China’s largest state-owned shipbuilder, the COSCO Shipyard Group,
has launched into a massive effort to build up capacity at all of its shipyards,
including the facilities at Zhousan, Nantong, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Shanghai,
Xiamen, and Dalian.
Dalian, for example, registered a staggering leap in capacity, on the order of
73 percent, by late 2005.^8 Its shipyard boasts the largest floating drydock in the
world, allowing the yard staff to perform hull work on very large crude carriers.^9
That Chinese engineers designed and built the dock is a point of special pride
for Beijing. The reasons for this growthinclude low costs, the meteoric rise
in demand, economies of scale, improved quality, and co-location in China
(as opposed to the more distributed global networks of shipyards operated by
other marine conglomerates).
That Asian economies have an insatiable appetite for energy resources
is already common knowledge. Resource-poor countries such as Japan and
South Korea depend almost entirely on oil shipped from the Persian Gulf to
sustain their economic viability. China has joined these two countries as a
major energy importer. In 2003, China surpassed Japan as a consumer of petro-
leum, moving into second place behind the United States.^10 The U.S. National
Intelligence Council projected that Chinese oil consumption must increase
by 150 percent by 2020 to sustain a healthy rate of economic expansion. If so,
Chinese demand for oil will nearly equal the U.S. demand forecast for that
year.^11
Accelerating seaborne trade and energy dependence, then, will almost certainly
heighten national security concerns related to the safety of SLOCs (sea lines of
communication). The need to assure anuninterrupted flow of goods on the
high seas may compel Asian nations to build up naval power as a strategic hedge
against disruptions to energy imports. Recent military trends suggest that this is
indeed the case.Naval Power
While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to set forth a full net assessment of
the military balance in Asia, a few illustrations of the martial dimension of
maritime affairs in Asia today are in order. Table 1.1 depicts the force structures
of the Asian navies (surface combatants and submarines) featured in this volume
as they stood in 2006, including those of South Korea and Taiwan. Table 1.
provides a snapshot of the quantitative changes in these five naval force struc-
tures between 1990 and 2006. Including the latter two navies highlights the
considerable combat power that even smaller navies in Asia could bring to
bear in times of crisis. Table 1.1 also includes the navies of the United Kingdom
and France, widely recognized as second-tier naval powers, as a basis for com-
parison.4 Asia Looks Seaward