China's new "imperial" navy - Review Essay - Book Review

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2002 by Bruce Elleman

Cole, Bernard D. The Great Wall at Sea: China's Navy Enters the Twenty-first Century. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute ress, 2001. 320pp. $34.95

Kondapalli, Srikanth. China's Naval Power. New Delhi: knowledge World, 2001. 252pp. (no price given)

Wright, Richard N. J. The Chinese Steam Navy, 1862-1945. London: Chatham, 2000. 2O8pp. $48.95

At the end of the Cold War, the Soviet navy was eliminated almost overnight as the world's second most powerful naval force. Russia's Pacific fleet is now so poorly supplied and equipped that it rarely leaves port. This unprecedented reversal of fortune has created a maritime vacuum throughout East Asia, leaving a wide range of regional powers, including the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, the Republic of Korea, and Japan, hoping to fill that vacuum.

Despite the current terror war, China still looms on the horizon as potentially the most important and dangerous rising power of the dawning Pacific century. The Chinese are intent upon using the fruits of their continuing economic growth to restore their historical position of regional dominance in Asia. The failure to integrate Japan (the rising power of the last century) peacefully into the international order cost the United States a world war in Asia. A similar failure with a nuclear-armed China could have catastrophic consequences. For the last two decades China has focused its development efforts on its economy, but recently its attention has turned toward the military, especially the navy; with the acquisition of capital ships from Russia. China is currently building a navy capable of projecting its power beyond its littorals. How it will choose to use its increasingly capable military has global implications.

Bruce Swanson's Eighth Voyage of the Dragon: A History of China's Quest for Seapower (Naval Institute Press, 1982) and David Muller's China as a Maritime Power (Westview Press, 1983) were useful for their time, but the extraordinarily rapid global and Far Eastern maritime developments during the final years of the last century require an in-depth study and reevaluation of China's naval ambitions for the twenty-first century. Therefore, the publication of the three books reviewed here is particularly timely.

Richard Wright's The Chinese Steam Navy, 1862-1945, provides a wealth of data concerning the early history of China's modern navy. Although the bulk of this work is concerned with tracing (often in mind-numbing detail) the history and specifications of individual Chinese steamships, arsenals, and armaments, Wright emphasizes three important facets of China's early naval development: China used the navy not only to promote coastal defense but to quell domestic unrest; its fear of putting too much power into a single naval organization compelled it to divide its navy into several competing fleets; and it tended to purchase, rather than build itself, top-of-the-line ships and armaments. Each facet exhibits strong parallels with contemporary naval developments in China.

According to Wright, the initial impetus for a Chinese steam navy was not to promote China's foreign policy abroad but to quell internal unrest, the Taiping Rebellion of 1852-63. The so-called Lay-Osborn Flotilla, composed of seven British-built ships, was China's first serious effort to employ a modern fleet. Faced with an internal rebellion that threatened to overthrow the government, "it seemed logical to some of the authorities to try to acquire some proper warships to help in suppressing the revolt."

Although the flotilla never played an important role in the suppression of the Taipings and was broken up in 1863 and sold, this event emphasizes the importance of domestic factors in the construction of the Chinese navy. During the mid-twentieth century, the Nationalists tried and failed to use their navy to defeat the Communists. It can be argued that today's Chinese navy remains focused not on a foreign opponent but on a domestic one, since its most important function is to oppose what Beijing portrays as the illegal separatist government on Taiwan. Thus a constant objective of the Chinese navy during the past century and a half would appear to be the suppression of domestic rebellion.

Related to quelling domestic opposition has been China's goal to promote coastal defense. Since China is a land empire, a primary foreign policy objective throughout much of its history has been to keep other powers away from its borders--its navy has focused on a defensive role. In this regard, Japan has been one of China's traditional enemies since the sixteenth century, when Japanese "pirates" regularly raided the Chinese coast. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, the Japanese navy achieved a resounding victory against China, resulting in the integration of Taiwan into the Japanese empire. Finally, during the 1937-45 conflict, the Nationalists fought in vain to keep Japan out of Manchuria and central China, but the Japanese annihilated the Nationalist navy.