The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) partnered with the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College for a fourth year and with the George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University for the second year to convene the 20th annual People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Conference in Carlisle, Pennsylvania from 25–27 September 2009.

The conference, “The PLA at Home and Abroad: Assessing the Operational Capabilities of China’s Military,” began with a keynote address by Admiral Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, and explored the broad range of operational capabilities of China’s military.

Conference Publications: Daniel Alderman, 2009 PLA Conference Colloquium Brief: The “PLA at Home and Abroad.” Released by the Strategic Studies Institute in January 2010, this colloquium brief summarizes key insights from the September 25-27, 2009 conference.

Dr. Andrew S. Erickson, Associate Professor in the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College, gave a presentation about China’s contributions to the security of seaborne commerce in Asia. In Erickson’s opinion, China is contributing increasingly to the security of the global maritime commons as a major maritime strategic stakeholder. It has done so by participating in such efforts to secure maritime commerce as the Container Security Initiative (CSI), by supporting Southeast Asian nations in their efforts to fight piracy, and by playing a valuable and growing role in counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. China’s contributions in these areas are rightly receiving approbation from the international community. While events in areas closer to China’s shores, particularly in East Asia, may impact Beijing’s interests most directly, its growing economic and resource interests and international position necessitate increasingly more distant presence. This may create new opportunities for cooperation in such areas as the Gulf of Aden: separated from their nations’ respective maritime claims by significant distance, the maritime forces of the Asia-Pacific, including those of the U.S. and China, may find a “safe strategic space” for new forms of maritime partnership. Further contributions to collective sea lane security can help to reassure other nations that China’s rise will be both peaceful and beneficial to the world.

Professor Andrew S. Erickson, China Maritime Studies Institute

Lecture summarized in John W. Kennedy, “Is China Focusing on Seapower,” Newport Navalog, Vol. 109, No. 17, 30 April 2010, pp. 3, 14.

Time: Thursday 22 April, 12 noon-1 pm

Location: 2nd Deck, Naval War College Museum, Newport, RI 02841-1207

Point of Contact: John W. Kennedy, Director of Museum Education and Public Outreach, tel. (401) 841-7276

China Goes to Sea is a collection of essays edited by Professors Andrew Erickson, Lyle Goldstein and Carnes Lord of the Naval War College. To shed light on current Chinese naval developments, the authors examine cases of attempted transformation from continental power to maritime power throughout history, from the Persian Empire to the Soviet Union, and determine the reasons for success or failure. The latest example of attempted maritime transformation is China’s turn toward the sea, as manifested in its stunning rise in global shipbuilding markets, wide-ranging merchant marine, expansive offshore energy exploration, growing fishing fleet, and increasingly modern navy. Unlike other works that view China in isolation, this comprehensive assessment of China’s potential as a genuine maritime power places China in a larger world historical context. Without underestimating the enduring pull of China’s past as it embodies threats to the country’s internal stability and its landward borders, this comparative study provides reasons to believe–despite continued skepticism–that China has indeed turned the corner on maritime transformation. If this proves to be true, such a transformation would be an extraordinary event in the history of the last two millennia. China Goes to Sea updates other books written on the subject that have been overtaken by China’s rapid strategic and technological change and offers a forward-looking analytical framework for understanding the future of Asian maritime power.

For further details, see:

Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, eds., China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, July 2009). Copies are on sale in the Naval War College Foundation Gift Shop.

Andrew Erickson, Lyle Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, “China Sets Sail,” The American Interest, Vol. 5, No. 5 (Summer, May/June 2010), pp. 27-34.

From NWC the participants/attendees were: Provost Ambassador (ret.) Mary Ann Peters, Dr. Carnes Lord, Dr. Andrew Erickson, Prof. Peter Dutton, and Prof. James Holmes. Other participants included Dr. Han Hua of Beijing University; Dr. Li Hong, Secretary General of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association (CACDA); Prof. Feroz Khan, a retired Pakistani general now resident at the Naval Postgraduate School; Mr. Henry Sokolski of NPEC, Dr. George Perkovich of Carnegie, and Mr. Robert Einhorn of the Department of State.

Tuesday, 17 November 2009, 5:15-9:00 PM

New England China Seminar, John K. Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Lecture: “China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective”

Location: CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Belfer Case Study Room, S020, Cambridge, MA 02138; (617) 495-4046

RSVP: lkluz@fas.harvard.edu

Profs. Andrew Erickson and Andrew Wilson are affiliated with the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. These presentations draw on their contributions to CMSI’s recently-published edited volume, Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, eds., China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009). This volume is the third in the series, “Studies in Chinese Maritime Development,” following China’s Energy Strategy: The Impact on Beijing’s Maritime Policies (2008) and China’s Future Nuclear Submarine Force (2007).

INFORMATIONAL FLIER

After a lengthy hiatus lasting nearly six centuries, China is reemerging as a maritime power. The heart of the Beijing’s accelerating naval development is the submarine force. China’s navy launched 13 submarines between 2002 and 2004. China has also imported large numbers of advanced Kilo-class SSKs. Chinese maritime ambitions are not limited to wielding stealthy submarines: a new array of frigates and destroyers heralds a new era in Chinese maritime confidence. However, China does not seek to “rule the waves” writ large (at least for now), but rather is aiming for the much narrower and more realizable objective of dominating the East Asian littoral. To help achieve this more limited objective, the PLAN has to date avoided costly aircraft carriers, and is instead devoting considerable attention to a decidedly less detectable arena of naval warfare: sea mines. Chinese strategists contend that sea-mines are “easy to lay and difficult to sweep; their concealment potential is strong; their destructive power is high; and the threat value is long-lasting.”  In tandem with submarine capabilities, it now seems that China is engaged in a significant effort to upgrade its mine warfare prowess. In contrast to submarine force development, mine warfare capabilities are relatively easily hidden and thus constitute a true ‘assassin’s mace’ [杀手].

China is achieving a rapid if uneven revolution in maritime and aerospace capabilities. These capabilities are divided among China’s Second Artillery, Air Force, Navy, General Armaments Department, and even the ground forces, to some extent. Competition may emerge among these services for control of new forces, such as military space capabilities. China has methodically acquired technologies which target limitations in the physics of high technology warfare, or “physics-based limitations.” These can place high-end competitors, potentially the U.S. Navy and other armed services, on the costly end of an asymmetric arms race. In addition to these widespread incremental improvements, China is on the verge of achieving several potentially game-changing breakthroughs; most importantly anti-ship ballistic missiles, but also the capability to launch streaming cruise missile attacks, and anti-satellite attacks, and even the application of satellite navigation to facilitate military operations. These achievements promise to radically improve the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s military’s access denial capabilities by allowing it to hold at risk a wide variety of surface and air-based assets, were they to enter strategically vital zones on China’s contested maritime periphery in the event of conflict.

China does face some ongoing challenges in developing its military. Lagging areas include human capital, realism of training, hardware and operational deficiencies, C4ISR, and target de-confliction with existing systems and strategies. China has many ways to mitigate these limitations for kinetic operations around Taiwan or other areas of its maritime periphery and potentially for non-kinetic peacetime operations or phase-zero operations further afield. Conducting high-intensity wartime operations in contested environments beyond Taiwan at the present would tend to be much more challenging for China, however. And China would need to achieve major qualitative and quantitative improvements, particularly in aerospace, to progress in that area. That, in turn, would give China vulnerabilities, in some ways of the same sort that it is able to target on the part of the U.S. right now. Looking forward, the biggest strategic question for U.S. Navy planners is whether and to what extent China will choose to develop the aerospace capabilities and other capabilities to support major kinetic force projection far beyond Taiwan.

After a lengthy hiatus lasting nearly six centuries, China is reemerging as a maritime power. The heart of the Beijing’s accelerating naval development is the submarine force. China’s navy launched 13 submarines between 2002 and 2004. China has also imported large numbers of advanced Kilo-class SSKs. Chinese maritime ambitions are not limited to wielding stealthy submarines: a new array of frigates and destroyers heralds a new era in Chinese maritime confidence. However, China does not seek to “rule the waves” writ large (at least for now), but rather is aiming for the much narrower and more realizable objective of dominating the East Asian littoral. To help achieve this more limited objective, the PLAN has to date avoided costly aircraft carriers, and is instead devoting considerable attention to a decidedly less detectable arena of naval warfare: sea mines. Chinese strategists contend that sea-mines are “easy to lay and difficult to sweep; their concealment potential is strong; their destructive power is high; and the threat value is long-lasting.”  In tandem with submarine capabilities, it now seems that China is engaged in a significant effort to upgrade its mine warfare prowess. In contrast to submarine force development, mine warfare capabilities are relatively easily hidden and thus constitute a true ‘assassin’s mace’ [杀手].