China’s Malevolent Naval Aggression

By Seth Cropsey

Friday, February 18, 2022

 

As the Winter Olympics come to a close, Americans may soon stop paying attention to the Chinese Communist Party and the threat it poses. But they shouldn’t. Instead, they should understand that the most pressing difficulty in countering China’s challenge is neither material nor psychological, but rather intellectual: Western policymakers do not grasp either the full scope of China’s intentions or the CCP’s holistic approach to international competition.

 

This holistic approach is particularly apparent in Chinese naval policy. Publicly speaking, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) navy challenges the U.S. Navy in a conventional manner despite its reliance on land-based missile and aviation support, while Chinese hybrid forces shape the combat environment pre-conflict. But the CCP’s international-port development demonstrates the sophistication of the Chinese strategy: By purchasing global maritime infrastructure, Beijing hopes to turn the U.S.’s preferred weapon, a long-term blockade, against it.

 

Conventional and “gray zone” Chinese maritime power are the CCP’s best-known means of dominating the seas. The PLA navy has constructed a power-projection force capable of operating within the First Island Chain. In a war, its host of surface combatants, supported by ground-launched strike aircraft and long-range missiles, would saturate U.S. and allied bases and capital-ship formations, attempting to push American naval ships out of strike range. Chinese submarines, particularly nuclear-powered attack and guided-missile submarines, would harass American warships and transports farther into the Indo-Pacific, disrupting in-conflict resupply and pressuring an already-deeply inadequate U.S. support fleet.

 

Meanwhile, the CCP’s sub-conventional forces — the China Coast Guard and People’s Maritime Militia — are capable enough to confront adversaries in any South China Sea conflict, and the artificial islands that China has built would be effective forward bases for surged fighter and strike aircraft during such a conflict. Moreover, the PLA is expanding its aircraft-carrier force, allowing it to meet the U.S. Navy in a traditional fleet action, and building an amphibious fleet to make an invasion of Taiwan viable. Indeed, the PLA is capable of fighting a theater-wide war against the U.S. and its allies today, and its strength continues to grow.

 

That said, it is important to remember China’s central weaknesses, as well, when looking at its strategy. The CCP relies on energy and raw-material imports for economic stability. A severe downturn in those markets would jeopardize its survival, even in peacetime — hence its aggressive fiscal and monetary reactions to economic shocks, and Xi Jinping’s campaign to gain control of China’s quasi-private corporations. Yet the PLA will not have enough carriers, surface combatants, and submarines to confront the U.S. far into the Indian Ocean and break a blockade until the mid 2020s, at least. Thus, the CCP remains vulnerable to a far blockade, conducted from the Middle East and cutting off imports through the Malacca and Lombok Straits.

 

Co-belligerency is a solution to this quandary. If the CCP can convince Iran to fight against the U.S. in a Sino–American conflict, Pakistan to join a Sino–Russian coalition, Russia to act in Europe, or the energy-producing Middle Eastern allies of the U.S. such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE to oppose a far blockade, then American strategy will splinter. Similarly, if China can construct enough telecommunications and transport infrastructure in U.S.-allied countries, it can raise the cost of siding against it during wartime.

 

Just as worrisome, foreign-port development may have put an alternative option on the table: China could be capable of conducting a blockade against the U.S.

 

No formal list of Chinese international ports exists. But it is undeniable that China, through parastatal entities, has powerful influence in a string of major ports from Singapore to Piraeus, Greece, the precise route along which Chinese-bound goods flow. Indeed, the Suez Canal–Indian Ocean–South China Sea trade route is one of the world’s busiest, and a route upon which all U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific rely.

 

Eight ports are most relevant: Singapore; Colombo and Hambantota, Sri Lanka; Aden, Yemen; Djibouti; Sokhna, Egypt; Haifa; and Piraeus. In total, these ports account for over 50 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), the standard measurement for maritime transport. Before the Covid pandemic, Chinese ports handled around 240 million TEUs, four times greater than American ports’ 55.5 million, and greater than all combined East Asian port traffic. This provides the CCP with an immense amount of data, collected from shipping-terminal software in each of its state-owned or parastatal ports. Hence the CCP has an excellent understanding of maritime traffic, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, but also elsewhere.

 

The immensity of China’s merchant fleet compounds the issue. As of 2019, China’s commercial fleet had a capacity of 270 million deadweight tons (DWT). And even that figure understates the size of what was, by last year, the largest such fleet in the world. Commercial tankers are often registered under “flags of convenience” — the flags of states that lack residency requirements and extensive admiralty regulations — to mitigate an owner’s liability. Conveniently flagged ships likely make up half of the world’s merchant fleet. CCP-controlled groups purchase ships and operate them under flags of convenience, and the party itself has also created shell companies and affiliated private entities to purchase ships that are then flown under the flags of U.S.-friendly countries. This adds yet more data to the Chinese trove, allowing the CCP to identify transport patterns.

 

A troubling inference follows: The CCP likely has more information on American commercial vulnerabilities than the United States does.

 

China not only has the world’s largest navy. It not only has a regional and global port network feeding it information on American economic activity. It also has a merchant fleet beholden to the CCP that it can use to both deny the U.S. critical goods and support its own manufacturing, energy consumption, and peacetime or wartime logistics. This gives it the power to mount a de facto blockade against the U.S., by rerouting ships away from American ports.

 

Given the opacity of merchant flag-bearing, American planners cannot trust foreign-flagged ships. The U.S. merchant fleet is woefully weak, and what strength it does have is required for domestic transport. Meanwhile, the American maritime-industrial base has not produced a major civilian ship since the mid 2000s, making rapid commercial expansion hard to imagine.

 

Chinese maritime strategy is holistic. The CCP integrates industrial, naval, and commercial considerations to expand its strategic options before and during conflict. If we hope to win our global competition with the PRC, we’re going to need to come up with our own holistic approach to match — and fast.