What Imperial Germany Teaches About China’s Naval Basing Ambitions

“The most significant threat, I think, from China would be to gain a militarily useful naval facility on the Atlantic coast of Africa . . . They’re working aggressively to get that . . . and it’s my number one global power competition concern.”

—General Stephen Townsend, U.S. Army, Commander, U.S. Africa Command, 22 April 2021¹ 

“I am quite hopeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbor; I must plough the seas doing as much mischief as I can until my ammunition is exhausted or a foe far superior in power succeeds in catching me.”

—Vice Admiral Maximilian Von Spee, Commander, German East Asia Squadron, following his victory at Coronel, Chile, 3 November 1914²

At first glance, the quotes above seem unrelated. General Townsend repeatedly stressed the dangers posed by Chinese ambitions to establish a naval base in West Africa. His successor, Marine Corps General Michael Langley, later said, “We can’t let them have a base on the West Coast, because it would change the [geostrategic] dynamics.”³ The United States remains worried about the military implications of an eventual Chinese base there.⁴

How do the forlorn words of a German admiral isolated in the South Pacific 110 years ago relate to this concern? Comparisons between today’s U.S.–China maritime competition and that between Britain and Germany in the opening years of the 1900s are common, but they overlook the Imperial German Navy’s far-seas activities.⁵ Vice Admiral Von Spee, and the experiences of the East Asia Squadron with its base at Tsingtao (today Qingdao) can teach us much about the far-seas ambitions of a rising naval power.⁶ 

The Kaiser’s Germany took over Tsingtao on a 99-year lease in 1898. A German squadron had operated in Asia without a base for decades; Tsingtao would become its homeport. The fishing village and old fort were soon turned into one of the finest dockyards and nicest cities on China’s coast.⁷ For 17 years the East Asia Squadron operated from this city and projected German influence across the Pacific. 

When World War I broke out, Von Spee’s force, then on a tour of Truk and Ponape, made a run for home via South America. It defeated a British squadron at Coronel off Chile, but it was in turn destroyed in December by British battlecruisers at the Falklands. Germany’s ambition to be a power in Asia sank with the squadron.

Unwinnable Pacific Scenario

Germany’s naval leaders always understood that neither the base nor the squadron would stand much chance in a war with a major maritime power. Germany could not supply or reinforce its Asian or Pacific outposts, nor defend them with the forces already present—thus Von Spee’s desperate words on the heels of his victory at Coronel. With Tsingtao about to fall to a Japanese siege and no other bases to fall back on, and dependent on neutral ports to fuel his coal-hungry cruisers, Von Spee realized his best chance was to break through to Germany, causing what havoc he could on the way.

Prewar German planning had recognized the likelihood of such an outcome.⁸ Naval Staff operations orders for foreign stations directed cruiser squadrons to engage in commerce raiding in the event of a war and identified four Kriegsfälle (war cases): case A against the United States, case B against France and/or Russia, case C against Britain, and case D with Japan.⁹ Von Spee noted that the success of commerce raiding depended on the extent of naval opposition and the availability of coal.¹⁰ Case D he saw as the most difficult scenario:

One cannot expect a successful defense of Tsingtao by open-water operations of my cruiser squadron. I am of the opinion that in case of war [with Japan] the cruiser squadron must leave Chinese waters immediately.¹¹

In the fall of 1914, Von Spee faced cases C and D combined, with reinforced Royal Navy forces in Asia and in the Americas, and the entire Japanese fleet in between. Tsingtao was besieged in late August, and Commonwealth and Japanese forces occupied all German island outposts in the Pacific by mid-September.¹²

Fuel and Ammunition Doom the Enterprise

A Chinese base in West Africa would similarly be indefensible. A squadron based there would face most of the same challenges in a conflict with the United States that the Germans faced in East Asia.

An enormous amount of German planning before World War I concerned the provision of coal.¹³ When war came, the search for coal drove many of Von Spee’s decisions. A Chinese squadron in the Atlantic would likewise struggle to refuel. Bunkering is not always an option in Africa, and pulling into neutral ports in wartime reveals a ship’s location and carries other complications.¹⁴ An assigned tanker would become a single point of potential failure for offensive operations and would force the other ships to operate together, instead of independently—a choice with which Von Spee also struggled. 

Unlike coal, oil cannot easily be extracted from captured merchant ships at sea, a practice that extended the range of German raiders. This is no peripheral matter. Chinese surface ships are rated as having an operational range of 5,000 nautical miles at economical speeds.¹⁵ The distance from Bata, Equatorial Guinea, to a mid-Atlantic point between Gibraltar and Florida is 4,500 nm—a journey of 13 days at 15 knots.¹⁶ A squadron based in the Gulf of Guinea would have limited ability to operate in the North Atlantic, where it could attack U.S.–European sea lanes or shore targets.

Ammunition too would present a challenge. After Coronel, Von Spee’s magazines were half-empty, with no replacements available anywhere closer than Germany. Modern guided-missile ships carry far fewer war shots than gun-armed cruisers and are much harder to reload, requiring specialized in-port facilities.¹⁷ Where would a Chinese Type 052D get new land-attack or antiship missiles, and where could they reload? Once the first loadout was fired, the ships would present almost no meaningful offensive threat.

An untitled midwar document buried in the German Naval Staff’s prewar planning files assessed the cruisers and rated their contribution to the war effort as disappointing. The document highlights Tsingtao’s unfavorable defensive situation, stating: “Stationing ships overseas without a defensible base proved to be a mistake.”¹⁸ The same would be true of a Chinese squadron based in West Africa, and is probably just as true for their Djibouti base. China would struggle to reinforce and resupply that base from across the Indian Ocean, where the dominant naval power is the U.S. Navy and its allies. This might explain in part why no People’s Liberation Army Navy ships have been homeported at Djibouti. Bases far from homeland support are extremely vulnerable, and naval forces on distant stations find their freedom of action severely curtailed.

Such a force could cause some trouble in the early days of a conflict. Von Spee tied down dozens of Allied warships, caused convoys to be rerouted, and got the First Sea Lord fired. The Allies lost 70 merchant ships and a cruiser squadron to Germany’s surface raiders, and the battlecruisers that finally dealt with Von Spee were not available a month later for the Battle of Dogger Bank.¹⁹ But by March 1915, all German surface combatants had been swept from the seas. The loss of Von Spee’s squadron was a severe blow to the German Navy’s prestige. Such could be the fate of a forward-deployed Chinese squadron.

Naval Diplomacy

China has surely considered these factors, meaning that if Beijing pursues a base in West Africa, it would likely be for non-wartime purposes. Examining the German East Asia Squadron’s 17 years of peacetime activities can shed light on these purposes. There were three primary reasons Germany, with a global commercial presence and the second-largest merchant fleet in the world, established Tsingtao and the East Asia Squadron:²⁰

• Represent the German Empire and enhance German imperial prestige worldwide.

• Protect German diplomatic and commercial interests and the German diaspora.

• Enhance Germany’s influence over Asian affairs.

China likely contemplates similar purposes for any base on Africa’s Atlantic coast.²¹ 

Not much has been written about the peacetime activities of the East Asia Squadron. Massie describes Von Spee’s time in command before the war as “an endless sequence of receptions, banquets, lawn parties, and balls.”²² Hans Karr, in one of the few books to cover the entire history of the East Asia Squadron, devotes just two paragraphs to its activities during the prewar period.²³ For detail one must turn to primary sources like logbooks and routine squadron reports. These reveal intense and varied employment that advanced German purposes while providing Berlin critical information and a tool for shaping events.

The squadron consisted of up to six cruisers, seven gunboats, two torpedo boats, and various support vessels. Ships remained on station for up to a decade, with individual vessels replaced when they became obsolete. That ships remained so long on station is a testament to the development of Tsingtao as a naval dockyard. Crews remained two years, with half rotating back to Germany each summer. Ships were underway a lot, usually in three-month deployments to specific regions, followed by four to eight weeks of upkeep and workups at Tsingtao. 

Bimonthly squadron commander activity reports provide a window on East Asia in the early 1900s.²⁴ They make clear that ships on the Asia station performed what naval historian Geoffrey Till calls “naval diplomacy.”²⁵ They carried out an intense program of exercises, official port visits, intervention in civil disturbances and uprisings, and assistance to civilians of all nations, from aiding merchant ships in distress, to protecting property and persons ashore.²⁶ Liberty was generous.²⁷ The activity report of July 1909, a year of relative calm, is indicative of life on the Asiatic Station, with squadron ships removing exiled rebels, investigating illegal fishing, towing a Norwegian merchant ship off a reef, fighting a dockyard fire in Nagasaki, and losing a commanding officer to injury in a hunting accident on the Yangtze River.²⁸ 

Diplomatic representation was an important function. The squadron commander was the senior German official in Asia and dined with the Dowager Empress Cixi, the Japanese Emperor, and the King of Siam, as well as meeting with local officials and foreign dignitaries. The flagship carried Prince Henry of Prussia to the funeral of the Meiji Emperor in 1913. Other naval officers performed similar representational duties.²⁹ Squadron ships carried out diplomatic and intelligence tasks for German consuls and island governors and exchanged salutes and visits with warships of all nations. Tsingtao itself served as a sort of German capital in the East, hosting official visits from warships and missions of every nation. 

In all these interactions, the squadron commander reported good relations, with one exception: the U.S. Navy consistently failed to make a good impression. After the July 1909 visit of the U.S. 3rd Cruiser Squadron to Tsingtao, the squadron commander reported, “in contrast to previous visits, the American sailors displayed passable discipline.”³⁰ Two years later, after the USS Saratoga (ACR-2) and Albany (CL-23) visited Tsingtao, the governor of Tsingtao commented on the shameful drunkenness of the American junior officers.³¹ An amusing anecdote furthers this negative perception of the U.S. Navy. A liberty party from the SMS Leipzig caused the “Rocking Stone of Amoy” to crash through the garden of a Japanese resident, damaging his fruit trees. The incident was covered extensively in the press, laying blame on the Germans.³² However, the German consul’s investigation revealed that a week earlier, sailors from a U.S. warship had used tools to deliberately weaken the stone’s base, leaving the inscription “This stone has been removed by Americans.” Nonetheless, Germany paid an indemnity of $250 “in order not to muddy the good relations with the Chinese authorities of Amoy.”³³

A Tool for Shaping Events

Four major conflicts erupted during this period. During the Spanish-American War, Vice Admiral Otto von Diederichs nearly snatched the Philippines out from under U.S. Navy Rear Admiral George Dewey’s nose at Manila Bay.³⁴ During the Boxer Rebellion, the squadron made significant contributions to the relief of Peking.³⁵ As the Russo-Japanese War proceeded, the East Asia Squadron reported on Japanese tactics, interned Russian warships at Tsingtao, and destroyed floating mines. Amid the 1911 Chinese Revolution, the squadron was instrumental in protecting German citizens and property up and down the coast and rivers. German naval power gave the Kaiser freedom of action in the region, a role commensurate with other foreign nations, and important input to Berlin’s global diplomatic efforts.³⁶

Germany also learned how to operate a navy at distance. Part of this is obviously fleet management: maintenance and personnel planning, dealing with different climatic conditions, and logistics and contracting support. But it also gained a cadre of experienced, worldly seamen. Squadron ships spent more time at sea than their sisters in the High Seas Fleet and visited more varied ports. Photo albums and memoires from East Asia Squadron sailors make clear they “joined the navy and saw the world.”³⁷ With more than 1,000 sailors rotating home every year, by 1914, at least 5,000 members of the High Seas Fleet would have served in Tsingtao.³⁸ Similar considerations likely drive Chinese thinking today for a navy with little out-of-area experience and almost no naval tradition.

Tsingtao and the German East Asia Squadron show what can be expected from a Chinese force stationed at a base in West Africa. There would, of course, be differences. Whereas Imperial Germany’s interests in Asia were commercial, many of China’s interests in Africa concern resource extraction. But Chinese acquisition of African resources would create a major risk. Relying on them would expose China should the resources be cut off. Preventing that severance would be almost impossible in an all-out naval war. 

Ambitions for distant bases should therefore be seen as setting the theater to secure peacetime access to resources and regional acceptance of China’s reach. It is one piece of China’s broader strategy to reshape the international order at the expense of others—pushing norms to get what it wants while embarrassing its rivals. For example, Beijing perhaps imagines that the next time sailors from the USS Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB-4) board Chinese-flagged fishing vessels with a Gulf of Guinea partner nation, instead of a strongly worded diplomatic protest, a Chinese destroyer could appear near the scene.³⁹

Analysis of Chinese basing ambitions should recognize that naval bases on distant shores serve peacetime, not wartime, ends. The tendency to see everything China does as a direct military threat misses Beijing’s whole-of-government efforts to gain access to resources and influence. A base in West Africa would indicate China is growing confident that it can achieve its global ambitions while avoiding war with the United States. In this sense, it should perhaps be more concerning that little progress appears to have been made toward such a base.