The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  China’s route to a modern carrier has been a tortuous one. In 1998, an obscure Chinese travel agency, whose directors had connections with the navy, purchased the hull of a former Soviet carrier called the Varyag from Ukraine. They paid $20 million and said that the ship would be used as a casino. It took them three years to get the vessel back to China. The Varyag was held up in Istanbul for eighteen months while a dispute with the Turkish authorities was resolved, and then it hit bad weather on its way around the Cape of Good Hope, before it was eventually tugged into Dalian, a port in the northeast of China. But by 2012, the newly rechristened Liaoning carrier was ready to enter formal service for the first time. The relaunch was accompanied with much fanfare and national pride. The commander of the carrier, Senior Captain Zhang Zheng, gave an interview on the ship’s deck to CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster. Zhang talked rather modestly about all the training the crew would need and the heavy responsibility they faced, but the interviewer could not contain himself. “Captain Zhang, you give me a very deep impression of being open-minded and energetic,” he beamed. “The navy also has very high hopes for you.”

  The battle to build the Liaoning carrier tells a lot about the shifting political sands and rising ambitions in China over recent years. As far back as 1928, Chen Shaokuan, the British-trained head of the Chinese navy at the time, first put forward the idea of building a carrier. In the 1980s, when he was head of the navy, Liu Huaqing started to lobby openly for the idea of a Chinese carrier, yet his civilian masters were not convinced. Deng Xiaoping pushed back against the expensive idea. In the early 1990s, Jiang Zemin, who had taken power after Tiananmen, also rejected the proposal. He was afraid that it would unnerve the U.S. too much to see China investing in such a striking symbol of great-power ambition. The early years of naval modernization focused mostly on the submarines and missiles that could help China exert more control over the Near Seas. The quest for an aircraft carrier became yet another of those ideas that were put on hold in the interests of “hiding the brightness.”

  But from the early 1990s, the idea of a carrier was taken up by China’s version of the military-industrial complex. The drumbeat started first in universities and think tanks and soon included mayors who wanted the carriers to be built in their towns, and the shipbuilders who were desperate for the contract. Supporters emphasized the unique place that aircraft carriers held for realizing China’s national destiny. Li Jie, a senior captain at the Naval Research Institute, claimed, “No great power that has become a strong power has achieved this without developing carriers.” Zhang Wenmu, one of the most vocal champions, argues that in the twenty-first century naval power will be a decisive factor in competition between states. Aircraft carriers are “a concentrated expression of a country’s comprehensive national power,” he writes.

  Kaiser Wilhelm was so fascinated with the navy that he once wore a naval uniform to a performance of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, with his sons also decked out in sailor suits. Bismarck had invested only in smaller, less expensive vessels, fearing that the real threats to Germany would come by land. However, under Wilhelm’s and Admiral Tirpitz’s direction, Germany invested in a huge fleet of battleships, the aircraft carriers of their day. “The Greeks and Romans each had their time, the Spaniards had theirs, the French also,” Wilhelm argued to justify the huge investments. The historian Robert Ross argues that China is witnessing the same sort of “naval nationalism” that has infected many aspiring great powers before, in which the natural desire to build up the military becomes distorted by a demand for prestige projects that have a strong nationalist appeal, even if their strategic worth is not so clear-cut. Unlike any other aspect of the country’s military modernization, the idea of a Chinese aircraft carrier became part of the popular imagination. As Ross puts it, “Chinese nationalists maintain that the realization of China’s historical destiny depends on the possession of a carrier-based navy.” Around the same time that China bought the Varyag, it purchased another former Soviet carrier from Ukraine, the Kiev. In this case, the vessel really was destined for tourism. It is now the centerpiece of a popular aircraft-carrier theme park in Tianjin, the large coastal city near Beijing. San Diego has a museum in a disused aircraft carrier, so the idea is hardly novel, but whereas the USS Midway Museum celebrates achievements from the past, the Tianjin museum is aspirational, a bid to capture the public enthusiasm for future naval grandeur. When I visited a couple of years ago, the insides of the Kiev were lined with worthy exhibits about the history of aircraft carriers. More recently, it has gone upmarket—part of the vessel is now taken up by a luxury hotel, a response to constant requests from people wanting to spend a night on board. The hotel photos indicate a preference for gaudy baroque, the low-ceilinged suites boasting white leather sofas and opulent chandeliers. Overnight guests have been promised an additional treat: the park intends to put on a mock naval battle every evening.

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  The launch of the Liaoning was a moment full of symbolism, to be sure, but Senior Captain Zhang was right: there is still a lot of work to do. China’s “starter carrier,” as some analysts have dubbed it, still faces a host of difficult challenges. The television images gave away one of those problems: there were no aircraft on the deck. China bought some fighter jets that can be used on carriers from Ukraine and is believed to have got hold of a similar Russian jet. There is even speculation that one of the models of its new stealth fighter jet could eventually be equipped to land on carriers. But developing its own jets for use on carriers—and training a team of pilots to use them—is another project whose time frame can be measured in decades rather than years. In 1954, the U.S. Air Force lost 776 aircraft and 535 aviators as it tried to develop its fighter jets. Carrier groups need a whole host of supporting ships, including submarines and destroyers that can provide modern defenses against missiles, some of which are still under development. In addition, the Chinese navy will also have to learn how to actually operate a carrier group, which requires the sort of detailed coordination and training that the U.S. has perfected over a century and through several wars. Again, developing this sort of seamanship is another decades-long enterprise.

  It may well be that China’s leaders will decide over the next decade to go all in and order a sizable fleet of carriers, but before then, they will have to overcome some powerful opposition to such an ambitious spending spree. According to naval planners, you need three carriers to ensure that one group is always operating, because at any single time one carrier is undergoing repairs and the other is preparing for the next mission. Now that China has launched its first carrier, the question is how many it will build. The Pentagon believes that another couple of domestically built carriers will be in operation by 2015. Chinese state media have talked about plans for three carriers, but other Chinese officials have privately talked about building five. The eventual numbers will make all the difference. If China develops a fleet that allows it to have two carrier groups operating at any one time, that will focus the minds of a lot of other countries in the region. But one carrier on its own does little to change the military balance in Asia. And as the Pentagon can attest, operating carrier groups is an extremely expensive business. Ever since Liu Huaqing first proposed building a Chinese carrier, the project has been tied up in budgetary battles, and the fight for resources is likely to get still more intense. Some estimates suggest that a new carrier in China would cost $10 billion, around 10 percent of the yearly official Chinese military budget. Even with a growing budget, China does not have the resources for everything. If China invests in a big carrier fleet, it will have fewer resources to invest in the “anti-navy” weapons designed to exert greater control over the Near Seas.

  For all the prestige that might come from having several carrier groups, plenty of hardheaded Chinese strategists believe they are of little actual military use once they leave China’s immediate maritime surrounds. If Chinese military officials hope that they can take out American carriers in th
e Near Seas, then the U.S., with its far superior air power, would have the same advantage if Chinese carrier groups started operating in the Indian Ocean. “We would be sitting ducks,” as You Ji, a Chinese analyst based in Singapore, puts it. The lure of a “blue water” navy is strong, and the vested interests behind a push to build more carriers will be hard to ignore. Yet it is not at all clear that China will have the skills or money over the next couple of decades to construct the sort of navy that would present a serious challenge to the U.S. in the Indian Ocean. And that is before China’s leaders tackle the trickiest issue of all—how to supply and protect a new fleet of aircraft carriers operating far from home.

  CHINA’S GUANTÁNAMO

  In 2004, the Washington office of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton produced a research paper for the Pentagon which put forward the idea that China was trying to establish a permanent military presence in the Indian Ocean. It analyzed a series of commercial ports across the region being built with Chinese help and money and concluded that they formed a “String of Pearls,” facilities with potential military use that could help China project military power all the way across the Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf. Initially classified, the paper was leaked to the Washington Times in 2005. Before long, it started to capture the imagination of the more hawkish observers of China’s military buildup, including in India, where there are persistent fears that a rising China will try to encircle it.

  If there is one issue that will define what sort of military power China becomes over the next couple of decades, it will be the question of overseas military bases. To build a network of bases would be a decisive statement about Chinese ambitions to project power and to build its own coalition of supporters. China’s navalists are gradually becoming more open about pushing the idea. The topic has long been discussed in military circles, but over the last few years it has also started to spill over into public debate about the country’s long-term military strategy. It plays into the nationalist sense in China that now is their time. “It is our right” to have bases that can be used to defend the country’s new economic interests, says Shen Dingli, a respected academic at Fudan University in Shanghai. “We should be able to conduct retaliatory attacks within other countries or at the neighboring area of our potential enemies.”

  Proponents of the “String of Pearls” theory argue that China is effectively creating a network of bases in the Indian Ocean by stealth. In Sri Lanka, the island nation with a strategic position at the meeting of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, China Harbour Engineering Company is building a mega-port which will be able to house large oil tankers and will have a major refueling facility. The port is in Hambantota, the hometown of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, allowing China to mix commerce with more personal diplomacy. Just down the road from the port, the same Chinese company also built the thirty-thousand-capacity cricket stadium which was one of the venues for the 2011 World Cup, another propaganda coup for the president. The relationship with Rajapaksa goes well beyond infrastructure, however. With the help of $1 billion in military aid from Beijing every year, and a Chinese veto against criticism at the United Nations, Rajapaksa ended the country’s long-running civil war in 2009 after a brutal final showdown. Given such complicit ties, there are plenty of suggestions that, over time, Hambantota could become the sort of place where Chinese vessels regularly dock to refuel and get supplies.

  Something similar has been happening in Gwadar, a deep-water Pakistani port on the Arabian Sea, close to the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz—the strategic chokehold for a large slice of the world’s oil supply. China helped build a commercial port at Gwadar, which was initially leased to a Singapore company, PSA International. But after a series of problems, the Singapore group dropped out and a Chinese company took over management control of the port. More important, a senior Pakistani official told one of my colleagues in 2011 that the government had asked China to build a naval base next to the commercial port, and that China would have access to the base, potentially allowing Beijing to station some of its ships and submarines in Gwadar. The Chinese have played down the suggestion, but a clear marker has been laid down.

  The “String of Pearls” is, of course, an idea straight from the Mahan playbook for aspiring great powers. Mahan urged the U.S. to find strategic locations in the Caribbean and the Pacific that could help the navy patrol the key maritime supply lines and the Panama Canal. A peacetime naval strategy “may gain its most decisive victories by occupying in a country, either by purchase or treaty, excellent positions which would perhaps hardly be got by war,” he wrote. Around the same time that America embarked on a burst of navy building in the 1890s, it also launched a drive to acquire overseas bases for its new ships. In the Pacific, it was supporters of the new navy who made the strongest case for incorporating Hawaii into the union. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish described Hawaii as an attractive “resting spot in the mid-ocean, between the Pacific coast and the vast domains of Asia, which are now opening to commerce,” as well as being a useful platform for curbing the rise of Japan. Earlier, the U.S. had taken control of the Midway archipelago, which was named because of its location directly midway between Los Angeles and Shanghai. Mahan was particularly obsessed with the Caribbean, where the British navy still had a large presence, and which he thought of in terms not dissimilar to the way the Chinese think today about the first island chain. In 1903, the U.S. Navy leased a new base in the Caribbean, which gave it the perfect launchpad to protect the eastern entrances to the Panama Canal, but which has become famous in modern times for very different reasons—Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

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  The “String of Pearls” concept appeals to a certain conspiratorial view of how China works, the image of a small group of Communist Party officials calmly hatching plans for global domination. It suggests that China already has a coherent and thought-out long-term strategy, a series of five-year plans that will eventually afford China a broad network of bases across the region. Given how utterly opaque China’s top-level politics remains, it is easy to imagine that the top leadership might have such a disciplined view of its future. But the reality of modern China is much more improvised and reactive than this cliché recognizes. It is certainly true that China’s interests are drawing it into the Indian Ocean. Yet Ramree Island tells a very different story about China’s overseas expansion, and one which corresponds more closely to how decisions really get made. In a system in which the authority of the leaders is fraying, the driving force is often pressure from below. The Burma pipeline is part of a dynamic whereby business moves first, to create a new reality of its own, and then foreign and military policies are forced to come from behind to fill in the gaps.

  The idea for the pipeline was first put forward by a history professor at an unglamorous provincial university. Li Chenyang, an expert on Southeast Asia at Yunnan University, in the southwest of China, started writing newspaper articles in 2004 suggesting that a pipeline could allow China to avoid bringing oil through the Strait of Malacca. In the long corridors outside Li’s office, there are large framed maps of the region, detailing Yunnan’s long borders with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. By driving a pipeline from Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, down through Burma, Li proposed China could gain access to the Indian Ocean. “The reality is the Americans want to control the Strait of Malacca,” as Professor Li put it. “For China to fall under American control is a very risky thing.” The idea was immediately taken up by the local government in Yunnan. But whereas Li and his academic colleagues were worried about energy and geopolitics, the local officials had a more prosaic motivation: jobs. Each year, Chinese officials receive a formal performance evaluation, and no matter whether they are running a village of a hundred people or a province of a hundred million, they are judged primarily on their ability to generate growth in their part of the economy. Their careers depend on the local GDP numbers. As a result, local officials are on the constant lookout for new investment pr
ojects that will boost growth. Although it has a rich cultural heritage, Yunnan is one of the poorer provinces of China, and its leaders have often complained that the industrial boom in other parts of the country has passed it by. They saw the pipeline as a perfect way to kick-start an oil industry in the province. The construction would bring a lot of jobs and funds, and a refinery would be needed at the end of the pipeline. A lot of the dynamism in China’s economy in recent decades is derived from this basic equation, the ceaseless drive at all levels of government for the latest new opportunity. For Yunnan officials, the pipeline is not about geopolitics, it is about GDP.

  The proposal also won support from the politically powerful oil industry. China National Petroleum Corporation is the biggest oil company in the country, but in the southwest of the country, it was coming second to its main rival, Sinopec. The new pipeline was a way into that market. Before long, CNPC was on board with the idea. Together with CNPC, the Yunnan authorities started lobbying Beijing hard to win approval. Initially, there was a good deal of resistance. But after several years of pressure by big-oil and provincial government officials, Beijing finally agreed to promote the idea. As Zha Daojiong, a Chinese academic who has followed these sorts of internal debates closely, told me: “From the outside, it can look like China has a coherent energy strategy, but in reality it often comes down to who shouts the loudest.”