China's Maritime Security Strategy

The Evolution of a Growing Sea Power

Edward Sing Yue Chan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000437119
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This book examines the evolution of China's maritime security strategy, and questions what has made China shift from a constrained to a more assertive strategy.

Historically, China has not been an active player in maritime security, but in recent years Beijing has begun to pursue policies and measures to safeguard its maritime rights and interests in the Indo-Pacific region. This growing influence in the region has become a concern for other countries about what kind of sea power China is developing. This book seeks to address this concern by providing an overview of the development of China's maritime security strategy from the era of Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. It suggests that while the involvement of maritime actors and the development of naval capability have provided the depth to the strategy, the national strategic guidelines from each generation of Chinese leadership have determined the overall direction of the maritime security strategy. After 40 years of development, China has established a set of priorities for its maritime agenda: territorial integrity is at the top, followed by development, and then regional and international maritime cooperation. These findings help us to understand China's multidimensional maritime power as being both assertive and cooperative.

This book will be of much interest to students of naval strategy, maritime security, Chinese politics and International Relations.

1
Introduction

What makes China the sea power today?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158523-1

The phrase “strong maritime power” is a popular political slogan in China that has appeared frequently in official documents in recent years. It has also been widely discussed by the media and scholars since 2012, as shown in Figure 1.1. This was also the year when Hu Jintao declared the goal of China’s strong sea power construction during the Eighteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (Hu, 2012). The most common explanation of this is that securitization in the Asia-Pacific region has made China vulnerable to various maritime issues, including vindicating claims to territory, territorial waters, and maritime space, preventing the emergence of new threats – such as Japan or India – curtailing United States (US) military’s freedom of action throughout East Asia, and limiting the access of the US to East Asia’s raw materials, markets, and investment opportunities. Therefore, Beijing needs to attain regional dominance through accumulation of sea power.

Figure 1.1 Number of articles on “strong sea power” (haiyang qiangguo) in CNKI database (1996–2020)

Source: CNKI database

China’s construction of sea power is not simply a political rhetoric. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has clearly been more assertive and proactive in various maritime security issues. Its presence in regional and global maritime space has become more prominent. For instance, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has constantly been navigating and conducting exercises across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea (SCS). The China Coast Guard (CCG) and other law-enforcement agencies have been operating in the nearby sea to demonstrate China’s jurisdiction over the disputed maritime zone. The series of land reclamation and militarization in offshore reefs in the SCS from 2015 to 2018 has also caused controversy in resolving maritime territorial disputes. In addition, the PRC has been more apparent in various oceans. Since 2008, the PLAN has conducted regular escort missions in the Gulf of Aden. In 2017, China set up its first offshore base in Djibouti, claiming that it was necessary for logistic support for far sea operations. Furthermore, as stated by President Xi Jinping in 2018, Beijing had set a goal to build a world-class navy by the middle of this century (Li and Wu, 2018). In fact, China’s naval capability has increased significantly in the last ten years, in particular with the construction of aircraft carriers Liaoning and Shandong. These examples show that China’s intention to become a sea power is growing.

Assertive moves by China in maritime affairs have already become a security concern to other countries. People assumed that they would witness the emergence of a new maritime hegemon in the twenty-first century, just like other oceanic empires in history, such as Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom (UK). In 2020, a number of countries, including Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, successively published policy papers or diplomatic statements against China’s claim to historical rights to maritime zones and underwater features in the SCS (“Who’s taking sides”, 2020). Some have also expressed their concerns about China’s active pursuit of greater influence in the Asia-Pacific region through gray-zone or para-military operations (Department of Defence, 2020; Ministry of Defense, 2020). The US, as the only global sea power in the twenty-first century, has also declared its position. In July 2020, Washington alleged Beijing’s historical claims in the SCS were “unlawful” and described China treating the SCS as its “maritime empire” (Pompeo, 2020). In fact, as a response to China’s growing assertiveness, the US Navy has been patrolling in the SCS since 2015, claiming that it is executing its freedom of navigation in the open seas, with an increasing frequency yearly. However, China has made intimidating responses to these US naval activities. In particular, in 2020, the two Chinese aircraft carriers, Liaoning and Shandong, reportedly crossed the Taiwan Strait in April and December, respectively (Chan, 2020; Zhen, 2020). It is clear that countries are threatened by China’s maritime expansion and have begun to respond to its actions.

Indeed, some of the aforementioned maritime issues have been ongoing since the 1980s or 1990s. For example, China’s maritime militia, which has been a controversy in recent SCS disputes, began participating in some patrolling and logistic supply missions with the Chinese Navy during the 1980s and 1990s. China also reportedly conducted construction and reclamation projects in contested reefs in 1995, such as the Mischief Reef incident. The US has had maritime conflicts with China since 1993 when a Chinese cargo ship, Yinhe, was intercepted by the US Navy in the Indian Ocean (IO). The following year, the US aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk patrolled in the Yellow Sea, and the PRC sent fighter aircrafts to patrol above the fleet as a response. As shown, it is evident that China has been involved in various maritime affairs over many years. Even though Beijing only declared the goal of “constructing a strong maritime power” in the 2010s, China has not become a maritime “threat” overnight as most countries have perceived. The question is, why does China now have the ambition to pursue construction of a strong maritime power? How have all these maritime incidents molded China’s maritime security strategy? Or more broadly, what has made China a sea power today?

Significance of this book

The answers to the aforementioned questions are important for several reasons. First, the motivation behind China’s emerging ambition of becoming a sea power needs to be understood. Broadly defined, China has been regarded as a historical continental power, with little interest in maritime politics. It was not until Liu Huaqing became the PLAN’s commander during the 1980s that someone suggested the state should have a strategy for long-term naval development. They also suggested that the Navy’s military capabilities needed to be improved in order to break through the constrained “first island chain”, a term that was used by the US as a geopolitical containment strategy during the Cold War to confine China’s expansion of communist ideas but which was later adopted by Chinese maritime theorists. Liu asserted that China needed the sea power to control the East China Sea (ECS) and the SCS in order to create a strategic buffer zone for the frontier (Liu, 2004: 432–9). Liu’s doctrine, namely, the “near sea active defense” strategy, indicated a turning point of China’s contemporary sea power development. While Liu’s ideas have an important legacy in Chinese maritime politics, they are different from China’s strong sea power construction today. His ideas were closely tied to the traditional thinking of China as a continental power, regarding the protection of the land as more important than the sea. Additionally, Liu’s focus had been on defense in the near seas. Beijing only pursued a limited, constrained, and slow overseas expansion during that time, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. However, China has now expanded its footprint in the far seas. Therefore, it is worth examining the development of China’s sea power or maritime security strategy – what has made China shift from pursuing near sea active defense to promoting “strong sea power construction” in the past 40 years.

Second, examining the development of its maritime security strategy could clarify our understanding of China’s comprehensive sea power. Like many other political slogans in China, Xi Jinping’s “construction of a strong sea power” is unclear and vague, which can be, and has been, interpreted in many ways. There have been different understandings of “maritime strategy” in China, including naval strategy, maritime security strategy, maritime development strategy, maritime power strategy, and maritime rights protection strategy (Martinson, 2016: 24–5). However, the existing literatures tend to focus more on the assertive side of its maritime security policies, especially on its rapid naval development, overlooking the extensiveness and comprehensiveness of China’s sea power. Beijing never mentions its objective as a strong maritime power together with its goal of naval development. The government and the military have repeatedly emphasized that China has no ambition to be a hegemon or seek expansion through military cohesion (He, 2019; State Council, 2019: Section 2). Even when Commander Shen Jinlong stated China’s goal to become a world-class navy in 2018, he also quickly pointed out that the goal did not imply China would become a global maritime hegemon (PLAN Party Committee, 2018). Alternatively, the phrase “constructing a strong maritime power” was embedded in the chapter in the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (FYP), which talked about “expanding blue economic space” (State Council, 2016: Chapter 41). None of the maritime-related objectives mentioned in the FYP – including marine resource exploitation, the blue economy, and marine environmental protection – were directly related to naval development.

China has been cooperative in some areas of maritime security. The most prominent example would be China’s continuous escort missions in the Gulf of Aden since 2008. By January 2021, China has sent 37 fleets to the IO, showing its participation in international maritime security (“China sends new naval fleet”, 2021). In addition, despite all the territorial disputes in the SCS, China has cooperated with countries in Southeast Asia on certain maritime-related agendas. For example, it has had regular meetings with Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand to share information on customs and fisheries in the Mekong River. It has also reached an agreement of joint exploration and development of energy resources in the disputed waters with the Philippines. The CCG has conducted joint law-enforcement operations with the Vietnamese Coast Guard in the Gulf of Tonkin since 2006. In other words, China’s involvement in maritime security has been extensive. An overinterpretation of China building its naval capability as part of its maritime development is negligent and, more importantly, risky. In fact, the agenda for maritime security in the twenty-first century is no longer identical to the one in Western colonialization. China, as a rising sea power, would be a valuable case study to comprehend what maritime security means to international politics. Therefore, this book explores how China has developed such comprehensive maritime security strategy in order to understand what makes up the policy agenda behind the construction of a sea power.

Third, there has been a lack of empirical research on the development of China’s maritime security strategy since its declaration of the “construction of a strong sea power” as a national goal. While some analysis has been conducted on China’s maritime strategy, it is now out of date. David Muller Jr., a US intelligent officer, published China as a Maritime Power in 1983, which provides a useful descriptive analysis of China’s naval development from 1949 to 1983 (Muller, 1983). However, Muller’s analysis ceases in the 1980s when China still had limited interests in maritime security. Later, An-Hao Huang’s The Maritime Strategy of China in the Asia-Pacific: Origins, Development and Impact examined China’s maritime strategy from 1949 to the mid-2000s (Huang, 2010). Similar to Muller’s work, his analysis does not address China’s call for sea power development because the goal was yet to be announced at the time the book was published. Indeed, the majority of the research focuses almost entirely on Chinese maritime behaviors in recent years: what it has done, what it has built. These studies are useful in highlighting China’s particular actions or policies in maritime politics. However, given that they only address a small number of events or cases before quickly drawing a conclusion, their evaluations can only explain a particular sector of or a restricted timeframe in China’s maritime strategy. Therefore, this book is the most up-to-date analysis of China’s development of maritime security strategy, and how it becomes the sea power today.

Lastly and most importantly, understanding China’s maritime security strategy has never been more important than it is today. Maritime security issues – territorial disputes, freedom of navigation, piracy, sea lane safety, fishery, energy security, and environmental protection – have become more prominent in the Indo-Pacific region in recent years, and China has been one of the most important parties in these issues. Yet some questions surrounding China’s sea power, including what kind of sea power it is likely to pursue, as well as how it will use its growing maritime capability and to what end, cannot be answered by researching just one aspect of China’s maritime policies, such as naval development, the SCS disputes, far sea policies, and sea power theories. A key part of this answer lies with the development of maritime security strategy. Understanding China’s past and present approaches to the strategy provides a crucial baseline in assessing future changes.

Overview of arguments

To explain why and how China has become the sea power today, I argue that there are four major factors affecting the 40-year development of China’s maritime security strategy: strategic guidelines, domestic actors, capability building, and agenda setting. First and foremost, strategic guidelines have been the precondition of whether maritime security is valued. As a subset of the grand strategy and security strategies, maritime security needs to be closely associated with the major national objectives of that particular administration. This would determine whether the country turns seaward or pursues minimal actions in maritime security.

Second, the involvement of domestic maritime actors either limits or expands the agenda setting and the variety of policies in maritime security strategy. Like many political decisions in China, the agenda of maritime security is based on the extensive policy debates among policy stakeholders and experts. However, this has often been neglected by scholars who assume that China has a monotonous view on sea power development. These players have provided policy suggestions with regard to how the state could develop a comprehensive sea po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Preface
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 Introduction: what makes China the sea power today?
• 2 Understand maritime security strategy in China
• 3 Deng Xiaoping’s era: a limited maritime security agenda
• 4 Jiang Zemin’s era: when maritime security became a concern
• 5 Hu Jintao’s era: the rise of China in the “maritime century”
• 6 Xi Jinping’s era: constructing a strong maritime power
• 7 Conclusion: China – the twenty-first century sea power
• Appendices
• Glossary
• Index