The United States, China, and Regional Naval Relations:
Competitive Coexistence
The evolving contest for East Asia’s seas will loom large on the Asia-Pacific
security agenda for the foreseeable future. The interaction of threat perceptions,
strategies, and force structures among China, other Asian nations, and the
United States will make for both cooperation and competition. Chinese analysts
view their nation’s actions as inherently defensive. They conceive of naval forces
as performing a deterrent function, independent of these forces’ combat role:
‘‘The challenge that China’s maritime sovereignty faces is not a problem of actual
combat strength between ‘Number Two’ and ‘Number One.’ It is rather a prob-
lem of effectively deterring the enemy from carrying out provocations.’’^239 With
respect to Taiwan, a senior Chinese official told the author, ‘‘We can win a war
with the U.S. without nuclear weapons [because the] U.S. is coming to us.’’^240
In a landmark study, John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai conclude that despite
the continuing difficulties China confronts as it seeks to match Western technol-
ogy and even organization, Taiwan’s importance to Chinese identity, strategic
value, and position as a bellwether of national territorial integrity justify extraor-
dinary expenditure of blood and treasure. Moreover, China’s military planners
appear to believe that by investing selectively in asymmetric weapons, they can
reconcile these conflicting realities without fuelling an arms race and hence
mutual insecurity.^241 With a burgeoning shipbuilding industry and maritime
commercial sector, not to mention an intensifying dependence on foreign sources
of natural resources, PLAN admirals find it easier and easier to persuade their
civilian leadership that the PLAN should take its place as a major instrument of
Chinese power.
Rapid development and acquisition of submarines, naval mines, missiles, and
other anti-access weapon systems appear to be part of a larger Chinese effort to pre-
vent the United States from operating effectively in the East Asian littoral, particu-
larly in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. While U.S.–China relations
have improved considerably since September 11, 2001, which helped to amelio-
rate Chinese resentments concerning the April 2001 EP-3 incident and the
May 1999 bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, emerging trends concerning
Taiwan suggest the lingering potential for conflict. U.S. naval planners must
prepare for a variety of disturbing Taiwan contingencies, including a decapitating
missile strike and a PLAN blockade that relies heavily on submarines and naval
mines. As Thomas Christensen writes: ‘‘The proximity of Taiwan to the main-
land...Taiwan’s massive trade dependence...the inherent difficulty in clearing
mines, and the extreme weakness of American mine-clearing capacity, particularly
in [the Pacific] theater...all make blockade a tempting...strategy for...China.
...’’^242 The end of the Cold War has also shifted the thrust of U.S. naval opera-
tions from force projection on the open seas to joint operations in easily blocked108 Asia Looks Seaward