinese navy could design tactics and weaponry. Sabotage warfare was an expedient, however, and a distasteful one at that. It was neither a mode of war making PLA commanders relished nor an artifact of Chinese strategic traditions or culture. Xiao proffered tactical solutions for the lesser antagonist at sea because that was what the PLA Navy was during the 1950s. Xiao went to war with the fleet he had—not one that might come into being decades hence. He left largely unanswered how the navy would do battle and advance strategic objectives once China had made itself strong.

While Chinese mariners’ theorizing and hard-won lessons at sea informed the PLAN’s operational doctrine, the Soviet Union represented a major source of early CCP naval thinking as well. In August 1950 Admiral Xiao convened the first navy conference to discuss the PLAN’s future development and direction. To him, ideological kinship, complemented by access to technology and know-how, made the Soviet Navy a logical, politically correct partner of choice.56 And sure enough, in ensuing decades the Soviet Union provided hardware, technical assistance, and thousands of experts to abet China’s cause.

Even so, Xiao opposed a blind embrace of all things Soviet. He insisted that the Chinese navy accept Soviet counsel selectively, rejecting Soviet ways unsuited to China’s distinct local conditions. To him it appeared plain that the PLAN could draw some technological and institutional lessons from the Soviets. At the same time the service must stick to its own traditions on such crucial matters as political indoctrination.

Xiao’s landmark August 1950 conference also imposed lasting effects on the Chinese navy’s force structure. The nation’s dismal economic, industrial, and technological state put a damper on the navy’s ambitions and options. The PLAN clearly could not stand up to modern navies from the West in symmetrical force-on-force combat. And the immediate Nationalist danger—a danger much closer to home—constricted the scope of naval modernization. Xiao thus concluded, “With an eye toward long-term development and departing from the current situation, we will build light combat power at sea that is modern and offensive in nature. We need to first organize and develop our current capabilities and, on the foundation of those current capabilities, develop torpedo boats, submarines, and naval aviation to gradually build a strong, national navy.”⁵⁷

Xiao’s espousal of surface, underwater, and air forces reflected an early appreciation of the character of naval warfare. “Modern sea battle,” maintained Xiao in 1950, “is necessarily a kind of three-dimensional war and is a kind of composite war. We must use the aircraft above the waves, the warships on the sea’s surface, the submarines in the water, and artillery along the coast to form a synergy of integrated power. In war, the lack of any one of those capabilities could well spell disaster.”58

The offshore engagements of the 1950s amply validated the importance of mutual support between surface forces and shore-based weaponry. Xiao’s directive—commonly known as “kong [空], qian [潜], kuai [快],” Chinese shorthand for “naval aviation, submarines, fast attack craft”—furnished a template for PLA naval development over the next two decades. Indeed, the synergy between sea-and land-based implements of maritime might endures in Chinese force design and methods to this day. That the PLA Navy should fight in concert with ground-based and irregular forces comes as second nature to China’s fighting sailors.

Liu Huaqing and Near-Seas Defense

The Chinese navy’s early operational history, Xiao’s doctrine of sabotage warfare at sea, and the fleet buildup that commenced in the 1950s engraved legacies on service culture that proved stubbornly resistant to change. External shocks and strategic decisions further solidified the status quo. For one thing, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s stymied the modernization effort. For another, Mao’s determination to pursue an undersea nuclear deterrent strained resources while diverting attention from conventional forces. China thus struggled trying to remake its light coastal force for more ambitious missions.

Indeed, obsolescent platforms constituted the bulk of the PLA Navy fleet well into the 1980s. The naval service overproduced outdated ships and submarines while neglecting new research-and-development projects. Single-mission platforms lacked self-defense weapons. Nonexistent coordination among combat arms hobbled the PLAN. To make matters worse, the limited range of shore-based air power on which surface units depended for protection against air and submarine threats confined naval operations to within two hundred nautical miles off mainland shores.⁵⁹

In short, the Chinese navy lacked the ability to wage the type of three-dimensional war Admiral Xiao had advocated decades before. Naval doctrine too was stuck in the past. Little changed from the 1950s into the 1960s, 1970s, and even early 1980s.60 Outmoded doctrine reinforced bloated force structure reinforced outmoded doctrine—setting in motion a vicious cycle.

This state of affairs persisted until 1982, when Admiral Liu Huaqing took over as PLAN commander. Considered the founding father of the modern navy that plies the seas today—and known in the West as “China’s Mahan”—Liu instituted a definitive break with the Maoist legacy. Western commentators have documented Liu’s central role in advancing the concept of “near-seas defense,” or “offshore defense.” No reprise of the existing literature need be attempted here.⁶¹ Nevertheless, it is worth noting that near-seas defense remains the bedrock for the PLA Navy, bridging its doctrinal past, present, and future. The PLAN encyclopedia states that near-seas defense involves “the combined use of all kinds of methods to exercise the overall effects of maritime power to preserve oneself to the maximum extent while unceasingly exhausting and annihilating the attacking enemy. It requires a sufficient grasp of mobile combat capabilities to search out and destroy the enemy, gradually shift the power balance, change the strategic situation, and thereby appropriately time the transition to the strategic counter offensive and attack.”⁶²

In keeping with Deng Xiaoping’s strategic guidance elucidated above, the concept of near-seas defense contemplated waging a long-term, regionally oriented strategy within an enlarged maritime defense perimeter. It thrust the Chinese navy’s area of operations much farther off mainland shores while erecting a series of echelons or defensive layers in a manner reminiscent of Soviet thinking.

Instead of fighting in China’s coastal waters, the PLAN now aimed to keep antagonists at arm’s length while shielding political and economic centers along the seaboard from attack. In contrast to sabotage warfare at sea, which sought to tie up or slow down enemy forces, near-seas defense would defeat them and roll them back. Rather than trust to pinprick strikes or hit-and-run attacks employing small forces, more substantial, better-organized formations would fight naval engagements. And from an institutional standpoint, near-seas defense freed the PLA Navy in part from subordination to the army. No longer was the sea service a mere adjunct to ground operations. It now enjoyed greater scope for action as an independent strategic force.

Importantly, PLA naval strategy was—and remains—anchored in Deng’s long-standing strategic principles. For example, Admiral Liu insisted that near-seas defense conform to strategic guidance premised on active defense. Near-seas defense deployed offensive tactics and operations to attain strategically defensive goals. Paramount among these goals was safeguarding such “core interests” as national unity, territorial integrity, and maritime rights—interests Beijing was prepared to defend by force.

Despite its offensive bent, however, near-seas defense remained true to the traditional assumption that China would open any conflict as the weaker antagonist. To remedy their material weakness, naval forces would prosecute aggressive offensive actions to grind down enemies. The cumulative impact of tactical actions would swing the naval balance in China’s favor over time, affording the PLAN the opportunity to seize the offensive. This sequence of events recalls the famous three phases in Mao’s concept of protracted war, which aspired to reverse a feeble Red Army’s fortunes vis-à-vis powerful foes. Over time the erstwhile weak would overcome the erstwhile strong.

Admiral Liu also delineated the geographic scope of the near-seas (近海), or offshore, area. In the past, the admiral’s colleagues had misconstrued “offshore” as being the capacity to project force a certain distance out to sea; two hundred nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, was the figure most often cited. During a high-level naval research meeting in 1983, however, Liu rebuffed this narrow geospatial conception. In his memoirs he recalls: “I emphasized that we must have a uniform understanding of the ‘near seas’ concept based on Comrade Xiaoping’s directive. ‘Near seas’ refers to our nation’s Yellow Sea, East China Sea, South China Sea, Spratly archipelago, and the waters within and beyond the Taiwan-Okinawa island chain, as well as the northern sea area of the Pacific. Just beyond the ‘near seas’ is the ‘mid-far seas.’”63

Liu’s terse description of the near seas reveals several insights worthy of attention. First, circumscribing the PLAN’s operational range by fixed distances would defy the reality of Asia’s complex maritime geography. For instance, James Shoal, the southernmost feature China claims in the South China Sea, is more than 1,850 kilometers from China. The waters east of Okinawa, far to the north, are almost 740 kilometers off the Chinese coast. The Taiwan Strait, midway between, measures only about 130 kilometers at its narrowest. In short, a 370-kilometer operational reach would suffice for PLAN purposes in some subtheaters but not others. It would make little sense to constrict the navy’s operating grounds, preventing it from discharging its defensive function toward the outer fringe of the near seas.

Second, Chinese conceptions of China’s maritime environs may not obey geographic boundaries. For Liu, the first island chain need not demarcate the outer frontier for offshore-defense operations. He refers to the “northern sea area of the Pacific” and to “waters within and beyond the Taiwan-Okinawa island chain.” Both expanses lie east of the Japanese archipelago. How far offshore defense goes beyond the first island chain remains unstated—perhaps deliberately so. Ambiguity permits future generations of PLA commanders to interpret the concept according to China’s needs and capabilities of the moment. Offshore defense may radiate as far offshore as Chinese weaponry can take it.

Third, Liu developed and refined his near-seas construct more than three decades ago. Its longevity attests not just to the durable nature of his vision but also to its conceptual malleability. Disentangling offshore defense from geographic features and arbitrary range arcs inscribed on the map empowers PLAN chiefs to broaden the range of offshore defense as navy capabilities improve. And to be sure, PLA defense white papers have pushed offshore defense farther and farther off Chinese coastlines. There is merit to leaving strategic concepts a trifle vague.

Finally, Liu’s definition of the near seas conveys a Sinocentric worldview and, in turn, an intensely proprietary attitude toward contiguous waters. Such presumption comes as little shock. Offshore sea areas have been integral to dynastic China’s periphery for centuries. History predisposes Chinese commentators to regard them as a marine preserve. Observers should evaluate Beijing’s claims to sovereignty in the China seas in this context. As the official PLA dictionary of military terms states, employing the possessive form: “The People’s Republic of China’s near seas include the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, and sections of water east of Taiwan Island” (our emphasis).64

To Chinese eyes, then, offshore defense constitutes a subset of Chinese homeland defense, consonant with China’s core interests. China attaches extraordinary value to fighting and winning in expanses that fall within the near-seas construct. They are sacrosanct—just as China’s landward core interests are sacrosanct.

In addition to clarifying the parameters whereby near-seas defense unfolds, Admiral Liu divided the navy’s “strategic missions” into peacetime and wartime activities. In peacetime, the navy must (1) defend the nation’s unity, territorial integrity, sovereignty, and maritime rights and interests; (2) transact naval diplomacy; (3) deter attacks on the homeland from the sea; (4) cope with local conflicts at sea; and (5) facilitate national development. In wartime the PLAN must (1) counter enemy attacks from the sea, acting independently or jointly with sister services; (2) guard the nation’s sea-lanes; and (3) execute strategic nuclear retaliatory strikes if so ordered by top CCP leadership.⁶⁵

Remarkably, when Liu drafted this slate of missions in 1986, they remained largely beyond the PLAN’s capacity. The admiral set his sights on the future, confident that the naval service would accumulate hardware and devise methods to fulfill the operational aims he set forth. And so it has. Today China’s navy makes foreign port calls and conducts drills with foreign navies as a matter of routine. It has mounted an uninterrupted presence in the Indian Ocean for counterpiracy duty. And its undersea deterrent is now integral to the nation’s nuclear posture. Few doubts linger that the PLAN can impose substantial costs on adversaries should atomic deterrence fail. Small wonder that Liu Huaqing remains a legendary figure among Chinese mariners.

Wu Shengli and the PLAN’s Transformation

If Admiral Liu laid the groundwork, the second-longest-serving commander of the PLAN, Admiral Wu Shengli, oversaw the most bracing time of growth and modernization in PLAN history. Under his watch the navy passed milestones of which Liu could only have dreamed. Wu inherited a navy well on its way toward regional and global eminence. Still, his leadership imparted new momentum to Chinese naval development. The navy accomplished the following under his tutelage:

•  Commissioning China’s first aircraft carrier and commencing construction of follow-on carriers

•  Commencing serial production of modern, indigenously designed surface combatants and submarines

•  Introducing second-generation nuclear attack submarines and strategic ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs)

•  Dispatching antipiracy patrols to the Indian Ocean

•  Evacuating Chinese nationals from Libya and Yemen

•  Providing naval escorts for chemical weapons removed from Syria

•  Searching for a downed civilian airliner—Malaysian Airlines Flight 370—in the Indian Ocean

•  Superintending disaster relief to the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan

•  Delivering emergency water supplies to the Maldives

•  Participating in U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific exercises

•  Breaking ground on China’s first overseas base, in Djibouti

•  Launching an island-building campaign in the South China Sea

The Chinese navy’s force structure, lethality, operational readiness, tactical proficiency, and diplomatic visibility all leaped forward under Admiral Wu. He led the service for more than a decade, helping the PLAN take its place as a respected force in Asia and beyond. The navy earned plaudits unthinkable in the early 2000s, from us as well as many others. Indeed, Professor Andrew Erickson of the Naval War College and Kenneth Allen of the Center for Naval Analyses, both close watchers of the PLA, liken Wu’s contributions to those of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the U.S. Navy nuclear-propulsion program, including the stratospheric standards it enforces.66 Rickover makes fine company!

Early in his tenure Admiral Wu coauthored an article with PLAN political commissar Hu Yanlin in the authoritative CCP journal Qiushi. In it they construct a powerful case for why China must go to sea. First, they frame their case in terms of the nation’s “century of humiliation,” a history drilled into Chinese leaders and citizens alike: “In China’s modern history, imperialists and colonists initiated more than 470 invasions of China, including 84 large ones, from the sea. The Chinese nation, which has suffered humiliation to the fullest, realized that the thin awareness of the maritime rights caused the decline of sea defense in modern history. This decline then directly resulted in these disastrous invasions … by the powerful Western countries. Only when the navy is strong can the maritime rights rise, which will bring the rise of the nation.”⁶⁷

The lesson is clear: never again. Never again should China expose itself to seaborne conquerors. It must make itself formidable at sea to avoid repeating past ignominy. Naval officers bear a special responsibility to right this historical wrong. Wu and Hu go on to assert that the Chinese state and society together have made the conscious policy choice to amass sea power: “To build a powerful navy has been the idea of our Party and our nation. Since the founding of the new China, our leaders of the Party and the nation—based on the strategic level of history, reality, and national development—have been taking the establishment and reinforcement of a powerful navy as the key task for the national defense and military construction.”⁶⁸

Wu and Hu then review past exhortations from Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong to Hu Jintao. “All of these key instructions from our Party,” they point out, “have clarified the fundamental goals, principles, policies, and development path” for the PLAN. Finally, the two remind readers that China’s navy is responsible for guarding vast swathes of the earth’s surface: “Our nation is an oceanic nation that owns more than 18,000 kilometers of oceanic coast line, more than 6,500 islands that are larger than 500 square meters, more than three million square kilometers of oceanic area with sovereignty and jurisdiction and international exclusive exploitation rights for 75,000 square kilometers at the bottom of the Pacific. In the oceanic area of our nation, there exist huge strategic interests along with various contradictions and threats.”69

Such assertions about China’s oceanic characteristics may jar those accustomed to classifying China as a continental power. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the 3 million square kilometers of Chinese maritime “sovereignty and jurisdiction” Wu and Hu claim include some 90 percent of the South China Sea. Otherwise their figures do not add up.

Whether consciously or not, the two admirals conceive of China’s saltwater quest in quintessentially Mahanian terms. The interplay between China’s deliberate choice to turn seaward and the structural geographic conditions that enable—and impel—Beijing to do so represents precisely the same dynamic Mahan identified in The Influence of Sea Power upon History. In that classic treatise Mahan proclaims that such factors as “geographic conformation,” “national character,” and “character of the people” determine whether a society is fit for sea power. Wu and Hu clearly believe that China meets these prerequisites for nautical success.

Intriguingly, the two also hint at the oceangoing character of the navy they hope to construct and deploy. They note, for example, that the Chinese navy has made strides in logistics, “extending near-seas support to far-seas support” (our emphasis).⁷⁰ As Mahan quips, navies deprived of fuel, stores, and access to overseas bases are like “land birds” unable to fly far from home.⁷¹ The PLA Navy is less and less land-bound by his standard.

Two years later Admiral Wu and PLAN commissar Liu Xiaojiang wrote another article for Qiushi to document the Chinese navy’s endeavors. Parroting Hu Jintao, Wu and Liu pledge to fulfill the military’s new historic missions, including winning “local maritime wars under informatized conditions” and carrying out “diversified military tasks.” They boast that the PLA Navy has matured into a “comprehensive military service” composed of surface, undersea, air, and coastal-defense units as well as a marine corps and an undersea nuclear deterrent force. And in tribute to the PLAN’s increasingly global nature, the two admirals pay special attention to noncombat exploits such as overseas port visits, multilateral exercises, disaster relief, and “far seas escorts” in the Indian Ocean.72

In short, the PLA Navy has gone global and appears increasingly comfortable about it. The year 2009 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the service’s founding. PLAN officials arranged a variety of activities to commemorate the anniversary, including a grand naval review at the North Sea Fleet headquarters at Qingdao. The fleet review was akin to a coming-out party for the Chinese navy. That year, accordingly, Admiral Wu granted a series of media interviews. The rare interviews opened a window into his thinking. When a reporter asked about how the navy was fulfilling Hu Jintao’s call to prepare for martial confrontations at sea, Wu replied: “We have tested a series of new tactics, such as surface action groups assaulting large formations of enemy combatants; submarines conducting deep water mine laying and ambushes; naval aviation squadrons executing long-range raids and nighttime low altitude attacks over water; naval and air forces prosecuting joint operations against submarines; combined arms blockades and combat; and confrontation and counterattack in complex electromagnetic environments on land, at sea, and in the air.”⁷³

Wu thus indicated that he had more than Taiwan contingencies in mind. ASW and mock attacks against massive enemy fleets are useful for countering U.S. intervention in the western Pacific. They are hardly necessary for fights in the Taiwan Strait, which lies under the shadow of mainland defenses. Wu also divulged certain operational and tactical details about near-seas defense in the twenty-first century. When asked to forecast what the PLAN would look like in 2019, on the seventieth anniversary of its founding, Wu replied: “Sophisticated equipment is the important material foundation for winning local maritime wars under informatized conditions. We will strengthen the development of core weapons systems, including large surface combatants; high underwater endurance, stealthy new-type submarines; supersonic combat aircraft; precision, strong penetration, long-range missiles; deepwater, high-speed, intelligent torpedoes; and interoperable electronic warfare systems.”74

In other words, the PLAN is ripening swiftly in terms of hardware. When Admiral Wu stepped down from his post in January 2017 he bequeathed to his successor, Shen Jinlong, a navy well positioned to fight and win in the near seas. In another interview, Wu vowed that the navy will apply itself wherever the top leadership discerns a need for it: “The People’s Navy will always adhere to the principle that, wherever the center of gravity of the nation’s interests leans, that is where the key direction of our combat power development will follow; wherever the scope of the nation’s interests extends, that is where the perimeter of our combat power development will reach; and wherever the threats to our nation’s interests come from, that is where the core of our combat power development will point against.”⁷⁵

These are forceful and confident words. The Chinese navy, insists Wu, must ready itself for blue-water ventures even as it continues equipping and training to manage trouble closer to home. Nor has its performance to date disappointed. Wu Shengli achieved much on his watch.

Thus, three admirals, Xiao, Liu, and Wu—landmark figures in Chinese naval development—compiled naval strategies that fit China’s strategic circumstances while making allowance for material conditions of poverty or abundance. Xiao’s concept of sabotage warfare at sea conformed to PLA operational traditions while making the most of meager means. Liu’s near-seas defense strategy dovetailed with China’s outward-oriented economy and expansion of its maritime interests beyond its immediate environs. Wu prepared the navy to defend the near seas while projecting its reach into the far seas. Each admiral, then, progressively expanded the scale and sophistication of naval operations in keeping with interests and threats specified by the navy’s political masters.

China’s Defense White Papers and Maritime Strategy

Because the naval leadership has remained in lockstep with political guidance, the directives handed down from Beijing provide clues to how the Chinese navy will handle geostrategic challenges confronting China. Beginning in 1998 the political leadership took to publishing biennial defense white papers, in part to explain how officialdom views sea power and its uses. Draft white papers undergo thorough interagency vetting and, as a consequence, constitute Beijing’s most authoritative statements about marine affairs. A white paper also acts as a proxy for the state of Chinese strategy at the time it appears. Taken together, these documents help outsiders trace how strategy has evolved through the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras.

China’s National Defense in 2004 broke new ground in Chinese commentary on naval matters. Strikingly, the white paper directs the PLA to craft military forces capable of “winning both command of the sea and command of the air.”76 “Command” is a Mahanian term connoting absolute control of important waters. The white paper, moreover, was the first official directive to mention the “common,” namely the seas, skies, space, and perhaps even cyberspace. The document orders the PLAN to acquire warships, aircraft, precision armaments, and information technology suitable to support its bid for command of sea and sky in China’s environs.

The 2006 defense white paper took this logic a step further, stating that “the Navy aims at gradual extension of the strategic depth for offshore defensive operations and enhancing its capabilities in integrated maritime operations and nuclear counterattacks. The Air Force aims at speeding up its transition from territorial air defense to both offensive and defensive operations”77 (our emphasis). In accordance with China’s growing dependence on the seas for its well-being, the framers of the report envision commanding the common within an expanding offshore belt. The Chinese navy, working alongside its sister services, will ward off threats to the homeland as far forward as possible. This mission is consistent with the views summarized in chapter 2, which hold that China must deepen its maritime defenses to protect coastal economic hubs. The farther offshore China’s defense perimeter, the better China’s chances of withstanding coercion or assault.

The 2008 defense white paper reiterates its predecessors’ mandate to gird for offshore operations, but it also commits the PLAN to work alongside foreign sea powers to combat nontraditional threats such as piracy, weapons proliferation, and humanitarian disasters. Consistent with Hu Jintao’s notion of new historic missions, the white paper depicts nontraditional missions as the latest phase in China’s naval evolution: “Since the beginning of the new century … the Navy has been striving to improve in an all-round way its capabilities of integrated offshore operations, strategic deterrence and strategic counterattacks, and to gradually develop its capabilities of conducting cooperation in distant waters and countering nontraditional security threats, so as to push forward the overall transformation of the service.”⁷⁸ The white paper proclaims that Chinese flotillas will help preserve good order at sea in “distant waters” deemed critical to China’s energy security and commercial access. China’s apparent willingness to broadcast its intent to take on nontraditional tasks marks a major departure from previous white papers. It bespeaks mounting confidence in Chinese capability at sea.

China’s National Defense in 2010 continues the trend. The white paper restates the goal of developing a well-rounded navy that can prosecute missions ranging from nuclear deterrence to high-end conventional combat to low-intensity peacetime military operations in remote waters. But it carves out even more room for tasks that fall short of conflict. Borrowing language once commonplace in U.S. defense circles, the white paper devotes special attention to “military operations other than war,” which encompass such nontraditional missions as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.79

The shift in focus between the 2010 white paper and its forerunners was not surprising; it followed Beijing’s dispatch of its first naval flotilla to the Indian Ocean for counterpiracy duty in December 2008. The white paper merely codifies what the navy was already doing. The document goes on to tout the PLAN’s efforts to protect shipping in the Gulf of Aden and thus, sotto voce, announces China’s arrival as an Indian Ocean player.

The 2013 defense white paper, The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces, delves even further into the nexus between national security and maritime power. Released after Xi Jinping took the helm in late 2012, the white paper reveals much about the new leader’s ambitions. It spells out frankly Beijing’s goals in the nautical realm: “China is a major maritime as well as land country. The seas and oceans provide immense space and abundant resources for China’s sustainable development, and thus are of vital importance to the people’s well-being and China’s future. It is an essential national development strategy to exploit, utilize, and protect the seas and oceans and to build China into a maritime power. It is an important duty for the PLA to resolutely safeguard China’s maritime rights and interests.”⁸⁰

The 2013 white paper casts off the exclusively landward orientation of the past, proclaiming China both a continental power and a maritime power. The document plays up the intimate relationship between China’s economic health and its access to the oceans. And, significantly, it sets the unequivocal goal of building China into a maritime power while noting that the Chinese military has a pivotal part to play in fulfilling that goal. The white paper’s framers further contend that “with the gradual integration of China’s economy into the world economic system, overseas interests have become an integral component of China’s national interests. Security issues are increasingly prominent, involving overseas energy and resources, strategic sea lines of communication (SLOCs), and Chinese nationals and legal persons overseas. Vessel protection at sea, evacuation of Chinese nationals overseas, and emergency rescue have become important ways and means for the PLA to safeguard national interests and fulfill China’s international obligations.”81 No longer, then, does Beijing confine China’s interests to the mainland and nearby waters. The globalization of China’s economy has tied the country’s fate to events abroad, both good and bad. As the report suggests, disruptions to energy flows in some far-flung corner of the world could harm the nation’s economic growth and prosperity. The evacuation of Chinese nationals during the Libyan civil war in 2011 underscored how vulnerable China’s interests in unstable regions truly are. Accordingly, Beijing explicitly designates sea-lane security and the protection of overseas interests as PLA missions for the first time, implying that the geographic sweep of Chinese military action is set to widen yet again.

The 2013 white paper thus doubles down on the naval service’s expeditionary character. The directive instructs the PLAN to develop “blue-water capabilities of conducting mobile operations, carrying out international cooperation, and countering nontraditional security threats.” It vows to step up “blue-water training” that hones the Chinese navy’s ability to form “combined task forces composed of new types of destroyers, frigates, oceangoing replenishment ships and shipborne helicopters.” The PLAN “is increasing its research and training on tasks in complex battlefield environments, highlighting the training of remote early warning, comprehensive control, open sea interception, long-range raid, antisubmarine warfare, and vessel protection [in distant seas].”⁸²

These passages are notable both for their vocabulary and for their substance. For the first time, a white paper deploys the phrase “blue water” to denote the PLAN’s geographic scope of operations. It is possible that “blue water” is just conceptual shorthand, interchangeable with the phrase “distant water” used in previous white papers. Nonetheless, it betokens a shift of mindset toward the navy.

At a minimum, the new language implies that Chinese now regard their navy as a globe-spanning force. An oceangoing fleet is no longer an aspiration; it is real. Elites and ordinary citizens expect the PLA Navy to possess the capacity to conduct errands throughout the world’s oceans. At the same time, the architects of the 2013 defense white paper describe in finer detail the hardware, seamanship, and training still needed for China’s navy to fulfill the nation’s oceanic destiny. That China’s leadership feels comfortable divulging specifics marks a sharp break from white papers released just a decade before.

The 2015 edition, China’s Military Strategy, follows the same trajectory. Its drafters place even more weight on how central the seas are to the nation’s well-being and security. “The seas and oceans,” the white paper declares, “bear on the enduring peace, lasting stability, and sustainable development of China. The traditional mentality that land outweighs sea must be abandoned, and great importance has to be attached to managing the seas and oceans and protecting maritime rights and interests” (our emphasis).83 The communist leadership thus ordains that Chinese society discard its landcentric strategic culture. The mandate from Beijing reflects a profound transformation of outlook. Threats to China have approached over land since antiquity. The Cold War was little different. The CCP leadership fixed its gaze on China’s land frontiers for decades during that twilight struggle. Beyond the borders lay rival great powers, some of which posed mortal dangers to China. Thus, the conceit that sea is as important as shore demands a remarkable rebalancing of China’s geostrategic priorities and habits of mind. Constituents possessed of the continental mindset long held sway in policy deliberations. The 2015 military strategy leaves scant doubt that Xi means to break the terrestrial monopoly on geostrategic thought.

While past white papers consistently pledged to defend China’s maritime rights and interests as Beijing construes them, the 2015 version proffers new details about menaces to China’s rights and interests. It accuses rival claimants of “provocative actions,” including activities that “reinforce their military presence on China’s reefs and islands that they have illegally occupied.” CCP leaders are evidently referring to actions taken by Southeast Asian states, mainly the Philippines and Vietnam, to hold the South China Sea atolls and reefs these states occupy and claim.

And in a thinly veiled reference to the United States, the document contends that “some external countries are also busy meddling in South China Sea affairs.” In fact, the paper says, “a tiny few maintain constant close-in air and sea surveillance and reconnaissance against China.” To cope with maritime interests and threats that CCP leaders see multiplying, the white paper goes on to argue: “It is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security and development interests, safeguard its national sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, protect the security of strategic SLOCs and overseas interests, and participate in international maritime cooperation, so as to provide strategic support for building itself into a maritime power.”84

The latter passage highlights the dual character of China’s maritime challenges and obligations as Beijing sees them. On the one hand, Beijing believes it must buffer the homeland against seaborne threats, uphold the nation’s territorial integrity, and guarantee rights and interests in offshore expanses. On the other hand, Beijing must extend its striking reach to defend a range of overseas interests while also conducting constabulary operations. In other words, the PLA must posture itself to respond to close-in and distant threats that impinge on China’s interests at virtually the same time. This twin responsibility corresponds to the white paper’s sketch of the Chinese navy’s expanded mission: “In line with the strategic requirement of offshore waters defense and open seas protection, the PLA Navy (PLAN) will gradually shift its focus from ‘offshore waters defense’ to the combination of ‘offshore waters defense’ with ‘open seas protection,’ and build a combined, multi-functional and efficient marine combat force structure.”⁸⁵

As noted before, “offshore waters defense,” or near-seas defense, connotes military operations designed to defend China’s core interests when deterrence fails. Taiwan represents such a core interest, and thus a cross-strait conflict embroiling the United States would fall into this category. “Open seas protection” refers to expeditionary operations aimed at blunting or quelling threats in peacetime or in that shadow land between peace and open war. Ongoing counterpiracy patrols in the Indian Ocean are such a mission. The strategy’s framers restate their fealty to Maoist concepts, however, even while contemplating operations in new theaters. They proclaim that active defense remains the “essence” of Chinese Communist strategic thought.

In other words, to obey policy directives from Hu and Xi, China’s navy must configure itself to respond to contingencies either close to home or in remote waterways. The authors of China’s Military Strategy foretell increasing demand for expeditionary deployments. If so, global missions will beckon the PLAN far from traditional operating grounds. But the PLAN will call on time-tested warfare precepts while doing business there.

Since the turn of the century, China’s defense white papers have added new nautical content bit by bit. Nowadays, the leadership minces few words about Beijing’s longing to become a sea power of consequence. That China’s future well-being depends increasingly on the sea represents a clear, consistent theme in recent directives—and thus they accent the PLAN’s global and expeditionary character. To all appearances the leadership has settled the debate about whether China should pivot seaward or apply its energies ashore.

This review of policy and strategy statements, from CCP chairmen to PLAN commanders to defense white papers, demonstrates that China has orchestrated its sea-power enterprise with skill, resourcefulness, and fortitude—panache, even. A relentless will to sea power has driven Chinese leaders to the sea, especially since the Deng Xiaoping era. Wolfgang Wegener might not approve of China’s purposes, but he would approve of China’s vigor—and of the maritime might to which popular and elite resolve has given rise.

Self-discipline has played its part in China’s seafaring enterprise. CCP chieftains have prudently limited their ambitions and thus avoided outrunning the resources available to them. Communist China assembled a fleet by increments, starting out with strategies of the weak under Admiral Xiao Jinguang before moving on to strategies of the strong, leveraging advanced platforms and weaponry. By the time Xi Jinping assumed power, the Chinese navy was primed for success in saltwater competition.

True to the art of strategy, then, Chinese leaders have set and enforced priorities. They heeded stubborn resource constraints, fixing their gazes on their nation’s most consequential interests and threats while postponing or canceling lesser pursuits. Mao and Deng contented themselves with defending China’s immediate environs while condemning hegemonic powers. They stood up to the most forbidding menaces during the Cold War, namely the United States and the Soviet Union. With a stronger navy to execute their strategic visions, Jiang, Hu, and Xi could realistically anticipate prevailing outright in modern naval combat.

That means combat against America and its Asian allies. Since the 1990s the United States has become both the gold standard of sea power to which China aspires and China’s archnemesis. As we show in the following chapters, Beijing has steadily made up ground against the U.S. Navy. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. But if future political and naval leaders approach their strategic tasks with the same imagination, discipline, and steadfastness as their forebears, then China will pose an enduring challenge to American mastery of the Asian seas. And it may make good against the oceangoing hegemon of the age where Wegener’s High Seas Fleet fell short.