Troubled Waters.

• Author: Ross, Robert S.
• Position: Maritime power of China - Essay

China is no longer simply a rising power. It is now a maritime power that competes for influence with United States from the Korean Peninsula, through mainland Southeast Asia and to the Strait of Malacca. China challenges U.S. alliances and the U.S. Navy's dominance of East Asian waters.

China's navy has made significant gains in closing the gap in U.S.-China maritime capabilities. These gains have accelerated the power transition in East Asia, enabling China to advance its interests in East Asia and challenge U.S. security and defense strategy. These developments have undermined regional stability, raised the risk of U.S.-China hostilities and transformed the regional balance of power.

China's challenge to U.S. security in East Asia is clear. But the United States is currently unable to compete with China and maintain the regional security order. The economic, political and institutional changes necessary to contend with China's growing naval power are daunting. Unfortunately, the United States has yet to confront this challenge.

Following the end of World War II and the onset of the Korean War, the United States established air, naval and ground force bases in South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. In the 2000s, it expanded its naval presence in Singapore and Malaysian port facilities. Into the early twenty-first century, America dominated the seas of East Asia.

U.S. maritime superiority contributed to regional peace and prosperity. It provided the stability that enabled the region to focus on economic cooperation rather than on security conflicts. China benefitted from this strategic order. Since the late 1970s, it prioritized economic growth over military modernization. Nonetheless, China's acceptance of this U.S.-based strategic otder reflected its naval weakness, rather than its undetstanding of Chinese security interests. Chinese economic prosperity and security depended on American good intentions.

China has long criticized America's East Asian alliances as remnants of "Cold War thinking." But this was not simply an ideological objection to U.S. policy. Rather, American alliances enabled the United States to encircle China's coastal waters with military bases in South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. Its strategic partnership with Singapore allowed the United States to treat Singapore as a de facto naval base. These facilities have enabled the United States to carry out extensive and close-in surveillance of China's coastal air and naval facilities and its naval operations and to challenge Chinese coastal security.

China never accepted U.S. maritime dominance. Now that it possesses a large and modern navy, China's leaders are determined to advance China's security in East Asia, necessarily challenging U.S. alliances and security interests.

For much of the post--Cold War era, China remained focused on developing ground-force superiority along its periphery. Russian military resurgence in Northeast Asia remained a possibility, and the border conflict with India was a persistent security concern.

In the past five years, however, China has developed greater confidence in its border security. Most important, the Russian threat has diminished. As China has modernized its economy, its infrastructure and its military, it has benefited from the persistent decline of Russia's population, economy and infrastructure in the Far East; its inability to reform its economy; and its preoccupation with U.S. military presence in Europe and the Middle East. Chinese observers now dismiss the possibility that Russia could challenge Chinese security or "balance" against China.

Elsewhere around its border, China enjoys unchallenged superiority. India has yet to develop the technology or the economic resources to challenge Chinese security. It lacks the naval power to monitor its coastal waters, much less challenge China in East Asia. It continues to import its most modern naval ships, and the large GDP and technology gaps between the China and India expand every year. Relative to China, India is a declining power. Along the rest of its border, China dominates its smaller neighbors. Vietnam, despite its traditional hostility toward China, must contend with the large and modern Chinese army just across its border, while its army has stagnated since the end of its occupation of Cambodia in 1991.

China's mainland strategic environment looks much like America's strategic environment in North America; it possesses the secure borders necessary to become a naval power.

As China focused on border security, its naval modernization program proceeded at glacial pace. It developed successive generations of naval ships, but it produced only a few prototypes within each generation. It focused on the development of the advanced technology and training necessary to construct a modern navy. But just when China developed confidence over its territorial borders, its navy developed the technology and skills necessary to build and operate a capable maritime force. Thus, within the past decade, China began to reallocate its defense spending to begin serial production of naval ships.

From 2010 to 2017, the number of Chinese naval ships increased from approximately 210 to 320. In 2016 alone, the Chinese navy commissioned eighteen ships. At three hundred ships, the Chinese navy is already larger than the U.S. Navy, and before long it may operate four hundred ships. It commissions nearly three submarines each year, meaning that in two years China will have over seventy submarines. The Chinese navy is also deploying significant numbers of cruisers, destroyers, frigates...