Powered by the world’s second-largest economy and defense budget, China is going to sea with a scale and sophistication that no continental power ever before sustained in the modern era. Its three sea forces are all leaders in their own right: the world’s largest navy, coast guard, and maritime militia by number of ships. They are supplied by the world’s largest shipyard infrastructure, which has achieved the largest, fastest production-capacity expansion in history. On the civilian side, Chinese sea power is augmented by the world’s largest fishing fleet, one of the world’s largest merchant marines, wide-ranging port infrastructure networks, and a large nationally flagged tanker fleet.
While paramount leader Xi Jinping is working to transform his nation further into a “great maritime power,” at a minimum today’s Middle Kingdom is already a hybrid land-sea power. Amid European decline and American fiscal and strategic challenges, this historic transformation has the potential to end six centuries of largely Western dominance of the world’s oceans. The U.S. Navy and nation must understand this momentous sea change to properly inform strategy and policy.
Since the Chinese Maritime Studies Institute was established in 2006, it has been conducting research and holding conferences covering the broad waterfront of Chinese oceanic efforts in order to advise U.S. Navy leadership and support the Naval War College in its core mission area of helping to define the future Navy. The Studies in Chinese Maritime Development series assembles the resulting proceedings into edited volumes focusing on specific topics of importance to further understand Beijing’s progress and challenges at sea.