The Contest of the Century (9 page)

Yet it is far from inevitable that the U.S. and China will end up as competitors in the Indian Ocean. China’s approach will depend in part on a number of key decisions that China’s leaders will need to take over the next decade, which will involve massive investments and will be crucial barometers of their long-term intentions. Distance from home drastically changes the military calculation for China. In the Near Seas, the geography is on China’s side: it has missile sites along its coast, which it can use to exert control over sea-lanes. But in the Indian Ocean, those advantages disappear. If China wants to have the ability to contest the seas well beyond its periphery, and to project power in the Indian
Ocean, it needs to invest heavily in two areas. It will need to have bases in and agreements with friendly countries that will allow it to use their ports and airfields to support its forces. And it will need the sorts of warships that can provide some form of air cover across wide expanses of ocean. In other words, it will need aircraft carriers. The bad news for China is that, although both projects are superficially attractive, they will be politically difficult and economically costly to implement.

THE
“
STARTER CARRIER
”

“Without an aircraft carrier, I will die with my eyelids open,” Liu Huaqing, the former commander of the Chinese fleet, said in 1987—a Chinese phrase that implies a deep, unfulfilled desire. In the modern era, Liu was the first official to push the case for a bigger fleet; he is often referred to as “the father of the modern Chinese navy.” It was Liu who introduced the concept of “Near Seas” and “Far Seas” into Chinese strategic thought, and also he who, in the 1980s, led the navy’s transformation from a glorified coast guard into a modern fleet. China, he argued, needed to stake its claim as a great power, and an aircraft carrier was the vital platform for projecting naval power over long distances. When he outlined these ideas in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when most Chinese were not able to eat meat regularly, his plans seemed quixotic. But by the time he died, in early 2011, they had become mainstream: a few weeks before his death, Chinese officials acknowledged for the first time that the country was building its own carrier. All nine members of the Communist Party Standing Committee turned out for Liu Huaqing’s memorial service, the only time in recent memory that this has happened for a military leader. A distraught-looking Hu Jintao presented a bouquet of white carnations to his widow. Xi Jinping gave a speech saying that China had to step up the development of its naval capabilities to match its new position in the world.

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.

——

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 the 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.