China’s Global Maritime Ambitions 10,000 Miles Beyond Taiwan

The year is 2050, and to American strategists, the so-called decade of maximum danger seems like the distant past. Although historians and defense analysts in the early 2020s predicted a violent clash between China and the United States over Taiwan, the tension resolved anticlimactically and peacefully. The amphibious invasion many of the wonks were expecting around 2027 never came to pass, and successive governments in Taiwan slowly warmed up to—or were cowed by—Beijing. In the 2030s, as a gesture of friendship, the pro-Beijing Kuomintang, then in power, invited People’s Liberation Army (PLA) detachments to the island for maritime and land drills; they agreed to let PLA forces remain stationed there on a rotational schedule. Taipei renounced its diplomatic and political separation from China, and local officials invited Beijing to enforce a national security law like the one successfully implemented in Hong Kong in the early 2020s. 

The United States, still distracted by the internal domestic political rifts that had begun to deepen at the turn of the millennium, was in no position to object or intervene. Many Americans of the 2030s questioned the wisdom of risking war with another superpower if most Taiwanese themselves wanted reunification with the mainland. Yet, because U.S. strategists had devoted so much of their thinking to the Taiwan scenario in the 2020s, they were not ready for China’s expanded presence in the Western Hemisphere, closer to home. While they focused on Taiwan, which turned out to be a non-issue, China had been signing basing contracts and building out forward-operating, blue-water naval forces. From the Middle East to Western Africa, and even across Latin America, the PLA Navy (PLAN) ruled the seas.

Back to 2024, no one can say for sure whether Xi Jinping will decide to risk it all on a Taiwan invasion. But while preparing for that contingency, the United States must not ignore the greatest long-term threat to U.S. maritime power: a globe-spanning PLAN that can threaten the U.S. Navy’s command of the world ocean. Since World War II, no country has come close to challenging that command, but China is poised to do so within the next several decades. As students of history and of maritime theory, the PLAN’s leaders have a keen understanding of what is needed to accomplish what can only be called China’s maritime dream. 

For its part, the United States must anticipate the PLAN’s strategy and develop a counterstrategy that prevents this outcome. This must be a long-term plan that greatly expands investment in naval force structure, not only to deter an invasion of Taiwan in the near term, but also to thwart China’s long-term designs to contest the United States’ local sea lines. It will not be easy to develop and follow such a strategy, but without keeping this clear goal in mind, the U.S. Navy could someday find its homeland littorals dominated by Chinese maritime forces.

Ten Thousand Miles

China aspires to build a naval force that operates across the global maritime domain, well into the blue water of the world’s oceans. In late 2021, the PLAN surpassed the U.S. Navy in hull count to become the largest navy in the world, but most of its naval operations have remained confined to its home waters and the littorals near the Chinese mainland.¹ This will soon begin to change. To see why, consider what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been saying and doing.

The CCP has made it clear in its public communications that it seeks a navy that has the capability to operate globally. When Xi Jinping said the PLA must become a “world-class” military by 2050 at the CCP’s 19th Party Congress in 2017, his words were literally “worldwide first-class military.”² Scholars associated with China’s National Defense University consider “overseas military operations in the ocean” an objective worth pursuing.³ A 2019 white paper from China’s State Council Information Office states that China is building “far seas” forces, and other white papers have argued for protecting China’s extensive sea lines of communication (SLOCs).⁴ 

But it is not only China’s words that reveal the intent to build a blue-water navy capable of global operations; China is actively developing this capability today. As part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—Xi Jinping’s signature global investment program—Chinese state-sponsored companies have secured operating rights for ports in several foreign countries well outside China’s traditional sphere of influence in East Asia. China insists these efforts are for “win-win” commercial partnerships, but many China watchers suspect several of these overseas BRI ports could be operated as bases for PLAN warships.⁵ 

While China’s only official overseas naval base is in Djibouti, it could convert several of its existing commercial ports into military bases. Such dual-use facilities—whose purpose could be both commercial and military—would follow a pattern of other Chinese investments in recent years. One of the first such facilities built within the BRI is ostensibly a space observation center in Las Lajas, Patagonia, Argentina. The station, which is run by the Strategic Space Force, a branch of the PLA, has caused controversy in Argentina because Buenos Aires has no physical oversight of the station’s operations.⁶ While not a naval facility, the Las Lajas base is concerning not only because it could be used to track U.S. military satellites, but also because it portends further PLA presence in the hemisphere.⁷

Another example of the PLA expanding its presence in Latin America was brought to light in June 2023, when the U.S. State Department reported that China has been developing a military facility in Cuba for the purpose of joint military training. While Cuba and other authoritarian states in the hemisphere have hosted anti-U.S. forces for decades, the difference with this facility is that it is part of China’s “Project 141,” a secretive military logistics support network that aims to give China a worldwide presence.⁸ The U.S. military is taking notice; Army General Laura Richardson, head of U.S. Southern Command, testified before the House Armed Services Committee that China is on a “relentless march” to replace the United States as a leader in the region.⁹ Similarly, Richardson’s predecessor, Navy Admiral Craig Faller, testified in 2021, “We are losing our positional advantage in this hemisphere and immediate action is needed to reverse this trend.”¹⁰

Aside from its growing presence in Latin America, Beijing looks intent on building a network of dual-use facilities along the U.S. maritime periphery. On the Atlantic side, China has been trying to establish a permanent military base in Equatorial Guinea since 2019.¹¹ While most of China’s engagement in Africa has focused on nations bordering the Indian Ocean, establishing a naval base on Africa’s Atlantic coast would give the PLAN a base of operations with open SLOCs to the U.S. mainland. The Commander, U.S. Africa Command, Army General Stephen Townsend, testified, “By 2030, Chinese military facilities and technical collection sites in Africa will allow Beijing to project power eastward into the Middle East and Indo-Pacific Theaters and west into the Atlantic.”¹²

China’s Global Maritime Dream

Throughout the 2020s, the United States pursued a whole-of-government approach to prevent an invasion of Taiwan. Learning from Russia’s war with Ukraine, the U.S. defense industry ramped up its munitions production rates to ensure it had plenty of weapons available to send to Taipei. It even succeeded at building up the submarine industrial base that had struggled during the first part of the decade, ensuring it could sink an invasion force crossing the Taiwan Strait. By 2030, U.S. shipbuilders had managed to produce submarines at a rate of more than two Virginia-class attack submarines and one Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarine each year.

But while the U.S. defense industry met this demand for advanced submarines and precision-guided munitions, Beijing was launching new warships at a much faster rate. The gap in platform numbers between the two navies continued to grow, as new copies of the PLAN’s sleek Type 055 Renhai-class cruiser slid down the rails monthly. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy was forced to decommission its aging Ticonderoga-class cruisers and some of its littoral combat ships, and struggled to make up for these losses in new hulls. Without the ships to compete, the U.S. Navy faced contested SLOCs near its own shores.

In the mid-2040s, Beijing began “escorting” merchant shipments into and around the ports it controlled, including through the Panama Canal. For these services, Beijing began charging fees—payable in yuan—for any ships flagged under another country. States could avoid this tax if they agreed to certain demands, such as allowing China’s fishing fleets access to their waters or handing over to Beijing Chinese dissidents living within their borders. To refuse these demands risked seeing the PLAN disrupt the flow of trade to their shores. The U.S. maintained naval supremacy near its own coasts with its still powerful navy, but the era of global freedom of the seas was effectively over. 

Deng, Meet Mahan

Why is China intent on building a globe-spanning naval presence? Some of the practical reasons include its need to protect its international commercial investments, to expand the waters where its vast fishing fleet can operate, or even to distract the United States from its focus on East and Southeast Asia. But more important, Beijing is seeking to revise the world order the United States and its allies built after their victory in World War II.¹³ As former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday pointed out in the 2022 CNO’s Navigation Plan, U.S. national security rests on the U.S. Navy’s ability to provide “unrestricted seaborne trade, unimpeded access to markets, and a free and open rules-based order.”¹⁴ 

Beijing’s strategy has not been to challenge the U.S.-supported global order outright, but to slowly build the capacity to do so. In 1990, Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping released his famous 24-character strategy, which stated that China should “hide our capacities and bide our time.”¹⁵ The hide-and-bide strategy, as it became known, was used as a recipe to grow China from a poor nation into a global superpower. The West welcomed China into international institutions hoping that it would soften its authoritarian policies, encouraged by Deng’s economic reforms. But since the rise of Xi Jinping, China has refused to reform further and instead has become more overtly authoritarian. China has militarized the atolls in the South China Sea despite promising not to, rapidly built up its military, invested in cutting-edge weapons, and threatened Taiwan with numerous air defense identification zone incursions. Politically, it continues repressing freedoms, from committing genocide against the Uighur minority in Xinjiang to repressing speech in Hong Kong. The era of “hide and bide” is over. Or is it?  

Hide and bide lives on in China’s maritime strategy. While China does not expect to challenge the U.S. Navy’s maritime superiority anytime soon, it is slowly growing its battle force and its network of potential bases. This strategy is in line with the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, whom Chinese navalists have for years admired.¹⁶ Mahan argued that great powers’ navies require overseas bases from which they can operate to contest SLOCs and key choke points: “the base, the objective, and the communications . . . are the conditions of the problem by which the distribution of naval force is ultimately to be determined.”¹⁷ With the dual-use ports it is developing in Latin America, Africa, and even in the Pacific, the PLAN is developing the kind of naval force distribution Mahan called for. From these points, the PLAN could threaten U.S. naval forces, keeping them in a defensive posture and diverting them from threatening the PLAN in its own home waters. “Success will certainly attend him who drives his adversary into the position of the defensive and keeps him there.”¹⁸

A hide-and-bide maritime strategy would also make sense in the context of other military theorists’ ideas, including those of maritime strategist Julian Corbett and Sun Tzu. Corbett, in contrast to Mahan, argued that the supreme object of maritime warfare is command of the sea—not necessarily to threaten the adversary’s fleet, but to control maritime communications. This is the object of maritime warfare because it allows a state to threaten its adversary’s maritime commerce or “national life.”¹⁹ A maritime power need not gain full sea control to contest another state’s SLOCs, because temporary, local sea control might suffice. By controlling key ports along the U.S. periphery and eventually operating flotillas out of them, the PLAN effectively would be able to threaten temporary local sea control even in the U.S. home waters of the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific. Just having this option would give the PLAN the flexibility to keep the U.S. Navy guessing and off balance—much like the distributed maritime operations (DMO) concept the U.S. Navy is pursuing in the western Pacific.²⁰

A hide-and-bide maritime strategy, coupled with China’s well-known antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy in the South China Sea, embodies Sun Tzu’s concept of cheng and ch’i forces within the maritime domain. These two forces complement one another to form a kind of grand maritime strategy. For Sun Tzu, the cheng is the overt, direct, and visible force that pins the enemy down, while the ch’i is the “extraordinary action,” the “other means” that works to defeat the enemy.²¹ In the case of Chinese maritime strategy, the cheng force is the A2/AD network close to the Chinese mainland—the antiship ballistic-missile weapons engagement zone, the militarized islands, and the like—which is the current focus of U.S. strategy. The unorthodox ch’i could be the large global maritime network that China is building.

Attacking the Strategy

Preventing a Taiwan invasion is important for U.S. prosperity and security, but it cannot come at the cost of failing to head off a more dangerous long-term contingency. The United States needs a complete maritime strategy that not only accounts for the near-term need to deter a move on Taiwan, but also addresses the very real long-term threat the PLAN poses to sea control. U.S. maritime strategy recently has been so narrowly focused on defending Taiwan that planners have failed to articulate a cohesive global strategy for how the U.S. Navy will preserve that blue-water sea power well into the future. It must develop such a strategy soon or else risk losing even local command of the seas in the Western Hemisphere—something that has not been contested for more than 200 years. 

Any sound naval strategy would need to counter both the cheng and ch’i components of Beijing’s plan and then lay out a roadmap for achieving the force levels and composition needed to do this. The Navy’s 1986 Maritime Strategy would be a good exemplar for a modern-day strategy, as some have already argued.²² Worries about the Soviet naval threat then are similar to those about the PLAN threat today. Before the U.S. Navy developed its Maritime Strategy, the Soviet Navy outnumbered it 3.5 to 1 overall and 1.8 to 1 in open ocean ships.²³ Ultimately, the U.S. Navy realized it needed a force large enough both to protect SLOCs in the Atlantic and Pacific and to project forces forward quickly in a time of war.²⁴ From this realization came the argument for a much larger naval force of 600 ships.²⁵ 

In a similar way, U.S. strategic planners today must not only plan for the forces needed to threaten and deter a Taiwan invasion force, but they must also plan for building a force that can simultaneously protect SLOCs closer to home. Of course, this means an all-of-government approach that includes diplomatic engagement with countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific. In terms of naval force structure, the United States must invest in a robust shipbuilding base that can compete with China’s. Recent reports that Chinese shipbuilding capacity is a staggering 232 times that of the United States only intensify the need for such an investment, which should not only include an ambitious naval building plan but should also focus on revitalizing the nation’s Merchant Marine to provide for the “national life” that Corbett describes.²⁶

Today’s U.S. Navy shipbuilding plan is only a continuation plan, lacking an obvious strategic basis. A recent fleet study called for a 373-ship battle force, but the details are classified, making it difficult to grade the Navy’s homework.²⁷ As it was with the 1986 Maritime Strategy, the Navy should be open and ambitious with its current strategic goals, and then go about matching the ways and means of its strategy with its ends. Those ends should no doubt include developing the forces needed to deter or thwart a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but if U.S. maritime strategy is myopically focused only on this acute, near-term contingency, it will come at the expense of having no long-term plan to stop China from worldwide control of the maritime battlespace.

The 10,000 Mile Dragon

Chairman Emeritus Xi, frail with age (he was in his late-90s) but still vital, made a rare public appearance at the Communist Party’s centennial in 2049. He had much to celebrate—including a peaceful de facto unification with Taiwan under his watch, of course. But more important, he realized the party’s China Dream to build a globe-spanning, world-class military. He made some brief remarks, beaming with pride as he spoke about the Chinese dragon that now spanned 10,000 miles from nose to tail across the globe. It was not a flashy invasion or even a direct confrontation with the United States that led to this; it was the unglamorous slow and steady development of global sea control.