TO THE LIST of industries now dominated by China, there is one surprising new entry: Miss World. Beauty contests were banned in China by Mao Zedong as one of the worst forms of Western decadence, but their bland internationalism appeals to modern China’s desire to be included. Of the last nine Miss World pageants, five have been held in China, all at the seaside resort of Sanya, on subtropical Hainan Island, off China’s south coast. Sensing a great way to boost tourism, the local government spent $30 million to build a special venue for the contest, the Beauty Crown Theater, a huge arena near a man-made beach which is shaped like, well, a crown. When it opened in 2003, the winner was Rosanna Davison, a nutritional therapist from Dublin whose father, Chris de Burgh, wrote the syrupy global smash hit “Lady in Red.” Qi Guan, a Chinese model who wore a flowing red ball-gown for the evening’s finale, was the second runner-up. Her compatriot Zhang Zilin went one better in 2007, winning China’s first Miss World title.
When the Miss World show is in town, the swimsuit photo shoots take place across the road, at the Sanya Sheraton Hotel, which looks out onto the white sands of Yalong Bay, a crescent-shaped cove lined with palm trees. With a Ritz-Carlton on one side and a Marriott on the other, Yalong Bay is a transplant of multinational tourism on China’s southernmost point. The resort has become hugely popular with prosperous Chinese families, who escape the urban grind for a few days of sun that before would have required a trip to Thailand. On the beach, I met one couple from Jiangxi Province who were sporting his and hers Hawaiian shirts and shorts. On the winter day when I traveled, it was minus nine degrees Celsius (not quite sixteen degrees Fahrenheit) when the plane left Beijing, and a balmy twenty-three degrees Celsius when we arrived three hours later in Sanya, a reminder of the continental size of China. The Sheraton is also a popular escape for well-to-do Russians living in eastern Siberia. On the menu at the Lotus Café, which is surrounded by a landscaped Japanese-style koi pond, the Sheraton Club Sandwich is offered in English, Mandarin, and Russian.
That day, the hotel was hosting a corporate retreat for the Chinese subsidiary of Syngenta, a multinational based in Switzerland which sells genetically modified seeds. The hundred or so employees spent the afternoon playing games on the beach, including the confidence-building drills in which one person falls back into the arms of a colleague. “Trust your partner, trust your partner,” the master of ceremonies shouted. Having fun on the beach, they barely looked up when a Chinese Type 054 frigate sailed casually across the bay, in plain view of the tourists. Yalong Bay, it turns out, has a double life. The brand-name hotels occupy only one half of the beach; at the other end lies China’s newest and most sophisticated naval base.
Yalong Bay is where the two sides of China’s rise now intersect, its deeply connected economy and its deep-seated instinct to challenge America—globalization China and great-power China vying for a spot on the beach. Celebrating their success in the China market, the Syngenta employees at the Sheraton all wore T-shirts emblazoned with the English-language slogan for their event: “Step Up Together.” Yet right next door to their party was one of the most striking symbols of China’s great-power ambitions. Ideally situated for quick access to the busy sea-lanes of the South China Sea, the base in Hainan is one of the principal platforms for an old-fashioned form of projecting national power, a navy that can operate well beyond a country’s coastal waters. For the last couple of decades, such power politics seemed to have been made irrelevant by the frictionless, flat world of globalization. Yet Yalong Bay demonstrates a different reality. It is one of the launchpads for what will be one of the central geopolitical tussles of the twenty-first century—the new era of military competition in the Pacific between China and the U.S.
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The Asia-Pacific region is now the most dynamic economy in the world and accounts for around half of all output, an intricate network that takes software and design from California, tiny microchips from Japan, and sophisticated screen technology from South Korea, and assembles them into iPads in a factory in southern China. Given that nearly 90 percent of intercontinental commerce travels by ship, Asia’s seas have become the principal arteries of the global economy. If there is a symbol that defines the era of globalization, it is the container ship. Traveling the long sea-lanes west from Asia toward Europe and east toward the U.S., the biggest ships now carry as many as seven thousand containers, stacked eight rows high. The enormous economies of scale that container ships offer have made it possible to manufacture socks and televisions in Asia and then sell them at low cost in Walmart or Primark. The ease and safety with which these hulking ships, the length of four football fields, travel safely across the world’s oceans is what makes the global economy tick. Freedom of navigation is the unwritten label on the modern consumer economy.
Two very different visions of Asia’s future are now in play. Since the defeat of Japan in 1945—and especially since the end of the Cold War—the United States Navy has treated the Pacific Ocean as almost a private lake. It has used that power to implement an international system in its own image, a rules-based order of free trade, freedom of navigation, and, when possible, democratic government. That Pax Americana was cemented in June 1971, when Henry Kissinger pulled Richard Nixon away from a state dinner for the president of Nicaragua and showed him a secret cable from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in which Beijing agreed to a face-to-face meeting between the leaders of the two countries. “This is the most important communication that has come to an American president since the end of World War Two,” Kissinger told Nixon, with his customary mixture of grandiloquence and flattery. The four decades since Nixon met Mao Zedong have been the most stable and prosperous in Asia’s modern history. Under the agreement, the U.S. endorsed China’s return to the family of nations, and China implicitly accepted American military dominance in Asia.
In many ways, China has been the biggest beneficiary of this system. History is full of examples of rising powers which have complained that the existing rules were rigged against them. In the first decades of the last century, Germany and Japan found themselves squeezed out of important aspects of the global economy as the major powers used their imperial networks to guarantee the essential raw-material supplies they needed for their economies. The roots of both world wars lay partly in this friction. However, since the late 1970s, China has been able to use the very openness of the U.S.-led order to promote its extraordinary growth. China has been allowed to insert itself into an international trading system which has clear and established rules, and it has been able to buy the oil, copper, and iron ore that it needs on global markets. Now the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods, China has a vast seaborne trade that is underpinned by the calming influence of American naval dominance.
Never written down or officially announced, this understanding between Beijing and Washington on America’s role in Asia is crumbling. China now wishes to recast the military and political dynamic in the region to reflect its own traditional centrality. Great powers are driven by a mixture of confidence and insecurity. China wants a return to the leadership position it has enjoyed so often in Asian history. It also frets about the security of its seaborne commerce, especially in the area it calls the “Near Seas”—the coastal waters that include the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas. The Yalong Bay naval base on Hainan Island is one part of the strategy that China is starting to put in place to exert control over the Near Seas, an effort to push the U.S. Navy ever farther out into the western Pacific. In the process, it is launching a profound challenge to the U.S.-led order that has been the backbone of the Asian economic miracle.
Although the Chinese navy’s name—the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN—betrays the fact that it was once the poor cousin of the army, for the last twenty years China has been undergoing a rapid military buildup, and the navy has been given pride of place. More important, China has been investing in its navy in a very specific way. China’s naval planners have focused on the warships, silent submarines, and rapid small boats which form the basis of what the U.S. Navy calls “access denial.” The clear implication of the investment plan is that China is trying to prevent the U.S. Navy from operating in large areas of the western Pacific. China’s new navy is both an expression of power and a means to a diplomatic end. By weakening the U.S. naval presence in the western Pacific, China hopes to gradually undermine America’s alliances with other Asian countries, notably South Korea, the Philippines, and maybe even Japan. As American influence declines, China would be in a position to quietly assume a leadership position in Asia, giving it much greater influence over the rules and practices in the principal arena of the global economy. Through its navy, China hopes to reshape the balance of power in Asia.
Countries compete for influence in all sorts of ways, over economic rules and political philosophies, but the military arena is the most important. If allowed to blossom, military rivalries have the capacity to calcify all other interactions between the countries. Compromise is hard for political leaders when senior generals are muttering dark warnings in their ears. That makes the emerging contest in the western Pacific one of the central global issues over the coming decades. It will be a crucial test for how the U.S. and China manage their emerging great-power rivalry. It will also be a laboratory for many of the questions about China’s rise—how Beijing intends to pursue its leadership aspirations in the region, and whether, in an era of fiscal retrenchment and political polarization, U.S. global influence still has staying power. The naval competition in the western Pacific will set the tone for a large part of global politics.
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Aspiring great powers have often taken to the high seas as a route to expanded influence. The U.S., U.K., Spain, Venice, and even ancient Athens all built powerful navies to defend their far-flung interests. In the late nineteenth century, Germany was gripped by the allure of constructing a grand navy, prompting Kaiser Wilhelm II to establish the special rank for himself of Großadmiral (great admiral). Sea power is not just about control of the seas; it is also a tool to influence other countries and to shape events. Superior sea power allowed the Europeans to begin asserting control over Asia in the fifteenth century, led first by the Portuguese, and it has enabled outside countries to dictate terms in the region ever since. It was through sea power that a small country like Britain, with only a modest army, could command an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. More recently, domination of the Pacific and Indian Oceans since the end of the Second World War has allowed America to be the preeminent power in Asia. American naval power, combined with the air superiority that comes from a large fleet of aircraft carriers, has been the backbone of its effort to spread free trade and democratic values throughout the region.
Navy building can explain a lot about a nation’s intentions, its ambitions, and its anxieties. Long lead times mean that naval planners are not thinking about tomorrow; they are placing bets on how the world will look in one, two, or three decades’ time. Navies can also provide a grandeur that beguiles some countries. Hu Jintao defined the development of Chinese naval power in 2006 as a “glorious task”; Rear Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the Chinese navy, described the quest for a strong fleet as part of “the great revitalization of the Chinese nation.” The same sentiments are echoed by popular military commentators. “When we look at history, we can see [that] whether a country is powerful or not is closely related with its naval forces,” writes Major General Luo Yuan of the China Military Science Society. “When its naval forces are powerful, then the country is strong; when its naval forces are weak, then the country is also fragile.” In 2009, the year when the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its sixtieth anniversary with the grand military parade in Beijing, the navy had their own parade earlier in the year. Fifty-two vessels took part in special review at the east-coast port of Qingdao, including previously unseen nuclear submarines. In many ways, it was a coming-out party for China’s new navy.
For anyone who grew up during the Cold War, it can be tempting to see all this as an ideological contest. There is a deep chasm in political values between Washington and Beijing that heightens the sense of competition between the two governments. The U.S. believes the Chinese political system is in some sense illegitimate, while the Chinese insist—not without some justification—that the U.S. would like to see a form of regime change in China. Yet one of the striking aspects of China’s turn to the seas is that it is rooted in history and geography in a manner that transcends its current political system. It was from the sea that China was harassed during its “century of humiliation” at the hands of the West. China was one of the most prominent victims of nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy, when Britain, France, and other colonial powers used their naval supremacy to exercise control over Shanghai and a dozen other ports around the country. The Opium Wars were principally a naval exercise: During the first war, in 1840, the British navy was able to deploy the Nemesis, a steamship made of iron whose large guns bombarded Chinese defenses. China learned the hard way that having a weak navy leaves a country vulnerable to pressure and bullying by others. The instinct to control the surrounding seas is partly rooted in the widespread desire never to leave China so vulnerable again. “Ignoring the oceans is a historical error we committed,” says Yang Yong, a Chinese historian. “And now even in the future we will pay a price for this error.”
This sense that China is under siege is aggravated by looking at a map. Chinese talk about the “first island chain,” a perimeter that stretches around the western Pacific from Japan in the northeast, through Taiwan, to the Philippines in the south, all allies or friends of the U.S. This is both a geographical barrier, in that it creates a series of channels that a superior opponent could block in order to bottle up the Chinese navy, and a political barrier controlled by governments close to Washington. For a country that wants to start flexing a few of its muscles, this map makes China deeply uncomfortable; it is almost hemmed in from the sea. Chinese strategists talk about “breaking through the thistles,” the development of a naval capability that will allow it to operate outside the barrier of the first island chain they think the U.S. has constructed to keep China contained. The Science of Military Strategy, a 2005 statement of the PLA’s military doctrine, says that if the navy is kept within the first island chain, “the essential strategic space for China’s rejuvenation will be lost.” Zhang Wenmu, a well-known and hawkish writer on naval issues, argues, “Restricting China to the shallow seas west of the first island chain is both unfair and impossible and China simply cannot accept it.”
When China looks out to sea, it also quickly sees the U.S. According to Chu Shulong, an academic at Peking University, this grudge with the U.S. has grown stronger in recent years, as the Chinese navy has expanded. In the decades when China had little more than a coast guard, it was largely unaware that the U.S. Navy was patrolling waters near its shores. But now that its capabilities are more advanced, it witnesses on a daily basis that the American navy is superior, and operating only a few miles from many of China’s major cities. “For them, this is a major humiliation that they experience every single day,” says Chu. “It is humiliating that another country can exercise so close to China’s coasts, so close to the base in Hainan. That is the reason the navy wants to do something to challenge the U.S.”
Anxieties about history and geography have meshed with broader concerns about economic security. One of the key turning points in China’s push to the high seas took place when China became a net importer of oil for the first time, in 1993. By 2010, China had become the biggest consumer of energy in the world and the second-biggest consumer of oil, half of which is now imported. A Chinese company has built the largest oil tanker in the world, a 333-meter-long vessel called the Xin Buyang, which carries three hundred thousand tons of oil each time it travels from the Middle East. New great powers often fret that rivals could damage their economy with a blockade. Such warnings have become common in China over the last decade. For every ten barrels of oil that China imports, more than eight travel by ship through the Strait of Malacca, the narrow sea channel between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, which is patrolled by U.S. ships. Fifteenth-century Venetians used to warn, “Whoever is the Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.” Hu Jintao echoed similar sentiments when he warned in a 2003 speech that “certain major powers” are bent on controlling this crucial sea-lane. Until now, China’s maritime security has been guaranteed largely by the U.S. Navy. But, like aspiring great powers before it, China has been forced to confront a central geopolitical dilemma: can it rely on a rival to protect the country’s economic lifeline?
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China’s naval buildup may be directed at the U.S., but in lots of ways it has also been modeled on the U.S. At the very least, it should come as no surprise to the U.S. that an aspiring great power should seek to exert greater control over its regional waters. From the early days of the American republic, strategists in Washington fretted about the presence of the old European powers in the Americas. In 1823, these anxieties were given an official stamp when President James Monroe declared that the American continents were “henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” In effect, America put up a large “Stay Out” sign over the hemisphere. It is a natural instinct of rising powers to try and establish a buffer that prevents the more established powers from threatening their security. Like China today, America then worried about the risk of a blockade of its economy, or that a European power might organize a coalition among its neighbors to contain its rise. Like Chinese leaders today, American politicians in the nineteenth century took geopolitics very seriously while all the time professing disdain for the old European games of power politics. And, like China today, America was planning for the long term. The Monroe Doctrine was more bluff than fact for over half a century after it was announced. Britain continued to interfere in and occasionally colonize parts of the Americas for much of the nineteenth century. Even by the 1880s, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina all had larger navies than the U.S. It was not until the 1890s, when America started to establish a world-class navy, that it was able to genuinely enforce the Monroe Doctrine—a crucial point not lost on the Chinese today.
Indeed, China’s naval push is drawing heavily on American influences. In 1890s America, one of the most important evangelists of naval power was Alfred Thayer Mahan, an undistinguished naval captain who had started to plot a maritime history while whiling away some days at the English Club in Lima, Peru. The book he eventually wrote, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1680–1783, turned out to be one of the most influential of his generation when it was published in 1890, with the aid of a $200 personal loan from J. P. Morgan, and helped convince Washington of the need for a big navy. Mahan had two major themes. The first was about the virtues of building a naval force that could fight “decisive battles” against prospective rivals, thereby ensuring the command of the seas that can guarantee national greatness. The second was a more nuanced geopolitical theory about the importance of controlling the sea-lanes that are vital to a nation’s commercial life.
In the West, if Mahan is remembered at all today, it is largely for the first set of ideas, which have cast him as one of the warmongers of his age. The notion of applying “overbearing naval power” was taken seriously not only in the U.S. but also in Germany, where Kaiser Wilhelm was a big fan and ordered a copy of his great work placed in every battleship. (“I am… devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,” he once said.) When the Kaiser met with his naval officers for drinks, they would make toasts to “The Day,” the chance they craved to show off their newfound naval strength in one do-or-die battle with the dominant maritime power of the age, the British navy. Mahan died just after the outbreak of the First World War, and his obituary in the New York Times said that his writings were “really responsible for the German Navy as it exists today.” Sir Charles Webster, the British historian and wartime diplomat, once claimed, “Mahan was one of the causes of the First World War”—a charge from which his name has never completely recovered.
But in today’s China, it is the geopolitical aspects of Mahan’s writing that are greatly admired, the relationship between expanding commercial interests and naval power. Just as China worries about the Strait of Malacca and the first island chain, Mahan obsessed about building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama and about having naval capabilities in both the Caribbean and the Pacific to defend America’s new commercial arteries. He pushed for the U.S. to acquire bases in the Caribbean, to allow U.S. ships to control access to the Panama Canal. For Mahan, sea power was a crucial aspect of economic development. The ability to secure sea-lanes and the critical geographical locations that facilitate commercial traffic “affects the very root of a nation’s vigor.” Mahan’s ideas from the 1890s echo many of the challenges the Chinese see today, the mixture of a quest for national greatness and insecurity about economic lifelines at sea. The “Near Seas” is a formulation that has a strong Sinocentric ring to it, with its implication of a form of Chinese historical ownership, but it also embodies Mahan’s vision for a country to secure its vital maritime frontiers.
Neglected at home, Mahan has become deeply fashionable over the last decade in Chinese intellectual circles, including translations of his books, academic articles on their importance, and conferences on his ideas. He has inspired a generation of Chinese navalists. “A big country that builds its prosperity on foreign trade cannot put the safety of its ocean fleet in the hands of other countries,” writes Ye Hailin, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Doing so would be the equivalent of putting its throat under another’s dagger and marking its blood vessels in red ink.”
One publisher released an edition of Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power with a fold-out map of the Asia-Pacific that included all the U.S. naval facilities in the region. James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, two American historians who have tracked Mahan’s influence in China, write: “His sea power philosophy remains hypnotic.… The Mahanian conceit that national greatness derives from sea power beguiles many Chinese strategists.” As a result, they conclude: “We should therefore expect China to attach extraordinary value to fighting and winning in the waters that fall within the near-seas.”
The U.S. and China have already indulged in some potentially dangerous sparring in the Near Seas—the sort of thing that in the Cold War was known as “nautical chicken.” In March 2009, the USNS Impeccable, a surveillance ship, was on an operation around seventy nautical miles from the new submarine base in Hainan when it was confronted by a flotilla of ten different Chinese ships. The Chinese crew dropped planks into the water to obstruct the American ship’s movements. When it braked, the Chinese sailors then used long poles to smash the surveillance instruments it was towing behind the ship. As the American ship retreated from the area, it was shadowed and harassed for some time. When the Chinese ships decided to take their leave, the crew of one boat dropped their pants and waved their bare bottoms in the direction of the Americans.
The confrontation was significant not just because of the risk that it might have escalated, but because it amplified one of the big underlying political issues in the western Pacific. China’s new naval capabilities are interlaced with a broader political strategy designed to exert more control over its maritime reaches. Beijing’s most extravagant claim is in the South China Sea, where a series of islets, reefs, and rocks are disputed by a number of countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines, and China. Beijing argues it has a historical right to be the dominant power in the area, a claim expressed in China’s now famous “nine-dash-line” map, which assumes ownership of 80 to 90 percent of the South China Sea. (Chapter 3 will have a more detailed discussion of some of these disputes.) At the same time, China is pushing a version of international law which would potentially give it the right to exclude foreign militaries from large sections of the seas that surround it. A United Nations convention called the Law of the Sea tries to codify rules for national ownership of the world’s oceans. The law gives countries an “exclusive economic zone”—or EEZ—that runs two hundred nautical miles from their coastline, where they have the rights to resources in the water or under the seabed. According to the U.S.—and a majority of other governments—there is a right to freedom of navigation in this zone that includes military vessels. However, China is the leading member of a smaller but significant group of countries which think that foreign militaries should be excluded from their EEZ unless they have permission. In particular, China objects to surveillance vessels operating too near to its coast, just as the U.S.’s Impeccable was doing.
Taken together, the two claims have huge implications. China argues that many of the islands in the South China Sea qualify to have their own exclusive economic zones, even though some are no more than largely submerged rocks and many are administered by other countries. As a result, China argues that most of the South China Sea is part of its exclusive economic zone. If it takes control of all the islands, and if its legal interpretation of the Law of the Sea stands, China would be giving itself the political case to turn away the vessels of foreign navies from most of the South China Sea. Given the centrality of the sea to the global economy, this is a far-reaching claim that has enormous implications for everyone in the region—and especially for the United States. Although China’s ultimate aims are still not entirely clear, the evidence of growing ambitions is unnerving the U.S. military. “China is knowingly, operationally and incrementally seizing maritime rights of its neighbors under the rubric of a maritime history that is not only contested in the international community but has largely been fabricated,” Captain James Fanell, deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet told a conference in 2013. He described an intelligence briefing he attends every morning at 6 a.m. which brings together the U.S. military’s leading Asia-Pacific analysts. “Every day it is about China,” he said, adding: “They are taking control of maritime areas that have never before been administered or controlled in the last 5,000 years by any regime called ‘China.’… China’s conduct is destabilizing the Asian maritime environment.”
Even with these claims, it might seem improbable that China would seek to tamper with the right to freedom of navigation. China has been an enormous beneficiary of open seas; its economy is based on the free flow of imported raw materials into the country and the export of manufactured products. The assumption among many governments in the region had always been that, even if China would defend its territorial claims fiercely, it would not let those political disputes contaminate its booming commercial links with the rest of the region. Few worried that China would use its growing power to act as a toll keeper of naval traffic in the western Pacific.
Yet confidence in such an assumption is gradually beginning to weaken. Over the last few years, China has shown a willingness to use a form of economic blackmail and bullying during political disputes that raises real questions about how it would behave if it were ever to control the sea-lanes through the South China Sea. During a standoff with Tokyo in 2010, after the Japanese coast guard arrested a Chinese fisherman who had rammed one of its vessels in disputed waters, China limited exports to Japan of rare earths—a group of commodities which China controls and which are central to the manufacture of many products, such as cell phones. When ships from China and the Philippines clashed in 2012 over control of a small island in the South China Sea, Beijing refused to accept imports of bananas from the Philippines, leaving large shipments to rot in a harbor. The local government on Hainan Island has declared it has the power to board vessels which “illegally enter” Chinese waters—one in a string of announcements that have added to the sense of uncertainty about how China will use its growing power. The expansive and ambiguous claims China has made in the South China Sea, combined with its willingness to hold trade hostage to political arguments, have, at the very least, raised questions about freedom of navigation in the region. As Peter Dutton, a U.S. expert on maritime law, argues, China’s approach to the Near Seas has already created “hairline fractures in the global order.”
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Shortly before he retired as head of the U.S. Pacific Command in 2009, Admiral Timothy Keating revealed a conversation he had had with a senior Chinese naval officer, who effectively offered to split the Pacific with the U.S. “You, the US, take Hawaii East and we, China, will take Hawaii West and the Indian Ocean,” Keating recalled the officer, whom he refused to name, as saying. “Then you will not need to come to the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean and we will not need to go to the eastern Pacific. If anything happens there, you can let us know and if something happens here, we will let you know.” Keating admitted that the offer was perhaps made “tongue-in-cheek,” but it was revealing. One reason that tensions in the region are rising is the substantial gap between U.S. and Chinese views of America’s natural role in Asia. For many in China, a U.S. retreat from the region is an inevitable response to the revival of Asia. Yet the view is very different from Washington. Since the early years of the republic, the western Pacific has played a large role in America’s sense of its own security.
America’s first Pacific alliance was signed as far back as 1833, a full two decades before Commodore Matthew Perry more famously first set anchor in Japan. President Andrew Jackson sent a sloop-of-war called the USS Peacock on a mission around parts of the South China Sea, including a stop at the kingdom of Siam, modern-day Thailand. During the visit, his envoy, Edmund Roberts, signed the Siamese-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce with a representative of King Rama III. Jackson sent as a present a sword whose gold handle had an elephant and an eagle emblazoned on it. The pool of people at the time in either country who spoke both Siamese and English was almost nonexistent, so, in order to make sure the treaty would not be questioned, it was also translated into Chinese and Portuguese.
The prominence of the Pacific in the American mind accelerated sharply in the 1890s, in the era of Mahan and another of his disciples, Theodore Roosevelt, who a century before Barack Obama was really America’s first Pacific president. Roosevelt was the first to predict that Asia would become a center of global power, initially as a result of the rise of Japan, but later as China and India caught up. And he placed the maintenance of a favorable balance of power in Asia at the center of America’s priorities. “The commerce and command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history,” Roosevelt predicted.
America’s Pacific role did not fall temporarily into its lap at the end of the Second World War and the decline of the British Empire, nor is it a product of the Cold War. Instead, it is much more deeply rooted in the U.S.’s own history and vision of the world. Over the last century, America has defined its vital interest as preventing any one power from dominating the other main regions of the world and turning them into a private sphere of influence, whether in Europe or in Asia. The U.S. eventually fought the First and Second World Wars because it did not want Germany to dominate Europe—and, in the second war, also to stop Japan from controlling Asia. Washington’s ultimate goal in the Cold War was to prevent the Soviet Union from exercising control across the whole of Eurasia.
It should come as no surprise that the rise of China is beginning to stir something deep in the American psyche. Relative decline or not, Washington will be determined to prevent any other country from dominating such a central part of the world. China’s naval push strikes to the core of how America understands both its security and its prosperity. The Obama administration’s desire to “pivot” toward Asia, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan end, might seem like a new departure to address the rise of China, but it is also a very traditional American response to a shifting balance of power in Asia. Unless America suffers a much deeper economic collapse, it is difficult to imagine the U.S.’s not wanting to play a significant role in Asia in the coming decades. Washington was never going to acquiesce in a proposal to split the Pacific. “If the U.S. does not hold its ground in the Pacific, it cannot be a world leader,” as Lee Kuan Yew, the former Singaporean leader, puts it in a cold assessment of the political stakes. “The 21st century will be a contest for supremacy in the Pacific because that is where the growth will be.”
Robert Gates was about to go into a meeting with President Hu Jintao when one of his aides showed him some images that had just appeared on a Chinese Web site that specializes in military gossip. It was January 2011, and the U.S. defense secretary had traveled to Beijing to try and mend fences after China had suspended military contacts between the two countries’ militaries in protest of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. The photos purported to show a test flight for the J-20, China’s attempt to develop a “fifth generation” stealth bomber that can evade conventional radar. “It’s flying!” wrote an Internet user with the name Little Bird King in one of the chat rooms for military issues run by the People’s Daily group, publisher of the party’s mouthpiece newspaper. A large crowd of onlookers watched the test run from outside the fence at a military airfield in Chengdu, some standing on the back of a white pickup truck to get a better view. For Gates, the timing seemed a deliberate insult: the Chinese military were rubbing his nose in one of their new high-tech capabilities.
The photos were a particular embarrassment to Gates, who had publicly dismissed the idea of a Chinese stealth bomber only two years earlier. China would have “no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020,” he had told an audience in Chicago. Most American observers thought that China’s jets were mediocre copies of old Russian models. A month earlier some grainy photos had appeared on another Chinese military-fan Web site showing the J-20 being pulled out on the Chengdu airfield. Soon after, the photos reappeared on the Aviation Week Web site in the U.S., after blogger Bill Sweetman posted them at 7:30 a.m. on Christmas Day and talked about rumors of a test flight. Yet the Pentagon did not believe the new Chinese jet fighter was ready to fly.
Gates was so angry that he suggested canceling the meeting with Hu Jintao, only to be persuaded to attend by Jon Huntsman, then the U.S. ambassador to Beijing. When Gates asked Hu about the test flight, he was greeted with a nervous silence. The president appeared to know nothing about it. They were seated in one of those U-shaped Chinese meeting rooms, with the principals at the top and a line of their aides on either side. Hu asked his defense minister, Liang Guanglie, who in turn asked the PLA’s deputy chief of staff, Ma Xiaotian. No one seemed to know what had actually happened. Eventually, an air-force officer explained that the test flight of the stealth bomber had taken place by coincidence on that day. “I take President Hu at his word that the test had nothing to do with my visit,” Gates said rather curtly after the meeting.
Sometimes an uncomfortable silence can tell you as much about a political system as a library full of theses. At the very least, Hu’s reticence showed a lack of day-to-day coordination between the PLA and its political masters. Whenever a major U.S. naval vessel passes into the Asia-Pacific Region, the Asia director at the National Security Council receives a written note, so that the White House is not blindsided by activities of the Pentagon. China lacks such a coordinating mechanism. Yet it is equally possible that elements of the PLA were intending to send Gates precisely the message that he had imagined, and that the test flight was held on that day as a deliberate provocation. The Chengdu airfield has two landing strips—one far away from view and one visible from a public road. The test flight used the second runway, and when it was completed, the aircraft was parked beside the road, so that local military enthusiasts could take more pictures. In the past, China’s pervasive Internet censors have taken down images of new military technologies they do not want the world to see. This time, they let the photos remain. Andrew Scobell, an analyst with the Rand Corporation, later told a congressional hearing that the message from the test flight was: “America, take heed. The capabilities of our weaponry are ever improving, and we are not intimidated by your technologically superior military might.” If sending such a signal to the U.S. also caused a moment of acute diplomatic embarrassment for the country’s president, then so be it.
——
One of the ironies about Deng Xiaoping’s advice to “hide the brightness and nourish obscurity” is that it requires a decisive figure like Deng to implement. Playing nice with the neighbors involves making the sorts of concessions that can gall nationalists. It needs a strong leader who has the credibility to take a few blows on the chin, and who can face down the more ambitious and nationalistic of his colleagues, especially from the military. Yet Deng also made sure that China would never have such a strongman again. After the quixotic disasters of the Mao era, the Communist Party has gone out of its way to reduce the space for another all-powerful leader. The party now has a fixed retirement age, and an entrenched process of leadership transitions that take place every decade (with some housecleaning every five years). The upside is that the party is much more predictable and professional. The downside is that it is now governed by committee, which can slow decision making and can make it much harder for the leadership to stand up to more strident voices. Over the last decade, China has seen a fracturing of power among the elite, with different vested interests from within the party-state starting to push their own foreign-policy agendas more openly and more aggressively. Cheng Li, a Chinese political scientist now at the Brookings Institution in Washington, uses three couplets to capture the new dynamic of power in China. “Weak leaders, strong factions; weak government, strong interest groups; weak party, strong country,” as he puts it.
China’s determined push to the seas is a product of its history and geography, to be sure, but it is also being driven by these shifts within the Chinese political system as more voices start to be heard. China’s leaders no longer enjoy the unquestioned authority over foreign policy that Deng was able to command. The cautious elite consensus on how to manage the country’s rise is gradually being undermined in favor of a more strident defense of national interests and a greater willingness to ruffle international feathers. The Foreign Ministry should be in charge of international relations but is actually the weakest ministry in Beijing, outgunned and out-politicked by other influential groups. Not one foreign-policy official is a member of the twenty-five-strong Communist Party Politburo. Like new great powers before it, China is finding that success creates its own expectations. China’s leaders now have to deal with the often raucous Internet nationalism of the urban middle class, which has been reared on stories about the “hundred years of humiliation.” The wealthier these urban professionals become, the more impatient they are for China’s leaders to assert a bigger role. Local governments and powerful state-owned companies want to have a say on important foreign-policy issues. And the civilian leaders also have to deal with a more restless and powerful military.
If there is one subject that is the hardest for foreign China-watchers to get a handle on, it is the relationship between the Communist Party and the military. Despite the breathtaking changes in Chinese society over the last three decades, high-level politics are still a black box, and that is even more the case for the People’s Liberation Army. The military is formally under control of the Communist Party rather than the state, which adds to its sense of mystery and autonomy. To most outside observers, and to many Chinese, the PLA seems like a separate world walled off from the rest of the party-state. The very brief glimpses into the PLA afforded to the foreign media confirm that sense of an institution following its own rules. In 2008, one of my colleagues managed to organize an interview with a senior PLA official. We were instructed to come to the PLA’s foreign-affairs office, north of the city center, an airy, palatial building with marble floors and long, empty corridors. As a journalist in China, you can tell a lot about a government official by the way he or she conducts an interview. Most government departments insist that you send over half a dozen sample questions beforehand, and they will reject an interview request if the topics are too controversial. The less secure the cadre, the longer they spend on the initial softball questions. I have conducted interviews in which the official in question proceeded to read out a twenty-five-page prepared answer to these questions, leaving only a few minutes for a real interview at the end. Major General Qian Lihua, director of the defense ministry’s foreign-affairs office, walked into the conference room where my colleagues and I were waiting and shook our hands. He picked up a paper that one of his aides had prepared and handed it to us. “This is a written response for the questions you sent over,” he said. “Now, what do you really want to ask me?” He went on to give the strongest indication yet that China was building an aircraft carrier. “The navy of any great power… has the dream to have one or more aircraft carriers,” he said.
Like many of the party leaders of his generation, Deng was himself a veteran of the Communist Party’s war against the Nationalists and the Long March. Not only did he have strong personal relationships with the military top brass when he assumed power, but they also had a sense of shared sacrifice in defense of the party. Over the last couple of decades, however, the party and the military have taken different paths. The party has become dominated by trained bureaucrats who have worked their way up the system, spending decades in provincial jobs learning the ropes. The new military leaders are also cut from a different cloth. Rather than party ideologues well schooled in the texts of Marxism-Leninism, they are now professional soldiers who are focused on honing their new skills. The PLA has less influence over domestic politics than it used to enjoy but, at the same time, the party is much less directly involved in the PLA than it once was. The PLA political commissars, who once enforced political orthodoxy among the rank and file, are now much more focused on boosting morale—one Chinese observer likens them to the equivalent of chaplains in a Western army. As Marxism has withered as a guiding force, the military has also developed a stronger sense of its role as a defender of the national interest. China now has a professional officer class with a slightly Prussian air, which is proud of the new capabilities at its disposal and was reared on a worldview that sees China as a powerful and strong nation.
The most dangerous situation would be if a few “rogue generals” started to freelance, using the perceived weakness of civilian leaders to push their own agenda outside of the formal policy process. That would be a large red-flag warning about looming future instability in China’s relations with the rest of the world. Most informed observers of China’s military believe that this is far from the case, and that the Communist Party leadership still remains firmly in control of the military. But every now and then, there are tantalizing glimpses of a restless military that is occasionally willing to push the boundaries. The test flight of the J-20 on the day Robert Gates was in town was one such case. Another incident happened in 2007, when China used a land-based missile to blow a weather satellite out of space. The test was a wake-up call for foreign militaries, a warning shot about China’s cyberwar capabilities. Just as illuminating was the way the test was discovered. With no word coming from the Chinese government, the story first appeared in a U.S. magazine, which was probably tipped off by U.S. or other Western intelligence agencies. And even when the news did break, the Foreign Ministry gave the impression that it had been left completely in the dark by the military.
These little glimpses of the interactions between the PLA and the party suggest an occasionally confrontational streak, but they do not indicate a stark split. The real influence that the PLA is starting to have is more subtle, the result not of open lobbying but from the drip-feed effect of a military worldview that is both intensely proud of China and deeply skeptical about the U.S. military. It is this tide of hawkish views that is helping to gradually chip away at Deng’s call for self-restraint. By exposing big shifts in relative power that have taken place between the U.S. and China, the financial crisis encouraged some in China to believe that the time was theirs. Hu Jintao had few connections with the military before he became president in 2002, and Chinese academics and officials who attend regular foreign-policy gatherings with military officials would describe the openness with which Hu was criticized—something that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. One leading academic told me of a discussion with some of his military counterparts in which Hu had been attacked by name for being soft on Japan. “Arrogant people with a lot of ego,” the academic described them.
I got the full force of this worldview when I went to visit Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu. I wanted to meet Liu because a few months earlier he had caused something of a sensation when he published his first book, China Dream, a nationalist tract that called for the country to build a military force to rival and compete with the U.S. In his book he argued that the U.S. and China were embarking on a “marathon contest” for global leadership. Having spared no efforts to contain the rise of the Soviet Union and Japan, Liu argued that the U.S. would “fight a third battle to retain its title” against China. His book became a best seller both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. One large Chinese newspaper ran serializations of China Dream for a whole month. Yanghe, a company which makes one of the country’s best-known brands of liquor, ordered ten thousand copies to give to its clients. “The chairman described it as a textbook for patriotism,” Liu told me, not a little immodestly.
Liu lives in a complex of residential buildings reserved for military personnel, just along the road from the Defense Ministry’s huge building in central Beijing. Foreigners are not supposed to enter the compound, he said on the phone, so I should wear a woolly hat and keep my head down when passing through the gate. In the end, the car drove in without any problems at all, the guard airily waving us through. Inside the compound, there were few signs of insecurity, but plenty of esprit de corps. There was a well-tended running track, and a theater that put on shows of revolutionary songs at the weekends. It was midmorning, and the exercise area was full of pensioners doing stretches on a series of yellow machines. A lithe fifty-year-old with dyed black hair and the rank of a senior colonel, Liu now teaches at the National Defense University, where he gives lectures on Marxist theory and U.S.-China relations. Liu said that on the very day he launched his book, in 2010, Barack Obama gave a speech saying that the U.S. would never be number two in the world. “It was such a coincidence. As an ordinary military man, I argue loudly that China should try to be the number one, should race to be the champion country,” Liu said.
A few months before we talked, a Chinese admiral called Yuan Youfei had caused a good deal of consternation at a high-profile U.S.-China summit when he launched into a long diatribe attacking the “hegemonic” U.S. According to American officials present, Yuan accused Washington of plotting to encircle China and treating Beijing as an enemy. Liu Mingfu said he agreed entirely with Yuan’s analysis. For Liu, the Chinese leadership faces a stark choice: either China develops the military capacity to challenge the U.S., or it will be forever bullied by its larger rival. “For China, a runner-up who does not want to be a champion is not a good runner-up,” he told me. “But the U.S. wants a mini-NATO to contain China.” As we talked in his flat, his wife sat next to him, eating sunflower seeds from a plastic bag and nodding vigorously every time he made a forceful point. A few weeks before, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had visited Beijing to encourage Chinese entrepreneurs to do more for charity. “Chinese people enjoyed seeing the civilization of Gates and Buffett. America should send more cultural and peaceful ambassadors like that,” Liu told me. “But, instead, the American aircraft carriers make 1.3 billion Chinese people see America’s hegemony and barbarism.” As I was leaving, he gripped my hand firmly. “You British are reasonable people; Germans are very reasonable,” he said. “But the Americans?”
Since the first Gulf War, in the early nineties, America has developed a battalion of “TV generals,” retired members of the military who provide expert commentary on military operations and, every now and then, slip in a hawkish criticism of the commander-in-chief. In the last few years, something similar has started to happen in China. A small group of media-friendly members of the armed forces have begun to talk openly about their views on military matters, including their mistrust of and distaste for the U.S. military and its policies in Asia. Dai Xu, a colonel in the air force, writes regular articles and appears on television to criticize U.S. efforts to contain China. “If the U.S. can light a fire in China’s backyard, we can also light a fire in their backyard,” he wrote in 2010. In some ways, Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu is the latest addition to their numbers. The question that remained unanswered during our conversation was whether Liu’s brand of saber rattling was a minority position, or if he was reflecting broader views about the U.S. among the armed services that are starting to influence the politicians. Liu is not in active service and is not involved in developing Chinese military strategy. The sort of crude and hard-line views that he puts forward are, therefore, by no means official policy, although China Dream did have a foreword written by Lieutenant General Liu Yazhou, the son-in-law of a former Chinese president and a close adviser of Xi Jinping, China’s new president.
Many experts on China’s military warn against seeing the PLA as a unified bastion of anti-Americanism. They say that the PLA, like so many institutions in China these days, is full of people who have substantial direct experience of the U.S. Indeed, the children of a few senior military figures are believed to have attended university in the U.S. They also have huge admiration for the operational skills and technology of the U.S. military. Others are less sanguine. A few days after I met Liu, I asked Chu Shulong what to make of Liu Mingfu and the other hawkish, military pundits. Chu spent eight years in the PLA before becoming an academic at Peking University, and so speaks from some experience. “These scholars at military institutions have little contact with the real military leaders. They are giving their personal opinions, but they in no way represent the Central Military Commission [the body that runs the armed forces],” he told me. “The real military are much more hard-line than these scholars. They are even more hostile and suspicious of the U.S.”
Every now and again, that resentment toward the U.S. leaks out into the open. In 2010, recently retired admiral Hu Yanlin, who had been the navy’s chief political commissar and a close adviser to the top commander Wu Shengli, described the U.S. as “the fundamental anti-Chinese force.” Talking about the South China Sea, he added that the U.S. “may seek to precipitate a crisis, hoping the internal difficulties would facilitate foreign aggression or that foreign aggression could cause internal anxiety.”
The PLA does not dictate policy to its civilian masters, but it does help shape the atmosphere in which policy is made. The nationalist rhetoric and skepticism of the U.S. that are central to the PLA’s worldview are slowly leaking into the policy process. Over the last decade, a weaker civilian leadership has found it harder to push back against hawkish voices in the military. All of which makes the personality and background of China’s new president so interesting and important. Unlike his predecessor, Xi Jinping is steeped in Chinese military tradition. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a central figure in the Communist Party war with the Nationalists in the 1930s, organizing a guerrilla base in Yan’an, in northeast central China, that later provided refuge for Mao Zedong. When the younger Xi left university in the late 1970s, his first job was as mishu, a sort of personal assistant, to Defense Minister Geng Biao, who was a friend of his father’s. Xi proudly wore a military uniform to the office every day. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is a popular folksinger who is attached to the army’s song-and-dance troupe. She holds the rank of major general, and until her husband became a senior leader, she was a regular in the huge television spectacle that airs every year on the eve of the New Year holiday. More recently, a photo has reappeared showing her singing to soldiers in Tiananmen Square in the days following the bloody suppression of the 1989 democracy protests.
In some ways, the military is part of his political support base. In two decades as a provincial official, Xi was known as a “military hugger” for his efforts to help the troops stationed in his area, giving them privileged access to amusement parks and festivals, and appearing regularly at military parades. Such a background could give Xi more credibility to stand up to some of the more restive generals. He will have a personal authority in their company that Hu Jintao always lacked. But it could also make him more sympathetic to their nationalist worldview. In the years during which he was preparing to take the top job, his most famous comments were a rant he gave at a 2009 dinner of Chinese expatriates in Mexico City, in which he warned, “There are a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country.” One of the central questions in China over the next decade will be whether Xi’s core instinct is to control the military, or to channel its views. A more natural leader than his predecessor, Xi could be less intimidated by hawkish voices. Yet his early statements have been full of nationalist echoes, and some analysts believe he is relying on the military to consolidate its position. In a speech he gave aboard the destroyer Haikou, which patrols the South China Sea, shortly after assuming power, he expanded on his new slogan about promoting a “Chinese dream.” “The dream can be said to be the dream of a strong nation and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military,” he said. “We must achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation and we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and a strong military.”
ASSASSIN’S MACE
Long before Diamonds Are Forever started playing on my China Southern flight back to Beijing, it had been hard to shake the slightly James Bond feel about Yalong Bay. If you stand on the beach at the Sanya Sheraton and look out to sea, and if the light is not too hazy, you can just about make out a headland to the southeast of the bay. What the eye cannot detect is the large underground submarine base that lies on the other side of the headland. First revealed in satellite photos published in 2008 by U.S. scientists, the images showed the cavelike holes which are the entrances for the submarines. The tunnels give way to a large harbor carved deep into the rock to protect the subs from bombing raids. The underwater base has the Chinese navy’s only demagnetizing facility, which makes it much harder for the submarines to be detected. The disclosures about the Sanya submarine base form part of a relentless trend over the last decade, during which observers have been continuously surprised by the technical sophistication of China’s military modernization. China has managed to catch a lot of people by surprise.
After touring the U.S. in 1890, Oscar Wilde had one of his characters react with surprise at being told that the U.S. had no ruins or curiosities. “No ruins, no curiosities!” the Canterville Ghost replied. “You have your navy and your manners.” For sophisticated subjects of the British Empire, the American navy was an obvious punch line at that time. Yet, by the end of the decade, one in which the U.S. invested heavily in its navy under the influence of Teddy Roosevelt and Captain Mahan, the U.S. had roundly defeated Spain in battles in Cuba and the Philippines, sending an unambiguous message to the world about its new maritime power. As recently as a decade ago, China’s navy suffered the same sort of condescension. The 1990 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, a sort of annual bible of the world’s navies, described the PLAN as “technically backward and operationally immature.” In 1996, three Chinese warships made a goodwill port call in San Diego. American officials who visited the ships noticed that the interior walls were made of plywood, which made them not only flimsy but also a fire risk. The Chinese military was considered so primitive that some American strategists joked that its battle plan for taking control of Taiwan was “a million-man swim.”
No one in Washington or any other Asian capital is making the same jokes now. If China’s newfound instinct to challenge the U.S. in the Near Seas is rooted in its history, its expanding economic interests, and the restlessness of some of its officer corps, there is also one final and equally important component—it now has the military capabilities to start making a difference. China is starting to push back against the U.S. in part because it can. After two decades of double-digit increases in military spending, China now has the second-largest defense budget in the world, after the U.S. While the U.S. has been fighting a losing battle in Afghanistan for over a decade and pouring more than a trillion dollars into the debacle in Iraq, China has been carefully conducting the biggest military expansion in the world. Of course, China’s budget is still much smaller than that of the U.S., which spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, and which will remain the most sophisticated military power for some time. But China has no intention of challenging the U.S. around the globe over the coming decades. It has no interest in establishing a serious naval presence in the Caribbean, for instance, or posting soldiers in continental Europe. Instead, it is focused on Asia.
With these more limited aims, China is catching up quickly with the U.S. By some estimates, China will have a bigger fleet than the U.S. by the end of this decade, and it already has more submarines. Although it is always dangerous to make straight-line predictions based on existing reality, if China continues with its current rate of increase in military spending, it will have a bigger defense budget than the U.S. by 2025, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Yet China does not need to match the U.S. dollar for dollar in order to achieve its goals: it only needs to spend enough to change the strategic balance in the western Pacific. Chinese strategists talk about “asymmetric” warfare, tactics and tools that can allow a weaker and smaller country to inflict huge damage on a bigger rival. China is not preparing for a war with the U.S. Indeed, the goal is to secure Beijing’s political aims without ever firing in anger. Instead, its military buildup is designed to gradually change the calculations of American commanders, to dissuade them from considering military operations anywhere near China’s coast, and to push them slowly farther out into the Pacific.
“We do not need to be in such a hurry,” Deng Xiaoping told a Central Military Commission meeting in March 1979. Deng was responding to pressure from his military colleagues for a big increase in spending on new weapons. It was a message he found himself repeating for the next decade, at meeting after meeting. China’s economic boom did not immediately lead to a rapid military buildup. Though the PLA wanted to invest, Deng insisted that building up the domestic economy would come first; the military would need to show some patience. During the 1980s, the Chinese government actually decreased the proportion of the budget that was destined for military spending. “Deng had to explain over and over again to disappointed officers why it was in the national interest first to develop the civilian economy and then to modernize the military,” notes Ezra Vogel, author of an authoritative biography on the Chinese leader. “Deng was probably the only leader of his time with the authority, determination and political skill to keep these officers from launching serious protests against this policy.”
But over time, patience wore thin, and the military has started to receive the sorts of resources that it had long been clamoring for. After Deng was forced to call up units of the PLA from outside of Beijing to fire on the Tiananmen protesters in 1989, spending on the military started to increase, including salaries and housing. If Tiananmen was a key turning point, another was the first Gulf War, in 1990–91. The campaign to push Iraq from Kuwait had a profound psychological impact among the Chinese leadership. Watching the images of destruction on their televisions, Chinese military officials were acutely aware of both their own limitations and the vast technological superiority of the U.S.
At the start of the naval buildup, Taiwan was the primary focus. China wanted to have sufficient forces to take control of the island if it ever tried to declare independence formally, and to prevent any other power from intervening in a conflict if it did break out. In the early days of the People’s Republic, almost all the viable ships were given to the northern and eastern fleets, which operate near Taiwan, while the southern fleet was considered a poor cousin. Taiwan remains a priority, but over time, the scope of China’s naval ambitions has expanded. One of the reasons the opening of the new naval base on Hainan Island was so significant was that it demonstrated the new priorities of China’s naval push, the ability to project power not just east, toward Taiwan, but also down into the South China Sea and beyond.
“Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?” The questions were raised by Donald Rumsfeld in 2005, when the then defense secretary was visiting Singapore for a conference. Iraq was still engulfed with violence at that time, and his comments seemed another exercise in neocon scaremongering. But nearly a decade later, the questions have not gone away. The uncomfortable truth is that China’s military investments are focused largely on the United States’ presence in the region. There should be little surprise that an aspiring great power would choose to invest more in its military as its interests and power expands. Yet China is not investing in the sort of navy that could be used for policing the world’s sea-lanes for pirates and terrorists. Instead, its principal target is the U.S. Navy. According to Dennis Blair, the retired admiral who was head of the U.S. intelligence services early in the Obama administration: “Ninety percent of their time is spent on thinking about new and interesting ways to sink our ships and shoot down our planes.”
American strategists sometimes talk about a Chinese “anti-navy”—a series of weapons, some based on land, some at sea, which are specifically designed to keep an opposing navy as far away as possible from the mainland. China has a large and growing fleet of submarines, including nuclear-powered vessels and a group of Russia-supplied diesel submarines which are quiet and hard to detect. It is developing two different versions of stealth fighter jets (including the airplane that was tested the day Robert Gates was in Beijing), as well as its own unmanned drones that can deploy missiles. The navy is developing a new type of destroyer battleship which will have some of the missile defense capabilities of American Aegis ships.
Pride of place in the anti-navy, however, goes to the Second Artillery Force, which operates most of the more than one thousand missiles that China has built up over the last two decades. There are missiles that can take out facilities on land, missiles for targeting satellites, and missiles for attacking ships. One technology in particular has attracted a lot of attention. China has invested heavily in a new generation of so-called carrier-killer missiles, designed to destroy aircraft carriers at sea. Larry Wortzel, a former American military attaché in Beijing, recalls a jocular warning he once received at a diplomatic reception. A Chinese officer put his arm around Wortzel’s shoulder and said, “We are going to sink your carriers with ballistic missiles.” The missiles, which supposedly cannot be detected by radar, have a range of fifteen hundred to two thousand kilometers. They are the modern equivalent of an “assassin’s mace,” the weapons used in Chinese historical novels that can undermine a technologically superior enemy. The implicit threat is that commanders of American aircraft carriers would have to think carefully about operating anywhere within that radius from the Chinese coast—a fundamental challenge to the way America projects military power in the region. It is the first weapons system since the end of the Cold War that both is potentially capable of stopping American naval-power projection and was specifically designed for that purpose. The strategy also represents good economics. Each of its carrier-killer missiles cost around $11 million; a new aircraft carrier now costs $13.5 billion.
With any new, untried weapons, there is always an open question as to whether it will actually work. The carrier-killer missile is no exception. Hitting a moving ship at long distance is an incredibly difficult task. The U.S. Navy would have plenty of options to defend its carriers, such as shooting the missile down with Aegis missile-defense cruisers, or trying to jam the “seeker” technology that missiles deploy when they get near a target. Yet American commanders cannot guarantee that their defenses will work. “We want to spoof them, preclude detection, jam them, shoot them down if possible, get them to termination, confuse them,” Admiral Jonathan Greenert, chief of U.S. naval operations, once said on being asked about the Chinese carrier-killer missiles. Can they be jammed? “Yes, no, maybe so?” he said.
The carrier killer is a technology whose potency will become apparent over the next decade. A more immediate threat comes from another innovation that has started to attract a lot of attention in Washington—China’s growing fleet of fast, mobile patrol craft that carry cruise missiles designed to attack ships. This is another technology that fits the pattern of fighting “asymmetric” warfare against U.S. carrier groups operating near the Chinese coast. These patrol craft use a catamaran hull that was initially designed in Australia for passenger ferries, but which allows the attack craft to skim across waves at high speed. The Houbei-class vessels, as they are called, also copy many of the same features as stealth fighter jets, such as windows with jagged edges and a sloped hull, which help it avoid detection by radar. The Chinese fleet now has around sixty of these catamaran craft, and each vessel carries eight anti-ship missiles. Chinese strategists describe them being used in “wolf pack” operations, in which they can swarm a target group of vessels, attacking in numbers from different directions. Their limited fuel tanks mean that they cannot operate at long distances from the mainland, but they could be very effective in any exchange nearer to the Chinese coast.
The other string of China’s “asymmetric” fighting capabilities is cyber- and space warfare. Whereas Chinese hacking of commercial secrets has won a huge amount of attention in the U.S., the potential use of cyberattacks during a conflict is less discussed. This could include attacks on infrastructure in the U.S., designed to inflict damage on the economy, but it could also involve attacking the information systems that the U.S. Air Force and Navy rely on. By taking out U.S. satellites, China could hamper the ability of U.S. fighter jets to operate effectively.
China’s navy still has many weaknesses, including the inexperience of its sailors in combat conditions. But the era of the “million-man swim” is long gone. China is quickly acquiring the capabilities to start challenging U.S. power projection in the western Pacific. In the process, the U.S. and China are embarking on an epic tussle for who will have the upper hand in the Near Seas. How that contest plays out will depend on three factors, which we will see in the next chapters. It will depend on how the rest of Asia reacts to China’s new ambitions, and on how America responds to the challenge, too. But it will also be heavily influenced by what China tries to do with its new navy in areas far away from its coastal waters. The rivalry between the U.S. and China in the western Pacific will be shaped partly by how China decides to approach the Indian Ocean.