It is not at all clear what role China sees for its People's Liberation Army Navy. Will it remain merely a coastal naval force, or does China have ambitions of building a blue-water fleet with aircraft carriers and other power-projection weapons that could rival those of the U.S. Navy?
How important do the Chinese think the development of naval power is? When we think about China's primary strategic problems—Taiwan and the possibility of U.S. intervention, sovereignty issues in the South China Sea, and the fact that its economic center of gravity is concentrated on its eastern seaboard—all are maritime in character. One of the major contradictions that students of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) face, however, is that the seemingly obvious maritime character of China's strategic future has not translated into a more prestigious role for the navy. The PLAN remains very much a junior partner to the army.
Today, PLAN officers hold no important commands or important positions within the highest echelons of the military hierarchy of China. Only one officer with high-level naval experience, Liu Huaqing, ever has served as a principal on China's equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the Central Military Commission), and even he came from and returned to the army. Among "China watchers," a broad consensus exists that the PLAN still does not wield a great deal of bureaucratic influence or clout within the PLA, and that the importance of China's maritime frontier has not translated into greater naval influence in Beijing.
One reason might be that a national strategy that does not envision the need to project power does not require any particularly insightful naval input. (The Jeffersonian and post-Civil War eras in U.S. naval history come to mind as roughly analogous.) Another reason might be that China's army-dominated military culture has engendered a worldview that land forces will do the heavy lifting in the defense of China's national interests, and that the PLAN will be nothing more than a maritime "speed bump" in the way of an attacking force.
Another contributing reason might be the circumstances of the PLAN's foundation 50 years ago. Starting basically from scratch, the early PLAN consisted largely of Nationalist naval formations that had defected en masse to the Communists. As a result, the PLA never fully trusted its erstwhile naval colleagues and placed reliable army officers in charge. The PLAN also was called into being to solve a specific operational problem—the intended invasion of Taiwan-rather than to carry out a grand strategic design that saw sea power as an important part of Chinese national security.
A fourth reason relates to the combination of domestic factors in China between 1950 and the late 1970s that had a very adverse affect on PLAN development:
- Mao Zedong and the party leadership depended on "mass movements" to engender broad support, and the army played a central role in them.
- Many "forward thinkers" were purged during the Cultural Revolution, when it was better to be "Red" than a technical expert. Navies are inherently technical services and, consequently, suffered inordinately in this environment. Many of today's PLAN senior officers survived in this environment—which should raise questions about their professional foundations.
- China's economy essentially was agricultural, not industrial or technical. More important in a naval context, it was autarkic. Western naval development long has had a close relationship with foreign trade. This economic spur only recently has become a consideration for China.
- China's foreign policy focus through the mid-1980s was on the Third World and land-locked countries. There was no need for a naval presence to show the flag.
- Mao's assessment of the geostrategic environment that China would face predicted both "people's wars" and global conflicts, and, later, ideological conflict with the Soviet Union. In all cases, these would be conflicts that focused on defending China from invasion. The wars on China's periphery with the United States would be based on ideological struggle over territory that, if lost, would put U.S. power directly on China's frontier.
Finally, the PLAN lags behind its Western counterparts in bureaucratic influence, senior command responsibilities, and the other interservice and national perquisites that we tend to associate with a strong navy because it has been at it for less than 20 years. It was not until the early 1980s that the PLAN was assigned an offshore defense role. Today's PLAN is a force in transition, a transition that will make it a far more formidable force in the western Pacific in the coming decade.
Soviet and Russian Influence
Soviet naval doctrine and operational concepts have had a great influence on the PLAN. Beyond the obvious ideological partnership in the early years of the PLAN, and the resurgent close political relationship with Russia today, the main reason China found Soviet (and now Russian) concepts so congenial is because both countries faced similar strategic challenges from the West and the United States. Western strategic thinking generally considered the oceans as a highway to bring the military potential of North America to bear on Eurasia. The natural strategic choice for the Soviets, and today the Chinese, was to seek the military means to defeat this threat.
The Soviets designed a defensive maritime strategy with thresholds established at various distances from their coast. These thresholds became, in effect, "lines in the water." This army style of thinking about strategy then formed the basis for the development of Soviet naval and air capabilities designed to deny the use of the sea to the West, The Soviets reached the high point of this sort of maritime strategic thinking in the mid-1980s. When one compares the Soviet strategy of 15 years ago to what we believe is China's first- and second-island strategic construct, the parallels are striking. Although it recently has become fashionable to talk about China pursuing an anti-access strategy, when scrutinized this strategy appears to embody the same concepts and capabilities that in an earlier decade would have been characterized as sea denial. The Russians today may not be able to field a sea-denial force structure, but they have the weapon systems and know-how to held the Chinese do so.
The Role of Liu Huaqing
Soviet influence is exemplified by the role Admiral Liu Huaqing has played in the development of the PLAN. Admiral Liu, trained in Soviet military schools, was an army officer who was assigned as commander of the PLAN from 1982 until 1988. He then was promoted to vice chairman of China's highest military body, the Central Military Commission, where he served, wearing his green army uniform, from 1989 until 1997.
Liu is credited with framing a maritime strategy to address China's national security concerns. He wanted to change the PLAN's national mission from coastal defense to "offshore defense." This change could have occurred only in the post-Mao era, when the strategy of "people's war" could be reinterpreted.
Liu established a maritime concept of operations that could be translated into a requirement for specific naval capability. By defining three strategic maritime areas that were of great importance to China, he then could present a coherent justification for resources. The island chain of the Kuriles, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia delineates the first area and is vitally important for several reasons: territorial claims, natural resources, and coastal defense. Liu hoped to have a navy in hand by 2000 that would be capable of asserting Chinese control, if required, of this maritime area. The second island chain extends from Japan through the Bonins to Palau and then Indonesia. The target date for achieving PLAN control, or at least denial, of this area was nominally 2020. The third stage was aimed at the rest of the Pacific Ocean. The strategic goal was a PLAN that could act as a global force, or at least a pan-Pacific force, by 2050.
When Liu's thinking is compared to Soviet naval strategy, especially Admiral Sergei Gorshkov's notions of positioning a series of increasingly powerful defensive layers the closer one approached to Russia's coast, the Soviet influence is clear. Arguably, Liu's strategy could be characterized as Soviet naval strategy with Chinese characteristics.
Implementation of an expansive and expensive maritime strategy such as Liu's is constrained by three factors. First, naval modernization, as part of overall PLA military modernization, is not at the top of China's list of priorities for resources.3 Second, the PLAN must compete within the PLA for resources, and the PLA Air Force also is in desperate need of modernization. Third, Liu's sea-denial area encompasses the U.S. treaty allies of Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, which means that if one takes Liu's notions literally, China has to achieve a capability to deny these waters to the United States through a combination of diplomacy and military capability—something not likely to happen in the near term.
Nonetheless, Liu's three-stage concept does provide both a sensible strategic approach for China and a basis for operational planning. It also provides a conceptual force-development template that can be used to establish weapon-systems requirements and to rationalize PLAN force-structure procurement within the Chinese bureaucracy.
Surveillance, Submarines, and Land-based Aircraft
Translating Liu's template into reality requires, at a minimum, three basic capabilities: open-ocean surveillance to locate enemy forces; a submarine force; and a land-based, cruise-missile-firing air force. All of these must work together to defeat approaching naval forces. This was the Soviet model, and it probably is where the PLAN is headed. What we know about the Chinese open-ocean surveillance capability is that for years they have had a reasonably good land-based electronic intercept capability. Space-based surveillance capabilities, however, are more problematic, but China is working to rectify this.
The PLAN's 64-boat submarine force is organized into six flotillas of approximately ten boats each: three flotillas in the North Sea Fleet in the vicinity of Korea on the East China Sea; two flotillas (which include the new Kilos) in the East Sea Fleet opposite Taiwan; and one flotilla in the South Sea Fleet (which is receiving the newly commissioned Mings). The fact that the newest submarines are assigned to the East Sea and South Sea Fleets is a clear indication that the PLAN's strategic orientation has shifted to Taiwan and the South China Sea.
The PLAN has done a laudible job of building an impressive submarine force. At issue is its tactical proficiency. On paper, it takes about 10 years' commissioned service for a submariner to be assigned as an executive officer and about 13 to 15 years to be assigned as a commanding officer. This experience is leavened somewhat by the fact that each submarine does not spend a great deal of time at sea. Apparently, a submarine commanding officer may spend only some 300 days at sea during his entire multiyear tour.
The PLAN Air Force (PLANAF) is a 26,000-person force equipped with some 750 mainly old aircraft. The PLANAF has spent the past 20 years trying to recover from the disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution, when its headquarters and schools were abolished and combat pilots flew fewer than 30 hours of training annually. The PLANAF has begun a gradual retirement of obsolete aircraft, but modernization has been slow and poorly funded, and the force must rely on upgrades to older aircraft such as the F-7, F-8, and B-6.
In terms of long-range strike at sea, the PLANAF still has a way to go before it can mount a cruise-missile threat to ships at sea similar to the Soviet Badger and Backfire threats of the Cold War. The PLANAF has converted a small number of its Badger-equivalent bomber, the B-6, to long-range cruise missile shooters. The B-6D can carry two C-601 antiship cruise missiles. The PLANAF does have a potentially capable airframe in hand that can take a Backfire-like mission profile—the FB-7. This aircraft can carry the C-801 (54-nautical-mile range) cruise missile, and the export version of the FB-7 apparently can carry the improved C-802 (90-nautical-mile range).5
The Officer Corps-Education and Training
Today's PLAN officer corps institutionally is very young. Only in the past 20 years or so has it begun to make the institutional commitment to professionalization. Early coastal defense doctrines not only placed the PLAN in a strictly support role to the army, but it also gave the army control of budget allocations, force development programs, and personnel recruitment. Purges in the 1960s and 1970s and the highly expensive program to construct nuclear-powered attack submarines divested the navy of both quality officers and money.
Despite these problems, a systematic training and education infrastructure was established in the earliest days of the PLAN to produce officers and sailors for every branch of the service. This system began to come into its own because of military educational reforms between 1980 and 1990 and then, in 1994, because of a Central Military Commission directive to focus training and education on "high-tech conditions."
Earlier reforms divided education into command institutions (what would be considered, in the U.S. Navy, professional development for increasingly responsible operational billets) and technical institutions. Some of the officers who go through these programs stay on as faculty, others go to research-and-development institutes, and others return to the operating forces.
The 1994 directive linked training and education at armed forces academic institutions to promotion. PLAN policy now sets minimum standards for assignment as commanding officer of a major surface combatant or submarine. The officer should hold a university degree—preferably in electronics or engineering. Prospective commanding officers also must be graduates of the appropriate professional schools and have experience on the staff of higher operational headquarters.
Today's PLAN appears to have both the educational infrastructure and the policy guidance needed to produce well-educated, professional officers. What still is not clear is how the shore-based training and education is leavened by operational experience at sea.
Speculation on the PLAN's Future
The apparent consensus among the handful of PLAN watchers is that future force-structure developments are unlikely to deviate dramatically from the slow modernization and expansion pattern of the past decade. In the broadest terms this means:
- A decline in patrol craft and minesweepers as China's defense perimeter moves farther from the past.
- Maintenance of the current level of amphibious ships, with the possibility of a slight decline.
- A gradual increase in surface combatants. There is a question as to what the driver for surface combatant force levels will be. It is unlikely surface combatants would be over emphasized because of its vulnerability to U.S. aircraft and submarines.
- A steady increase in attack submarines-both diesel-- and nuclear-powered. Submarines are central to any attempt to blockade Taiwan, and are the best chance the PLAN has to delay or deal with U.S. carrier battle groups.
- Potential acquisition of aircraft carriers. The primary near-term motivation for a carrier would be prestige. This factor cannot be discounted-China is the only member of the permanent five on the U.N. Security Council without one, and, in Asia, both Thailand and India have rudimentary carrier capabilities.
- Several predictable changes for the PLANAF, focusing on a smaller, more capable force of around 400-500 aircraft. All new aircraft probably will be air refuelable for operations over the South China Sea.
If China indeed has adopted Soviet naval doctrine, then it follows that Soviet naval evolution over the course of the Cold War should provide a yardstick by which to measure Chinese naval developments.
Conclusions
The PLAN, long the poor stepchild of the Chinese armed forces, almost certainly will play an increasingly important—perhaps the most important—role in the calculus of Chinese national security in the 21st century. This is not because of a Chinese Mahan-like figure who has totally reversed centuries of continentalist strategic culture, but rather for the more prosaic but real reasons of national self-interest, threat orientation, and unfinished issues of sovereignty.
The following considerations should force Beijing strategic planners to focus more closely on China's maritime frontier:
- Because of a mix of good fortune and adroit diplomacy, China does not face a threat of invasion or a crisis provoking territorial dispute with any continental neighbor.
- Beijing's economy is centered on its eastern seaboard.
- The challenges of the China-Taiwan dynamic have a decided maritime nature.
- The continued regional competition in the South China Sea challenges China's assertions of sovereignty over the Spratly Islands.
- Beijing's military diplomacy with countries on the "rim land" of East Asia is increasingly active.
- The historic reality that China's "century of humiliation" was caused by Western nations that came via the sea.
As logical as all this seems to a retired U.S. naval officer, one must confront the fact that the evidence is mixed on whether the Chinese leadership shares these views. Navies take a long time to evolve when missions are changed fundamentally. The PLAN is in the midst of such an evolution-one that demands close attention.
Rear Admiral McDevitt is director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the CAN Corporation. Before leaving active duty in 1997, he commanded the Peacock (MSC-198), the Oldendorf (DD-972), Destroyer Squadron 13, the George Washington (CVN-73) Battle Group, and the National War College.