In April photographs of a Chinese naval base on Hainan, a large island in the South China Sea, were published worldwide. They show extensive piers and also tunnels sunk into the hillside; it is not entirely clear whether ships or submarines can enter the tunnels. One photo shows the entire tunnel, including its bottom, so it appears to be entirely above water. Another photograph shows a Chinese strategic nuclear-powered submarine tied to a pier at the base. Apparently the existence of the base has been known since 2002, and it is somewhat surprising that news organizations, with access to commercial imaging satellites, have paid it no attention until now. Those who published the photographs considered the base a major new development in the long-standing Chinese attempt to dominate the South China Sea, and probably also a new threat to Taiwan.
There is no question that China is investing heavily in military, including naval, power. The announced 17 percent annual increase in defense spending is certainly intended to carry that message, although skeptics have suggested that no official Chinese figures are particularly meaningful. For example, the announced increase may include admission of spending formerly kept secret, as the Chinese government finds itself compelled to accept accounting practices common in the West. It may also be an attempt to intimidate other governments, particularly Taiwan's, which certainly cannot sustain that sort of growth rate in defense.
There are also suggestions that the Russians, who supply so many of the advanced Chinese weapons, are being compelled to raise their own prices (by much more than 17 percent) as they find themselves adopting more capitalistic practices. Surely some were shocked, for example, to discover that the Barrikady plant making the main new Russian strategic missile, Topol-M, has been declared bankrupt and is being liquidated. Presumably its problem was that the Russian government was trying to avoid paying what the plant's products actually cost. Price was a meaningless concept under the old Soviet system, but now it has much the same meaning that it has in the West. Given our own limited successes in estimating defense costs, we can imagine how much worse it is for an inexperienced Russian bureaucracy—and how that affects its customers.
How Useful?
All of that having been said, what does the emergence of a hardened naval base in the South China Sea mean? The idea is not new. Late in the Soviet era, one or more strategic submarine bases were built on the Kola Peninsula, complete with the sort of tunnels (into which submarines could certainly go) we are now seeing in south China. Before that the Royal Swedish Navy used to entertain visitors by showing them camouflaged nuclear-hardened tunnels big enough to house its destroyers. In both cases the idea was that ships were most vulnerable when static. An enemy might well imagine that his main chance to destroy either naval forces or a naval strategic deterrent was to hit the port with a big nuclear weapon.
The reality is a bit different. The hit on the port pays off only if all of the deterrent is sitting quietly at the pier, and—an important caveat—if the attacker thinks it a good idea to begin the war with a nuclear attack. Such an attack would be a horrifically dangerous gamble. The more likely scenario would be a war breaking out without an initial nuclear attack. There would be lots of time for the submarines at any base to disperse (if the war began with a nuclear attack, the base would be the least important initial target).
In the West, most of the strategic submarines are always at sea. How much would an enemy gain by, say, vaporizing the U.S. submarine base in Bangor, Washington? He might kill one or two submarines. How much would we gain by moving Bangor into a nearby mountain? We were much more interested in choosing geography which would make it difficult for an enemy to ambush our submarines on the way in or out?something which really could or would be done in any stage of a war.
Given the long endurance of nuclear submarines, the details of base location really do not determine where in a large region the submarines can operate. Much the same can be said of surface ships, given their ability to fuel at sea. The announcement of the Hainan base certainly dramatizes Chinese interest in the South China Sea, but even without a base the Chinese can steam where they like in that area. It is a lot more significant to ask whether naval operations well south of China can receive sufficient air support. Until the Chinese have a carrier, the answer is probably no. They may be able to launch operations against enemy naval forces operating in the South China Sea, but they will have limited ability to project power or to support their own surface forces.
Anyone who wonders about such operations may care to remember the travails of the Royal Navy in the eastern Mediterranean in 1941-42. Support from land bases proved useless, although aircraft from those same bases could certainly prevent the Italians from running their own convoys to North Africa. The technology is obviously different now on both sides, but in some sense both have scaled up equivalently.
So which developments in China really do matter? For the South China Sea, the most interesting one, now far past, was the Chinese decision to put garrisons on a few small islands, in effect claiming sovereignty (though not effectively). The Chinese have been building an amphibious force, and they have been replacing antiship missiles on some older frigates with bombardment rockets. Taiwan is close enough to the Chinese coast that aircraft based ashore would probably be useful for supporting a landing, much as aircraft in England supported the Normandy landing during World War II.
For operations further afield, the Chinese would need an aircraft carrier. The ex-Varyag has been sitting in a Chinese yard for some years. Depending on who is writing, she is essentially in storage or is being refitted, the work being mainly internal and electronic. If the refit is real, then her emergence would mean a lot more than a showy nuclear-hardened base.
Open Coast
The most interesting difference between the Chinese situation at sea and that of the Soviets during the Cold War is the relative openness of the Chinese coast. Choke points are not nearly so well defined. Water conditions make long-range sonar searches far more difficult. It is true that a chain of islands (Japan and the Philippines, for example) blocks Chinese access to the open sea, but there are so many gaps in this chain that it seems ill-adapted to the sort of choke point strategy the U.S. Navy and its allies pursued during the Cold War.
Chinese geography is also ill-adapted to the Soviet version of the choke point strategy, which was to set up bastions within which their most valuable naval assets—their strategic submarines—could, they hoped, be protected. We thought that our attack submarines could penetrate the bastions and thus pin down the bulk of Soviet naval forces trying to protect those valued assets. The bastions made sense if protection could be concentrated in the choke points. Without choke points, there cannot be bastions.
As for the tunnels, the submarines still have to get to sea to fire their missiles (which can't quite reach us from Hainan). Without any means of controlling the area near the hard base, how are the Chinese supposed to keep us from mining the vicinity? Of lurking offshore waiting to shoot? How good is their ASW? Taking into account the poor water conditions in the South China Sea, one would have to be rather skeptical on that score.
Given all of these considerations, the expensive excavations on Hainan are somewhat difficult to explain in our terms. Presumably this sort of work contributes noticeably to the announced increase in defense spending, but in naval terms it seems somewhat naive. The Chinese would have been better served buying a few more nuclear submarines so as to maintain deterrent patrols, precisely to make it impossible for us to neutralize that deterrent by dominating the area near their base.
The impression one gets from this development is that of non-naval thinkers who equate military power with the kind of fixed bases so important for, say, ground-based air forces. That in turn would be consistent with an image of intense Chinese interest in dominating the seas around the country without having built up a sea-oriented way of thinking. For example, some years ago, the Chinese simply transferred numerous officers from the army to the navy. That gained them many more "naval" personnel, but probably not navy-minded ones.