Asian Tide

Over a decade ago, a bipartisan coalition of political and opinion leaders marshaled arguments in support of Bill Clinton’s policy of granting China permanent normal trading relations, a necessary step in China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. China’s WTO ascension marked the grand denouement of a decades-long U.S. policy begun by Richard Nixon. The United States would engage China to help it join the “family of nations.” China’s entry into the World Trade Organization marked the final step in China’s long march from Maoist autarky to global trading nation.
Proponents of the policy made three broad claims. First, further engaging in trade with China would benefit the U.S. economy. Second, by joining the WTO, China would grant its citizens economic freedom, which would inevitably lead to political freedom. And finally, and most boldly, proponents such as then-National Security Advisor Samuel Berger claimed that China’s entry into the WTO would not just improve economic welfare but also improve U.S. national security. The logic of this last, most ambitious, claim was twofold. First, a China that enjoyed economic freedom would grant its citizens more political freedom. A freer China would feel more pressure to accept the international rules that maintain international order. Second, even if China grew stronger militarily, the country would be so intertwined within the international system that it would have no choice but to use its strength to help provide the international public goods that keep the global order functioning.

National security skeptics viewed this logic as flawed. Indeed, China’s growing wealth would provide the basis for Beijing to generate greater military power, but it was far from obvious that China would use that power to uphold a liberal international order that was fashioned by the West. The skeptics were granted a number of concessions, including legislation requiring the Department of Defense to report annually on China’s military power. And some ten Pentagon reports later, the skeptics seem to have the better of the argument. Few China policymakers or China analysts doubt anymore that, unless the United States rebuilds its Pacific forces, China’s military may become second to none in Asia. But Pentagon reports on China’s military power are by their nature circumscribed, fragmentary, and cautious. And the scholarly debates the reports have inspired are mostly narrow in focus and event-driven.

China’s growing military power is thus easy to dismiss as a threat to American security. For example, China tested an antisatellite weapon to great fanfare, but so what? It is one weapon against the overwhelming space power of the United States. China is deploying three new submarines a year, but why does that matter? Most recently, the commander of the Pacific Command, Admiral Robert Willard, confirmed that China is deploying a land-based ballistic missile that can accurately and lethally target U.S. surface ships and carriers. Sounds ominous, but would the Chinese really strike a carrier? 

The community of analysts, military officers, scholars, and officials interested and concerned about China’s military power is growing, but for those just joining the conversation, diving into the topic can be daunting. China optimists, moreover, argue that there is nothing disturbing about China’s growing power. It can be used for good purposes. Concerns about China are downplayed in part because Pentagon reports are not asked to comment on the most essential question: Is China building a military that contributes to international security, or is it building a military that is undermining it?

Two scholars at the Naval War College, Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, have done a signal service by providing an initial answer to this question. They do so in three ways. First, they have mined both the English and Chinese language publications about the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to piece together a persuasive facsimile of a Chinese maritime strategy. Second, they measure that strategy against Washington’s own. Third, they begin to provide an answer to the central question: Is the Chinese maritime strategy aimed at the provision of public good?

Yoshihara and Holmes hint at an answer, and in a refreshing break from the scholarly detachment the policy community has come to expect from academics, they make plain that the central purpose of this book is to help “the United States manage a disturbance to the regional order” caused by China’s impressive naval modernization. Put simply, China’s maritime strategy is upending regional order, and Holmes and Yoshihara want to help policymakers and military officers think through the proper counterstrategies.

Their central argument is that Chinese navalists are heavily influenced by the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the naval nationalist who famously influenced Theodore Roosevelt (as he pushed for more overseas possessions), Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the Imperial Japanese Navy. “Mahanians” are thus not a group of liberal internationalists interested in fashioning a navy that contributes to global public good. Certainly, China benefits as much as any country from the smooth functioning of the maritime trading system; but like Mahan, its naval strategists are not optimistic that the rules of trade and open access to commerce are self-enforcing. Rather, great sea powers need to secure access to markets “through the force of arms.”

It is worth quoting, as the authors do, Mahan at length on this point: Command of the sea is “that overbearing power on the sea which drives the enemy’s flag from it .  .  . and which, by controlling the great common, closes the highways by which commerce moves to and fro from the enemy’s shores.” A truly great power must be able, first, to secure access to markets and, second, to prevent an enemy from doing the same by overwhelming his fleet with naval power.

Yoshihara and Holmes help clarify Chinese strategy by gently dispensing with a term introduced by American analysts that has driven much of the debate over Chinese strategy. The term of art in the American security lexicon is that the People’s Liberation Army has an “anti-access strategy.” The idea behind “anti-access” is that China is developing a panoply of capabilities—ballistic and cruise missiles, submarines, antiaircraft weaponry—that it will use to attack Taiwan and keep the American military away from the Taiwan Strait. But that is far too narrow a description of Chinese strategy, argue Yoshihara and Holmes. Sure, the People’s Liberation Navy is trying to deny the U.S. Navy the ability to operate near China’s shores—all navies do that—but denying a power its military objectives “opens the way for a .  .  . fleet to exercise command in its own right.” And China’s Mahanians are not simply after the unification of Taiwan. Rather, as a great power, China wants assured access to key sources of commerce and to secure the routes upon which that commerce flows.

Yoshihara and Holmes urge readers to imagine a strategy defined by geographic concentric circles. First, China will want to command the waters around its periphery. This includes the Yellow, South, and East China Seas, or what China calls the “near seas.” Second, after Beijing is confident that it controls access to the areas around its shores, it will become a truly seafaring nation—one that can access and command what it calls the “far seas,” a geographic region that includes the main sources of its natural resource and maritime trade. This means that the Chinese Navy is turning its attention, full steam ahead, to the Indian Ocean and the countries that sit astride it. If, as Yoshihara and Holmes argue, the Chinese are true Mahanians, they will never allow other powers to control access to the Indian Ocean’s routes of ingress and egress. Rather, they will require and seek the capacity to use overbearing power against those who might interfere with their commercial routes. This explanation of China’s turn to the west seems altogether plausible given the PLA’s interest in control of the South China Sea and its nuclear submarine base at Hainan Island.

This picture of Chinese strategy is so shockingly at variance with contemporary thinking about maritime strategy that the temptation to dismiss it will be strong. As Yoshihara and Holmes point out, “Westerners .  .  . agree with Norman Angell (famous for declaring war a thing of the past on the eve of World War I) that the world has largely transcended power politics.” Battle fleets meant to defeat an enemy competing over command of the seas are irrelevant. Our own maritime strategy is suffused with such thought: It declares that we are in an era of a thousand-ship navy comprised of fleets from all over the world coming together to police the maritime commons together. In the contemporary Western liberal mind, the commons are not something to be commanded; they are a public good to be upheld by all responsible nations. The prime mission of the thousand-ship navy is not to defeat an enemy navy decisively​—​Yoshihara and Holmes remind us that the thousand- ship navy has been renamed the Global Maritime Partnership because the term “navy” sounded too bellicose to many potential partners​—​but the main purpose of maritime strategy now is to clear the sea lanes of pirates and conduct humanitarian missions, thereby making the world safe for commerce.

Even the Chinese, our defense leaders are quick to remind us, are becoming liberal internationalists; they are conducting antipiracy missions around the Gulf of Aden. Surely the Chinese understand that it is not in their interests to undermine good order at sea! The idea of navies visiting upon each other overbearing destruction in the service of sea control and assured access sounds so anachronistic—so 19th century—that it is difficult for the postmodern Western mind to accept that anyone can think in these terms.

But wait! caution Yoshihara and Holmes. Let’s understand what the Chinese are actually saying and doing.  They appear to have a definition of the commons at odds with that provided by Western property law and commonly used by contemporary Western foreign policy hands. Western analysts define the commons as shared space that no one owns and from which everyone benefits; for Chinese naval strategists, however, the commons is something a great power must control. The authors quote many Chinese officers, including Major General Jiang Shiliang, who believes that it is incumbent upon a sea power to have “absolute control of strategic passages traversed by vital goods” and “absolute command” of critical waters and geographic assets. China is not prepared to leave the protection of the “wide common over which men may pass in all directions,” as Admiral Mahan described the sea, to the tender mercies of a hostile U.S. Navy.

And how might the Chinese go about the project of “controlling strategic passages” and obtaining “absolute command” of critical waters and geography? The Chinese Navy will keep U.S. naval forces at bay by utilizing its growing undersea force, its land-based antiship ballistic missiles, and its many antiship cruise missiles fired off surface and subsurface ships. With antiship cruise and ballistic missiles fired from land or sea, China may be able to whittle down the U.S. Navy far into the Pacific while preparing for a Mahan-like decisive engagement closer to Chinese waters. And if China succeeds in retaking Taiwan—a foremost objective of those Chinese Mahanians—it can place naval assets on the island. Together with its already substantial base on Hainan island, Chinese naval assets on Taiwan can render the Luzon Strait in the Philippine Sea impassable for the U.S. Navy. In this scenario the Chinese will have created enough strategic depth to probe the thinly defended north through the Ryukyu Islands, and conduct operations in the southern part of the South China Sea near Luzon. The U.S. Navy would be dispersed and forced into a defensive crouch.

As Yoshihara and Holmes point out, by “driving up the costs of entry” of the U.S. Navy, the Chinese can deter U.S. involvement in Asian waters and impose local dominance long enough to realize such strategic objectives as exerting more sea control westward into the Indian Ocean. They describe how, with a strong undersea force, and cruise and ballistic missiles, China can make critical passageways no-go zones for the U.S. Navy. And they make a persuasive case that sea denial inexorably opens the way to greater command of the sea. But while they argue that denying important seas to the U.S. Navy provides China with the possibility of sea control, they do not describe how China would conduct a Mahanian-style engagement that will overpower the U.S. Navy.

How does China engage the United States in a major fleet engagement without a major fleet? The answer provided here is that China is adapting Mahan’s ideas to Chinese, particularly Maoist, strategic traditions. The Chinese Navy will dominate using a form of guerrilla naval techniques. To be sure, it is not obvious that guerrilla tactics at sea would have the same effects as those that drive an enemy from one’s homeland. And if they did, the question still remains: How does China control the seas with the missile and undersea force the authors describe? To command the sea, in the Mahan sense, China will need to have bases, the ability to protect convoys, and to exert control farther afield. Eventually, to command the sea, China will have to defeat enemies at greater distances and convince weaker powers that China is able to provide them with security.

It is likely that Yoshihara and Holmes omit a Chinese concept of sea control conducive to providing others with security for a simple reason: The Chinese don’t have one. Maybe the Chinese are Maoist guerrillas at sea, looking to tear down the U.S. Navy’s ability to provide security to its allies and maintain the maritime trading system, without providing an alternative. If the Chinese succeed at command of the sea through guerilla tactics, the world will look quite different than it does today. Beijing will have knocked down a system without building up a new one. In such a scenario, a nationalist China will vie with other powers for access to vital passageways and sources of commerce. This is a far different vision of global order than the one articulated by the 2007 U.S. Maritime Strategy. Indeed, it is a recipe for global disorder.

Yoshihara and Holmes succeed in their primary mission: to help the United States manage a disturbance to the regional order. Red Star Over the Pacific is the most comprehensive study of Chinese maritime strategy to date. They take seriously Chinese concepts of sea control, as well as China’s deep engagement with long-dead maritime thinkers. And they draw a stark contrast between a U.S. maritime strategy overwhelmed by liberal internationalist thinking, in which potential enemies are but one item on a list of problems to manage, somewhere between economic inequality and
natural disasters. China’s maritime strategy is rather more martial, with plans for command of the seas stretching farther and farther from China’s shores.

When comparing the Chinese and American maritime strategies, you can only conclude that America wants to jump into the postmodern 21st century in which nations ain’t gonna study war no more—while China tugs it back into the bellicosity of centuries past.

Daniel Blumenthal is director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.