China's Global Engagement: Cooperation, Competition, and Influence in the 21st Century by Jacques Delisle & Avery Goldstein

Author:Jacques Delisle & Avery Goldstein [Delisle, Jacques & Goldstein, Avery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Geopolitics, Security (National & International), World, Asian, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9780815729709
Google: 01jczAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 34409233
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2017-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

TOWARD A GLOBAL CHINESE NAVY?

China possesses the necessary geopolitical conditions that allow for the development of a large great power navy able to contend with any other naval power in its own region. It also has the financial and technological resources required to sustain its long-term naval development program that has already begun to challenge U.S. naval capabilities in East Asia. Should it sustain this program for the next ten to twenty years, it may well develop naval power that could rival the U.S. Navy.

To establish a maritime equilibrium of power in East Asia, China will require sea-based defense capabilities that will enable its ships to operate far from shore. Its long-term aircraft carrier program will, in part, contribute to this capability. Chinese development of ship-based antiship and antiair missiles will also contribute to its development of naval security in distant waters. These capabilities are not beyond China’s reach. With regard to quantity, China will benefit from its location in East Asia. Because its naval facilities are in the region, its ships spend less time in transition to and from deployments than U.S. ships based in the United States, so that equal ship quantities would amount to in situ Chinese numerical superiority.49 The United States might well respond with increased home-porting of its ships in allies’ facilities, but there will be limits to this possibility. Moreover, U.S. naval access to port facilities on China’s maritime perimeter will become increasingly vulnerable to Chinese land-based ballistic missiles.

Over the next decades, China’s will likely have the ability to achieve these capabilities. The pace of China’s shipbuilding program has been impressive. Since 2000, China has replaced most of its pre-reform platforms with “modern” platforms. In 1996 only 3 percent of its submarines were modern; in 2016 nearly 70 percent were modern. Even at reduced rates of GDP growth, China’s shipbuilding program will add significant numbers to the quantity of it modern naval platforms, including attack submarines, destroyers, and smaller, fast-attack ships armed with anti-ship cruise missiles. According to one estimate, assuming that China’s naval budget will grow commensurate with the rate of its GDP growth, in less than fifteen years the Chinese Navy will possess well over four hundred surface combat ships and nearly one hundred submarines. All of these ships will make significant contributions to relative Chinese naval capabilities in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and they will contribute to improved Chinese capabilities in the West Pacific Ocean.50

In contrast, the United States will confront considerable difficulty in allocating sufficient financial resources to enable the navy to realize its 2015 shipbuilding plan and to simply maintain the current size of the U.S. Navy. According to the Congressional Budget Office, for the U.S. Navy to fulfill its plan to operate a 308-ship navy in 2044, its annual budget will have to be nearly one-third larger than its average budget since 1985. Should the navy simply be able to maintain the levels of past funding, the size of the navy will shrink to 237 ships.

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