yOU DID NOT BRING any hundred-dollar notes?” the Yangon bank teller asked. There are all sorts of signs of just how detached Burma has become from the modern world after decades of sanctions and military-led incompetence, but the simple things are the most striking. Burma is one of the few countries in the world where visitors need to take large wads of dollar bills if they want to buy local currency. Forget ATMs; even travelers’ checks have passed it by. I handed the teller a collection of $20 notes I had withdrawn shortly before leaving the U.S. She scoured each note carefully, sometimes taking several seconds at a time, handing back any that were marked or even slightly frayed with a polite “tut,” as if I had been trying to cheat her. A few days later, as we were driving along rickety back roads on Burma’s Indian Ocean coast, the sense of stagnation was even harder to ignore. The poorer houses still had thatched roofs, and in some cases the walls were thatched, too. In many of the villages we passed through, the market consisted of a few piles of bananas and coconuts laid out on plastic sheets on the ground, alongside a few consumer basics. There were very few other cars and only a handful of motorbikes, the road being mostly occupied by bicycles and bike-rickshaws. The buzzing metropolis of Bangkok was just one hour’s flight away, and within three hours you could be in Singapore, whose vapid but impressive modernity is an unforgiving benchmark for just how far Burma has fallen behind.
Such a powerful sense of being stuck in time can also have its own allure, of course. The main road threaded through dense forest, but after a while weaved back to the coast. We passed golden beaches backed by palm trees and bougainvillea, empty but for the driftwood left by the tide. The monsoon had already passed through this part of the country, and there was a cool breeze off the Bay of Bengal. A century earlier, Rudyard Kipling wrote part of The Jungle Book at a resort just a bit farther south. At the time, both India and Burma were part of the British Empire, and the coast was a popular vacation spot for the Calcutta imperial class, just across the other side of the Bay of Bengal. It probably had not changed much since then.
After several hours of driving north, we came to a vast clearing that had been cut out of undulating forest and vegetation. The sense of timelessness ended with an abrupt shock. An area of several square kilometers had been surrounded by high fences, but there were plenty of telltale signs about what lay behind the locked gates. In the distance were a series of large tubular metal tanks suitable for storing oil. I counted three large red cranes of the type that I had seen on countless construction sites in China. The real clincher was in one corner of the site, where there were several long lines of portable buildings, their white walls and blue roofs marking them out as the dormitories for construction workers, some of whom I could make out in the distance by their orange hard hats. For anyone who had spent time on mainland China, these were the unmistakable sights and sounds of industrial development with Chinese characteristics.
We had arrived at Ramree Island, an isolated peninsula on the north of Burma’s Indian Ocean coast, which is quietly becoming one of the geopolitical hot spots of the twenty-first century. The fenced-off construction site I was able to glimpse is part of the single most ambitious overseas project that China has yet undertaken. Ramree boasts a natural deep-water port that looks onto the Bay of Bengal. It is also the starting point for a 2,806-kilometer oil-and-gas pipeline that stretches all the way across northern Burma, over mountain ranges and through tropical jungles, until it arrives at Kunming, one of the main cities in the southwest of China. The plans include a port, a railway line, and a major oil storage-and-treatment facility. A video presentation about the project adopts the kind of breezy management-speak that often accompanies Chinese investments, gushing about “a concept of one development zone, three clusters, and six bases.” The presentation includes a designer’s drawing for a high-rise housing project and a shopping mall, identical to the sort of development you can now find in the suburbs of a thousand Chinese cities.
Ramree was the site of an important battle in the later stages of World War II: the Allies battled for six weeks in early 1945 to defeat the Japanese forces stationed there, with Indian soldiers doing most of the fighting. The Battle of Ramree Island is better known for the fate of the retreating Japanese soldiers, who tried to escape at night across a mangrove swamp; many of them ended up eaten by saltwater crocodiles. The reported deaths of nearly a thousand soldiers is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest-ever loss of human life to animals. Ramree was strategically important for the Allies, because it was easily accessible by sea and because it provided an ideal airbase to support the rest of the Burma campaign. In the early twenty-first century, Ramree has again become a crucial geographical node, a place where commercial ambition and geopolitical calculation are colliding. By building a pipeline all the way through Burma, China is attempting to subvert the realities of its geography and to gain direct access to the Indian Ocean.
The basic idea is simple: As a result of the pipeline, some of the oil and gas that China buys from the Middle East will no longer need to travel through the chokehold of the Strait of Malacca. Instead, it can be transported overland from Ramree to China’s urban centers. The pipeline gives China a direct outlet to the Indian Ocean that it has never enjoyed before. It is a way of avoiding all that complicated geography at the mouth of the South China Sea, an engineering solution to the “Malacca Dilemma.” Why worry about sending ships down those narrow sea-lanes to the South China Sea, which can be blocked by opponents, when China can use a pipeline that starts at the Bay of Bengal?
That, at least, was the strategic thinking that helped win approval for the $2.5-billion pipeline project. But the law of unintended consequences has a way of turning such plans on their heads. The project was sold as a way of reducing risks to China’s supply routes. Yet, by avoiding the Strait of Malacca, China has created a new problem for itself in the Indian Ocean. “If we are going to have a big port and a terminal and a pipeline all on the west coast of Burma, then we are going to need some military protection there,” as one Chinese academic, who was deeply skeptical about the pipeline project, told me. “The result is the opposite of what people thought. It means that we are going to need a navy that can operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.”
The contest with the U.S. over the Near Seas is already a reality. But as China’s power and ambitions expand, it is only natural that its gaze will start to stretch farther afield, toward the Indian Ocean. Ramree Island is potentially the herald of a very different, long-term project to develop the sort of navy that can operate in the Indian Ocean and beyond. China is already the biggest consumer of oil in the Middle East and is tentatively starting to build political relationships in the region—just as the U.S. did a century before when Britain and France were the dominant outside powers. If China is really serious about securing the sea-lanes on which its economy depends, it will need the sort of “blue water” navy that can contest seas all the way from the Strait of Malacca up through the entire Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf, home of America’s Fifth Fleet. If China decides to go that route over the next two decades, it has the potential to alter fundamentally the nature of competition with the U.S. The challenge that China currently presents to the U.S. is intense but localized, restricted to China’s immediate maritime periphery. China’s immediate ambitions are regional, not global. But as it casts its sights across the Indian Ocean, the stakes become much higher, raising the prospect that China could pursue a much more sustained and broader challenge to the U.S.
Yet it is far from inevitable that the U.S. and China will end up as competitors in the Indian Ocean. China’s approach will depend in part on a number of key decisions that China’s leaders will need to take over the next decade, which will involve massive investments and will be crucial barometers of their long-term intentions. Distance from home drastically changes the military calculation for China. In the Near Seas, the geography is on China’s side: it has missile sites along its coast, which it can use to exert control over sea-lanes. But in the Indian Ocean, those advantages disappear. If China wants to have the ability to contest the seas well beyond its periphery, and to project power in the Indian Ocean, it needs to invest heavily in two areas. It will need to have bases in and agreements with friendly countries that will allow it to use their ports and airfields to support its forces. And it will need the sorts of warships that can provide some form of air cover across wide expanses of ocean. In other words, it will need aircraft carriers. The bad news for China is that, although both projects are superficially attractive, they will be politically difficult and economically costly to implement.
THE “STARTER CARRIER”
“Without an aircraft carrier, I will die with my eyelids open,” Liu Huaqing, the former commander of the Chinese fleet, said in 1987—a Chinese phrase that implies a deep, unfulfilled desire. In the modern era, Liu was the first official to push the case for a bigger fleet; he is often referred to as “the father of the modern Chinese navy.” It was Liu who introduced the concept of “Near Seas” and “Far Seas” into Chinese strategic thought, and also he who, in the 1980s, led the navy’s transformation from a glorified coast guard into a modern fleet. China, he argued, needed to stake its claim as a great power, and an aircraft carrier was the vital platform for projecting naval power over long distances. When he outlined these ideas in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when most Chinese were not able to eat meat regularly, his plans seemed quixotic. But by the time he died, in early 2011, they had become mainstream: a few weeks before his death, Chinese officials acknowledged for the first time that the country was building its own carrier. All nine members of the Communist Party Standing Committee turned out for Liu Huaqing’s memorial service, the only time in recent memory that this has happened for a military leader. A distraught-looking Hu Jintao presented a bouquet of white carnations to his widow. Xi Jinping gave a speech saying that China had to step up the development of its naval capabilities to match its new position in the world.
China’s route to a modern carrier has been a tortuous one. In 1998, an obscure Chinese travel agency, whose directors had connections with the navy, purchased the hull of a former Soviet carrier called the Varyag from Ukraine. They paid $20 million and said that the ship would be used as a casino. It took them three years to get the vessel back to China. The Varyag was held up in Istanbul for eighteen months while a dispute with the Turkish authorities was resolved, and then it hit bad weather on its way around the Cape of Good Hope, before it was eventually tugged into Dalian, a port in the northeast of China. But by 2012, the newly rechristened Liaoning carrier was ready to enter formal service for the first time. The relaunch was accompanied with much fanfare and national pride. The commander of the carrier, Senior Captain Zhang Zheng, gave an interview on the ship’s deck to CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster. Zhang talked rather modestly about all the training the crew would need and the heavy responsibility they faced, but the interviewer could not contain himself. “Captain Zhang, you give me a very deep impression of being open-minded and energetic,” he beamed. “The navy also has very high hopes for you.”
The battle to build the Liaoning carrier tells a lot about the shifting political sands and rising ambitions in China over recent years. As far back as 1928, Chen Shaokuan, the British-trained head of the Chinese navy at the time, first put forward the idea of building a carrier. In the 1980s, when he was head of the navy, Liu Huaqing started to lobby openly for the idea of a Chinese carrier, yet his civilian masters were not convinced. Deng Xiaoping pushed back against the expensive idea. In the early 1990s, Jiang Zemin, who had taken power after Tiananmen, also rejected the proposal. He was afraid that it would unnerve the U.S. too much to see China investing in such a striking symbol of great-power ambition. The early years of naval modernization focused mostly on the submarines and missiles that could help China exert more control over the Near Seas. The quest for an aircraft carrier became yet another of those ideas that were put on hold in the interests of “hiding the brightness.”
But from the early 1990s, the idea of a carrier was taken up by China’s version of the military-industrial complex. The drumbeat started first in universities and think tanks and soon included mayors who wanted the carriers to be built in their towns, and the shipbuilders who were desperate for the contract. Supporters emphasized the unique place that aircraft carriers held for realizing China’s national destiny. Li Jie, a senior captain at the Naval Research Institute, claimed, “No great power that has become a strong power has achieved this without developing carriers.” Zhang Wenmu, one of the most vocal champions, argues that in the twenty-first century naval power will be a decisive factor in competition between states. Aircraft carriers are “a concentrated expression of a country’s comprehensive national power,” he writes.
Kaiser Wilhelm was so fascinated with the navy that he once wore a naval uniform to a performance of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, with his sons also decked out in sailor suits. Bismarck had invested only in smaller, less expensive vessels, fearing that the real threats to Germany would come by land. However, under Wilhelm’s and Admiral Tirpitz’s direction, Germany invested in a huge fleet of battleships, the aircraft carriers of their day. “The Greeks and Romans each had their time, the Spaniards had theirs, the French also,” Wilhelm argued to justify the huge investments. The historian Robert Ross argues that China is witnessing the same sort of “naval nationalism” that has infected many aspiring great powers before, in which the natural desire to build up the military becomes distorted by a demand for prestige projects that have a strong nationalist appeal, even if their strategic worth is not so clear-cut. Unlike any other aspect of the country’s military modernization, the idea of a Chinese aircraft carrier became part of the popular imagination. As Ross puts it, “Chinese nationalists maintain that the realization of China’s historical destiny depends on the possession of a carrier-based navy.” Around the same time that China bought the Varyag, it purchased another former Soviet carrier from Ukraine, the Kiev. In this case, the vessel really was destined for tourism. It is now the centerpiece of a popular aircraft-carrier theme park in Tianjin, the large coastal city near Beijing. San Diego has a museum in a disused aircraft carrier, so the idea is hardly novel, but whereas the USS Midway Museum celebrates achievements from the past, the Tianjin museum is aspirational, a bid to capture the public enthusiasm for future naval grandeur. When I visited a couple of years ago, the insides of the Kiev were lined with worthy exhibits about the history of aircraft carriers. More recently, it has gone upmarket—part of the vessel is now taken up by a luxury hotel, a response to constant requests from people wanting to spend a night on board. The hotel photos indicate a preference for gaudy baroque, the low-ceilinged suites boasting white leather sofas and opulent chandeliers. Overnight guests have been promised an additional treat: the park intends to put on a mock naval battle every evening.
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The launch of the Liaoning was a moment full of symbolism, to be sure, but Senior Captain Zhang was right: there is still a lot of work to do. China’s “starter carrier,” as some analysts have dubbed it, still faces a host of difficult challenges. The television images gave away one of those problems: there were no aircraft on the deck. China bought some fighter jets that can be used on carriers from Ukraine and is believed to have got hold of a similar Russian jet. There is even speculation that one of the models of its new stealth fighter jet could eventually be equipped to land on carriers. But developing its own jets for use on carriers—and training a team of pilots to use them—is another project whose time frame can be measured in decades rather than years. In 1954, the U.S. Air Force lost 776 aircraft and 535 aviators as it tried to develop its fighter jets. Carrier groups need a whole host of supporting ships, including submarines and destroyers that can provide modern defenses against missiles, some of which are still under development. In addition, the Chinese navy will also have to learn how to actually operate a carrier group, which requires the sort of detailed coordination and training that the U.S. has perfected over a century and through several wars. Again, developing this sort of seamanship is another decades-long enterprise.
It may well be that China’s leaders will decide over the next decade to go all in and order a sizable fleet of carriers, but before then, they will have to overcome some powerful opposition to such an ambitious spending spree. According to naval planners, you need three carriers to ensure that one group is always operating, because at any single time one carrier is undergoing repairs and the other is preparing for the next mission. Now that China has launched its first carrier, the question is how many it will build. The Pentagon believes that another couple of domestically built carriers will be in operation by 2015. Chinese state media have talked about plans for three carriers, but other Chinese officials have privately talked about building five. The eventual numbers will make all the difference. If China develops a fleet that allows it to have two carrier groups operating at any one time, that will focus the minds of a lot of other countries in the region. But one carrier on its own does little to change the military balance in Asia. And as the Pentagon can attest, operating carrier groups is an extremely expensive business. Ever since Liu Huaqing first proposed building a Chinese carrier, the project has been tied up in budgetary battles, and the fight for resources is likely to get still more intense. Some estimates suggest that a new carrier in China would cost $10 billion, around 10 percent of the yearly official Chinese military budget. Even with a growing budget, China does not have the resources for everything. If China invests in a big carrier fleet, it will have fewer resources to invest in the “anti-navy” weapons designed to exert greater control over the Near Seas.
For all the prestige that might come from having several carrier groups, plenty of hardheaded Chinese strategists believe they are of little actual military use once they leave China’s immediate maritime surrounds. If Chinese military officials hope that they can take out American carriers in the Near Seas, then the U.S., with its far superior air power, would have the same advantage if Chinese carrier groups started operating in the Indian Ocean. “We would be sitting ducks,” as You Ji, a Chinese analyst based in Singapore, puts it. The lure of a “blue water” navy is strong, and the vested interests behind a push to build more carriers will be hard to ignore. Yet it is not at all clear that China will have the skills or money over the next couple of decades to construct the sort of navy that would present a serious challenge to the U.S. in the Indian Ocean. And that is before China’s leaders tackle the trickiest issue of all—how to supply and protect a new fleet of aircraft carriers operating far from home.
CHINA’S GUANTÁNAMO
In 2004, the Washington office of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton produced a research paper for the Pentagon which put forward the idea that China was trying to establish a permanent military presence in the Indian Ocean. It analyzed a series of commercial ports across the region being built with Chinese help and money and concluded that they formed a “String of Pearls,” facilities with potential military use that could help China project military power all the way across the Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf. Initially classified, the paper was leaked to the Washington Times in 2005. Before long, it started to capture the imagination of the more hawkish observers of China’s military buildup, including in India, where there are persistent fears that a rising China will try to encircle it.
If there is one issue that will define what sort of military power China becomes over the next couple of decades, it will be the question of overseas military bases. To build a network of bases would be a decisive statement about Chinese ambitions to project power and to build its own coalition of supporters. China’s navalists are gradually becoming more open about pushing the idea. The topic has long been discussed in military circles, but over the last few years it has also started to spill over into public debate about the country’s long-term military strategy. It plays into the nationalist sense in China that now is their time. “It is our right” to have bases that can be used to defend the country’s new economic interests, says Shen Dingli, a respected academic at Fudan University in Shanghai. “We should be able to conduct retaliatory attacks within other countries or at the neighboring area of our potential enemies.”
Proponents of the “String of Pearls” theory argue that China is effectively creating a network of bases in the Indian Ocean by stealth. In Sri Lanka, the island nation with a strategic position at the meeting of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, China Harbour Engineering Company is building a mega-port which will be able to house large oil tankers and will have a major refueling facility. The port is in Hambantota, the hometown of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, allowing China to mix commerce with more personal diplomacy. Just down the road from the port, the same Chinese company also built the thirty-thousand-capacity cricket stadium which was one of the venues for the 2011 World Cup, another propaganda coup for the president. The relationship with Rajapaksa goes well beyond infrastructure, however. With the help of $1 billion in military aid from Beijing every year, and a Chinese veto against criticism at the United Nations, Rajapaksa ended the country’s long-running civil war in 2009 after a brutal final showdown. Given such complicit ties, there are plenty of suggestions that, over time, Hambantota could become the sort of place where Chinese vessels regularly dock to refuel and get supplies.
Something similar has been happening in Gwadar, a deep-water Pakistani port on the Arabian Sea, close to the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz—the strategic chokehold for a large slice of the world’s oil supply. China helped build a commercial port at Gwadar, which was initially leased to a Singapore company, PSA International. But after a series of problems, the Singapore group dropped out and a Chinese company took over management control of the port. More important, a senior Pakistani official told one of my colleagues in 2011 that the government had asked China to build a naval base next to the commercial port, and that China would have access to the base, potentially allowing Beijing to station some of its ships and submarines in Gwadar. The Chinese have played down the suggestion, but a clear marker has been laid down.
The “String of Pearls” is, of course, an idea straight from the Mahan playbook for aspiring great powers. Mahan urged the U.S. to find strategic locations in the Caribbean and the Pacific that could help the navy patrol the key maritime supply lines and the Panama Canal. A peacetime naval strategy “may gain its most decisive victories by occupying in a country, either by purchase or treaty, excellent positions which would perhaps hardly be got by war,” he wrote. Around the same time that America embarked on a burst of navy building in the 1890s, it also launched a drive to acquire overseas bases for its new ships. In the Pacific, it was supporters of the new navy who made the strongest case for incorporating Hawaii into the union. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish described Hawaii as an attractive “resting spot in the mid-ocean, between the Pacific coast and the vast domains of Asia, which are now opening to commerce,” as well as being a useful platform for curbing the rise of Japan. Earlier, the U.S. had taken control of the Midway archipelago, which was named because of its location directly midway between Los Angeles and Shanghai. Mahan was particularly obsessed with the Caribbean, where the British navy still had a large presence, and which he thought of in terms not dissimilar to the way the Chinese think today about the first island chain. In 1903, the U.S. Navy leased a new base in the Caribbean, which gave it the perfect launchpad to protect the eastern entrances to the Panama Canal, but which has become famous in modern times for very different reasons—Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
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The “String of Pearls” concept appeals to a certain conspiratorial view of how China works, the image of a small group of Communist Party officials calmly hatching plans for global domination. It suggests that China already has a coherent and thought-out long-term strategy, a series of five-year plans that will eventually afford China a broad network of bases across the region. Given how utterly opaque China’s top-level politics remains, it is easy to imagine that the top leadership might have such a disciplined view of its future. But the reality of modern China is much more improvised and reactive than this cliché recognizes. It is certainly true that China’s interests are drawing it into the Indian Ocean. Yet Ramree Island tells a very different story about China’s overseas expansion, and one which corresponds more closely to how decisions really get made. In a system in which the authority of the leaders is fraying, the driving force is often pressure from below. The Burma pipeline is part of a dynamic whereby business moves first, to create a new reality of its own, and then foreign and military policies are forced to come from behind to fill in the gaps.
The idea for the pipeline was first put forward by a history professor at an unglamorous provincial university. Li Chenyang, an expert on Southeast Asia at Yunnan University, in the southwest of China, started writing newspaper articles in 2004 suggesting that a pipeline could allow China to avoid bringing oil through the Strait of Malacca. In the long corridors outside Li’s office, there are large framed maps of the region, detailing Yunnan’s long borders with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. By driving a pipeline from Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, down through Burma, Li proposed China could gain access to the Indian Ocean. “The reality is the Americans want to control the Strait of Malacca,” as Professor Li put it. “For China to fall under American control is a very risky thing.” The idea was immediately taken up by the local government in Yunnan. But whereas Li and his academic colleagues were worried about energy and geopolitics, the local officials had a more prosaic motivation: jobs. Each year, Chinese officials receive a formal performance evaluation, and no matter whether they are running a village of a hundred people or a province of a hundred million, they are judged primarily on their ability to generate growth in their part of the economy. Their careers depend on the local GDP numbers. As a result, local officials are on the constant lookout for new investment projects that will boost growth. Although it has a rich cultural heritage, Yunnan is one of the poorer provinces of China, and its leaders have often complained that the industrial boom in other parts of the country has passed it by. They saw the pipeline as a perfect way to kick-start an oil industry in the province. The construction would bring a lot of jobs and funds, and a refinery would be needed at the end of the pipeline. A lot of the dynamism in China’s economy in recent decades is derived from this basic equation, the ceaseless drive at all levels of government for the latest new opportunity. For Yunnan officials, the pipeline is not about geopolitics, it is about GDP.
The proposal also won support from the politically powerful oil industry. China National Petroleum Corporation is the biggest oil company in the country, but in the southwest of the country, it was coming second to its main rival, Sinopec. The new pipeline was a way into that market. Before long, CNPC was on board with the idea. Together with CNPC, the Yunnan authorities started lobbying Beijing hard to win approval. Initially, there was a good deal of resistance. But after several years of pressure by big-oil and provincial government officials, Beijing finally agreed to promote the idea. As Zha Daojiong, a Chinese academic who has followed these sorts of internal debates closely, told me: “From the outside, it can look like China has a coherent energy strategy, but in reality it often comes down to who shouts the loudest.”
Europe’s empires were not created overnight by grand design. Instead, they evolved through a gradual creeping process that started with trade and investment and ended with the use of military power to protect those business interests. The British Raj had its roots in the perceived need to protect the operations of the East India Company, and it was to defend those very same interests that the British invaded Burma in 1824. After defeating the Burmese forces—and ending Burmese independence for much of the next century—the British briefly moved the country’s capital to Sittwe, on the northwest coast, just north of Ramree Island. It is facile to suggest, as some do, that China is trying to re-create an old-fashioned empire, but it is fair to say that China’s overseas investments are repeating elements of the same imperial dynamic, the old story of the flag following the trade. In a political system in which some of the lines of control have eroded, ambitious local governments and connected state-owned corporations are pushing projects that involve substantial international commitments, the local economic tail wagging the Beijing diplomatic dog. In the case of the Burma pipeline, the project won the backing of Beijing even though its strategic benefits are really something of a mirage. If there ever were some form of conflict between the U.S. and China, then the pipeline would be much more vulnerable than the sea-lanes through the Strait of Malacca. It would take the permanent presence of a significant fleet to enforce a blockade of the strait, but only one bombing run to destroy the pipeline. The Ramree Island investment brings no actual security for China.
On Ramree Island itself, there is widespread suspicion about China’s eventual plans for the area. Common among locals I talked to was the assumption that China would eventually want to have a naval base there, to help secure its interests and protect the commercial traffic to the port. In Yangon, I heard the same story, a constant refrain that the pipeline is some sort of Trojan Horse that will justify a Chinese military presence. There is no evidence that this is happening—and such an idea would likely spark considerable resistance in Burma, including from the new civilian government. But the reality is that China is now building a huge oil facility looking onto the Bay of Bengal, which it needs to protect. Its commercial interests are pulling it into the Indian Ocean in ways that were not originally anticipated.
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Whether by secret design or by the inertia of its advancing business interests, China is likely to push for a much stronger presence in the Indian Ocean. But just as there are enormous operational challenges ahead if China wants to construct a navy that can contend in the Indian Ocean, so there are huge political obstacles if it tries to establish the sort of military basing rights that would allow it to project power far from its home base. If China really aspires to a stealth “String of Pearls” strategy, it will be very difficult to turn this into reality, because few countries will want to be seen taking sides. Every government in the region knows that, even with the huge investments China is making in its navy, the U.S. will have a superior fighting ability in the Indian Ocean for several decades to come. This means that a Chinese base on their territory would turn them into a highly vulnerable target in the first days of a conflict. Burma’s new government has tilted away from China in a way that makes it very hard to imagine its accepting a Chinese base, despite the incessant rumor mill in the country. Sri Lanka, too, knows how vulnerable it would be if Chinese vessels were permanently based at Hambantota. “There may or may not be a Chinese string in the region, but we will not be one of their pearls,” as one Sri Lankan official puts it.
Pakistan is the one country that has expressed some interest in hosting a Chinese base. But the idea is a lot less attractive than it seems. Gwadar is occasionally referred to in the press as “the most important place you have never heard of,” given its closeness to the Persian Gulf. But on closer inspection, it is of much less strategic use than it seems. Gwadar is an isolated city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, squeezed in between Iran and Afghanistan, where an insurgency against the state has been running for decades, becoming particularly ugly in recent years. The roads and rail links to the more prosperous parts of Pakistan, around Karachi and Lahore, are, at best, precarious. The port itself is also vulnerable, as it is on a small island, connected to the mainland by one bridge. In the event of a conflict, a single bomb could take it out of action.
Just as the U.S. did in an earlier era, China has long shunned the idea of foreign “entanglements.” Beijing has persistently denounced alliance building as a destabilizing form of power politics. We are not that sort of government, Chinese leaders insist. As a result, the establishment of an overseas base would be a Rubicon moment for China, one that cuts to the core of the question about how China really interprets its future role. Foreign bases are not just an exercise in logistics; they are sovereign territory within another nation. A base is the bridgehead to a very different relationship, the sort of defense alliance whereby the bigger nation offers to provide security in return for access and support. In other words, China would need formal allies. But the question every government would ask Beijing is, whom are we defending ourselves from? If China moves down this path, it could start a process of dividing the region between countries that rely on the U.S. for their security, and those that lean toward China. Asian governments would increasingly find themselves asked to take sides, the outcome they fear the most. For that very reason, some in China view it as an extremely dangerous step, one that would lead to greater isolation for China. “It is a self-fulfilling, delusionary idea to build our own bases and our own alliances,” Zhu Feng, an international-relations professor at Peking University, told me. “I totally disagree with the idea. We would create a geographic split in the region. It really would be the start of a new Cold War.”
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Of course, the Indian Ocean already has a billion-person-plus rising power, with a growing navy and a strong sense of its own role in the modern world. India is another important reason why China will have to tread very carefully in the Indian Ocean. Washington is by no means the only capital where the rapid expansion in China’s navy has provoked anxiety; New Delhi has also been watching the developments with some alarm. India and China share a tradition of fraternal ties rooted in the language of anti-colonialism and the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1927, two decades before he became the leader of a newly independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru signed a joint manifesto with delegates from the Chinese Communist Party at an anti-imperialist congress in Brussels. In 1962, however, the two countries fought a brief but fierce war over a border in the Himalayas that is still under dispute, and since then have viewed each other warily. Now that sense of competition is shifting to the Indian Ocean. “Rivalry has been a defining element of India’s relations with China for 60 years,” says Raja Mohan, one of India’s leading foreign-policy analysts. “But it is now beginning to move from the Himalayas to the waters of the Indo-Pacific.”
Just like China, India is also turning to the seas, and for many of the same reasons. As India has morphed since the early 1990s from an inward-looking and highly regulated economy to a more open, trading nation, it, too, has begun to fret about the safety of the sea-lanes that its new wealth depends upon. (Alfred Thayer Mahan is now the subject of great interest in India, too.) Having acquired its first aircraft carrier as far back as the 1950s, India now has three, and another which is a museum in Mumbai. Yet India’s naval buildup has had a different quality. Although New Delhi considers the Indian Ocean to be its natural backyard, it does not have the same sort of sweeping ownership claim that China presents. India is neither as suspicious of the U.S. as is China, nor is it building a navy specifically designed to challenge the U.S. The Indian navy has also been much more willing to take part in joint exercises with the U.S., signaling its willingness to carry some of the security burdens in the existing U.S.-led system.
In 2005, the U.S. and India signed a nuclear deal which, at first sight, appeared to herald an exciting era of close relations. In return for Washington’s turning a blind eye to India’s new nuclear weapons, the U.S. hoped that New Delhi would become an important partner in its regional diplomacy. Commentators in the U.S. gushed about the meeting of minds between the two biggest democracies in the world, multicultural U.S. and opinionated, querulous India. Since then, those high hopes have been dashed. Washington has become frustrated at India’s willingness to trade with Iran and to side with China at the Copenhagen climate-change conference. The more enthusiastic U.S. supporters of the deal were surprised to find that India still wants to conduct an independent foreign policy. India remains intensely proud of its hard-won autonomy and history of neutrality. The last thing it wants to be is a full-fledged American ally, to play the sort of loyal lieutenant role that Britain does. Nevertheless, New Delhi remains deeply suspicious about the nature of a rising China, and its relationship with Beijing will be shaped by how China decides to pursue its interests in its Indian Ocean backyard. The “String of Pearls” has had more resonance in India than in the U.S., because the idea anticipates India’s fear that China will attempt to encircle it. The prospect of a Chinese naval base on its eastern flank (Burma) or its southern tip (Sri Lanka) plays into those fears. And nothing could exacerbate India’s anxieties more than a permanent Chinese presence in Pakistan, which would be interpreted in New Delhi as a deliberate move against India. If China makes a concerted push to establish a permanent presence in the Indian Ocean, India will be pushed closer to the U.S.
AMERICAN PARTNERS?
As China’s interests and ambitions expand, it is only natural that it will start to think about how to project naval power in the Indian Ocean, yet at every stage it finds itself facing obstacles that will not be easily overcome. It is years away from a naval fleet that could genuinely challenge the U.S., and it will be very hard to establish the sort of permanent naval bases that would undergird a real military presence. And if it does make a big push into the Indian Ocean, it is likely to pour oil on the slow-burning rivalry with India. Given such formidable obstacles, it is possible to imagine that China will take a very different path in the Indian Ocean, and that it will look to collaborate more with the U.S. Navy. Washington has an opportunity to build a different sort of relationship with Beijing in the Indian Ocean, one that is much less inherently confrontational. Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used to talk about a thousand-ship navy, a global maritime network that would share the tasks of policing the oceans and of responding to disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami. There is a chance China could be gradually drawn into the framework of burden sharing in the Indian Ocean that already exists. These exercises would be naval confidence-building measures, a way for the two navies to get to know each other and to learn how to rub up against each other. The rivalry in the Near Seas will not disappear, of course, but it is possible that collaboration in the Indian Ocean could take some of the edge off that competition. Or, as retired U.S. Admiral Eric McVadon once put it: “One can readily imagine a scenario in which U.S. Navy F-18s from carriers are in air-to-air combat with Chinese planes over Taiwan. One can just as readily imagine those same planes… protecting sea-lanes from pirates and terrorists.”
In small ways, this is already happening. For the last two decades, the most dangerous place in the world for commercial shipping has been the coast off Somalia, including the Gulf of Aden, where pirates have been able to operate freely. Chinese ships have been among those kidnapped. As a result, since 2009, China has been taking part in the international anti-piracy operations in the region. With the U.S. Seventh Fleet based in Bahrain often in the lead, the operations are an organized show of force by more than twenty of the world’s largest navies, which escort commercial vessels through the most vulnerable waters. The contributing countries include Denmark, the U.K., Netherlands, Pakistan, and South Korea—in other words, a broad cross-section of the international community. Chinese naval officials now attend the meetings in Bahrain of the international anti-piracy coalition, which goes by the name Shared Awareness and Deconfliction Group (SHADE), a ghoulish acronym that bears the fingerprints of Pentagon bureaucrats. From 2009 to 2012, Chinese warships escorted more than five thousand commercial ships, most of them not Chinese, through the Gulf of Aden. In the larger anti-piracy operations, a convoy of ships from various countries travels up and down the East African coast in a carefully organized pattern, usually with a U.S. destroyer at the helm. The Chinese ships have never operated under U.S. command, but on occasion they have tagged along on these larger drills. The Chinese captains sail five nautical miles to the north or south of the convoy, maintaining a discreet and wary distance—a powerful metaphor for a country that is still not quite sure whether it wants to collaborate with, or challenge, the U.S. maritime order.