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book review roundtable

Toshi Yoshihara & James R. HolmesRed Star over the Pacific:

China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime StrategyAnnapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-59114-390-1 (cloth)

Dean ChengRory Medcalf

Michael McDevittBernard D. Cole

Zheng WangJames R. Holmes & Toshi Yoshihara

• http://asiapolicy.nbr.org •

asia policy, number 12 (july 2011), 141–68

© The National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, Washington

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The Influence of Sea Power on China, or the Influence of Mahan on Yoshihara and Holmes?

Dean Cheng

Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy is part of the growing body of literature that examines China’s

expanding naval capabilities. Based on an extensive survey of Chinese language sources regarding the role of navies and maritime power, Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes conclude that China will pursue a maritime future and posit that Chinese decisionmakers will follow the logic of Alfred Thayer Mahan, even if they do not necessarily hew to his specifics (or “grammar”) (p. 18). Thus, the authors laud the Chinese for “an impressive synthesis of strategic theories from foreign and indigenous sources,” with Mahan providing the “geopolitical logic” and Mao providing the specific “strategies and tactics” (p. 30). But while an intriguing hypothesis, the authors’ approach neglects to address the possibility that China may be pursuing policies that are at times consistent with Mahan but not motivated by his writings at all.

The authors note in the foreword that by 2004 they had begun to notice that Chinese strategists were regularly citing Mahan, which suggests that these strategists were “studying and internalizing his writings in anticipation of China’s entry into the nautical domain” (p. ix). If so, to the authors, better understanding what kinds of military and non-military strategies, operations, and tactics China might develop was imperative, given that they might well be applied against the United States. In short, the volume is dedicated to trying to understand “how an aspiring or established sea power thinks about strategy [as] indispensable to forecasting how it will fare on the high seas” (p. 3). To this end, Yoshihara and Holmes discuss the growth of Chinese maritime thinking, examine potential approaches by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to fleet tactics, discuss the possible role of antiship ballistic missiles, survey U.S. maritime strategy in Asia, and analyze the growth of imperial German naval power as a possible parallel to China’s experience (and argue that China will not follow the same path).

The book astutely notes that Chinese thinking on sea power is likely to differ, often fundamentally, from that of Western counterparts, given that the intellectual struggle over ideas often extends into realms such as geography

dean cheng is the Research Fellow for Chinese Political and Security Affairs at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining the Heritage Foundation in 2009, he was a Senior Analyst in the China Studies Division at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

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book review roundtable • red star over the pacific

and geopolitics that are no longer fashionable in the West (p. 42). The authors warn that Western observers should avoid projecting their own assumptions onto Chinese strategic thinkers. Instead, by examining Chinese strategic theory on its own terms, Western analysts could acquire “an instrument to track China’s maritime rise, complementing more traditional techniques of net assessment” (p. 43).

An examination of Chinese sources leads Yoshihara and Holmes to conclude that China is pursuing a deliberate turn to sea power along Mahanian lines of logic, although not necessarily adhering to Mahanian approaches (e.g., seeking a decisive fleet engagement), or “grammar.” To support their argument, they rely on Chinese texts rather than Western analyses and cite an impressive array of Chinese literature on naval and maritime power. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this book is the authors’ explicit discussion of their methodology and research methods.

It is, perhaps, a mark of how far the debate on China’s growing maritime power has progressed, and the rapidity of that growth, that at times the volume seems to be making almost indisputable arguments. The idea that China will develop a strong navy, or that Beijing is intent on developing an aircraft carrier, is now widely accepted, whereas just a few short years ago many scoffed at the prospect.1

Yet essential aspects of that growth are left unexamined. For example, the authors argue that Chinese strategists are budding disciples of Mahan, who they maintain saw “peacetime commerce…[as] the true path to national prosperity and greatness” (p. 9). Yet the volume includes only the most cursory discussion of the sinews of China’s sea power, such as its merchant marine or the major shipbuilding industries that remain state-owned enterprises. More problematic is the lack of clarity over whether China is pursuing an explicitly Mahanian strategy or whether the authors are imposing a Mahanian framework on China’s activities. Is Mahan a motivation for China’s growing maritime capabilities or a justification?

For the authors, it is clearly the former. They cite a range of writings that show a significant Chinese interest in exploiting the seas. In their view, China is not simply expanding its navy but is following a maritime-oriented strategy along Mahanian lines. Indeed, the authors seem to imply that there has been a steady progression in China’s emphasis on the sea, as though a maritime grand strategy is at work. But this turn to sea power occurs within a particular

1 It is worth recalling that some believed that China would convert the ex-Russian aircraft carrier Varyag, now renamed the Shi Lang, into a casino.

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geopolitical context—the end of the Cold War. Prior to that fundamental reordering of the international system, China was largely economically self-sufficient and militarily focused on the Soviet Union to its north. Naval forces, and maritime capabilities more broadly, were slighted because China did not need sea power, either for trade or for national defense.

With the end of the Cold War, however, as well as with the fundamental economic reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping (and reinforced in his 1992 “southern tour”), China necessarily became more dependent on the oceans. Its export-oriented economy and increasing reliance on imported resources to sustain that economy gave Beijing little choice but to develop its maritime capabilities. The creation and eventual expansion of special economic zones helped shift China’s economic center of gravity to the coast. At the same time, Beijing’s assessment of the “main strategic direction”—that is, the most likely direction of conflict—shifted from the north to the east.

Most Chinese writings on the need for sea power, therefore, have occurred after China was already dependent on the seas. Consequently, a concomitant shift in military policy is not necessarily Mahanian in nature—although such a shift does suggest an effort to reconcile defense efforts with larger strategic considerations following Mahan’s exhortations.

The idea of a more Mahanian turn is further called into question when China’s military development is seen in the context of the “new historic missions” of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).2 Set forth by Hu Jintao, these missions charge the PLA with safeguarding China’s national interests, not only at sea but also in the air, outer space, and cyberspace. Although China’s maritime capabilities are increasing, its military advances have not only, or even primarily, been in this area. The Second Artillery, China’s missile force, has seen a sustained expansion involving thousands of short-range missiles, and China’s air force has also enjoyed a steady modernization of its assets, including both combat aircraft and surface-to-air missiles. This would seem to contradict Mahan’s view of sea power as autonomous and inherently important in and of itself.

Similarly, it is unclear whether the PLA is in fact adopting a Mahanian view of maritime power. In spite of Beijing’s interest in developing the PLA’s naval capabilities, it is not at all clear that there is a singular or even predominant emphasis on naval power, such as Mahan supported and

2 For further discussion of the PLA’s “new historic missions,” see Daniel Hartnett, “Towards a Globally Focused Chinese Military: The Historic Missions of the Chinese Armed Forces” (unpublished manuscript); and James Mulvenon, “Chairman Hu and the PLA’s ‘New Historic Missions,’ ” China Leadership Monitor, no. 27 (Winter 2009): 1–11.

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Tirpitz and other Wilhelmine admirals advocated. Instead, the PLA, in its doctrinal development, has been moving steadily away from service-oriented operations toward joint operations. Indeed, in 1999 the PLA promulgated a new set of gangyao, a publication that falls between regulations and field manuals but also incorporates the concept of doctrine. The capstone of these gangyao was one governing joint operations, making it clear that, at least doctrinally, the PLA would seek to fight future conflicts jointly rather than by individual service.

This is not to argue that naval forces are not important in the PLA’s conception of future wars. Indeed, the emphasis on the ability to conduct joint operations would suggest that Chinese naval forces will inevitably be improved, if only to lend maritime support to future joint operations. Rather, I am suggesting that naval forces are not important on their own. As with the new historic missions, the emphasis on joint operations would seem to challenge the very fundamentals of Mahanian thought, with its preferred focus on naval operations.

These considerations suggest that evolving conditions in China have led to a set of policies that are consistent with some aspects of a Mahanian policy but not necessarily motivated by Mahan. Rather, it would seem that Mahan is used to justify the shape of China’s increasing dependence on the maritime sphere. In this regard, it is disappointing that the authors did not choose to incorporate a greater discussion of the evolving bureaucratic position of the PLAN. Until 2004, the Central Military Commission (CMC), which manages the PLA, had no service representation at all. Instead, the PLA was managed by the four general departments (the General Staff Department, General Political Department, General Logistics Department, and General Armaments Department)—all of which serve double duty for not only the entire Chinese military but Chinese ground forces as well.

The organization of the CMC is essential because it underscores the relatively low importance long accorded to the non–ground force services. Thus, until the commanders of the PLAN, PLA Air Force, and Second Artillery were included in the CMC in 2004, their bureaucratic voice had been muted. Conversely, now that the PLAN is part of the CMC, there may emerge a true maritime strategist in the Mahanian mold, generating a maritime strategy “with Chinese characteristics.”

If so, Yoshihara and Holmes are quite possibly correct in their final analysis. China is expanding its maritime commerce capacity, as one part of a larger initiative to build “comprehensive national power.” With its growing dependence on sea lanes, China almost inevitably will need to expand the PLA’s

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naval capabilities, both to protect the country’s access to resources and markets and to deny opponents the ability to endanger that access. This strategy is very much consistent with Mahan’s overall view of sea power. Thus, even if not inspired by Mahan, China’s actions may well reach the same end-state.

At the same time, as the authors note, what eventually emerges will be a product of uniquely Chinese conditions and constraints rather than a replication of prior maritime forces and strategies from history. The lessons and experiences of the United States, Germany, and other powers provide only limited analogies at best. For all its frustrating aspects, then, Red Star over the Pacific is a useful contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the future of the Chinese navy.

Right Arguments, Wrong Ocean?

Rory Medcalf

T oshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes have produced an impressive, bold, and sustained analysis of the rise of the Chinese navy and its plausible

future in challenging and thwarting U.S. influence. The book, however, is mistitled. Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy might just as well have been called something like “Red Star over the Indo-Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to the United States and India.” For the arguments contained therein suggest that Beijing’s primary maritime security focus will sooner or later become the Indian Ocean, with its arteries of energy supply and other commerce.

To generalists, policymakers, and security analysts not steeped in the lore of Sinology and studies of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the authors make convincing use of some quite startling Chinese-language primary sources: open-source publications that range from scholarly articles to speeches, interviews, comments, and popular journalism. They marshal these materials to make the case that Beijing’s naval ambitions are more far-reaching, in scale and in distance, than many eminent experts on China’s

rory medcalf is Director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute, Sydney, and is Senior Research Fellow in Indian Strategic Affairs at the University of New South Wales. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

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international relations have led us to believe. In particular, the authors cast China’s maritime strategy largely in terms of the theories of the old-fashioned and long-unfashionable American sea-power thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose ideas are alive and well in Beijing and, incidentally, New Delhi.

While Yoshihara and Holmes are proudly at pains to point out the novel and unorthodox nature of their approach—placing great store in very recent Chinese-language open sources—their conclusions may not be all that shocking to some readers in the defense communities of Australia or, one suspects, nations such as Japan and Vietnam in proximity to Asia’s contested maritime zones. The strategic debate in maritime Asia has moved along briskly in the past decade. First there was relative unconcern about China’s naval modernization, then a phase of wishful thinking around 2006–8, when Beijing’s ill-fated charm offensive was still alive and hopes were kindled briefly about engagement with China as a partner in policing the maritime commons. But the past two years, and especially the multiple incidents at sea in 2010, have brought a new realism to the picture. In retrospect, Canberra was ahead of this curve: its 2009 defense white paper now seems prescient in identifying the need for a serious submarine fleet as a hedge against uncertainties surrounding China’s rise (though the paper could still have been more diplomatically worded).

Thus, the present publication is ideally timed to inform the intense debates within regional security establishments about how to minimize the risk of conflict and destabilization accompanying Beijing’s centuries-awaited return to naval greatness. Its insights into China’s own robust strategic debates should be prized by security thinkers in Australia and other regional nations that desperately need to get their China analysis right. Yoshihara and Holmes also add valuable perspective on little-studied but militarily critical questions of how China might actually fight at sea, as well as on the complex intersection of its submarine-based nuclear deterrence imperatives and obsession with rolling back U.S. surveillance and sea presence in the South and East China seas.

For the reader hoping for an exhaustive exposition of what China’s naval ascent in Asia might mean, there are a few notes of disappointment. In particular, the text repeatedly makes clear that China’s maritime and wider national strategy will likely impel Beijing to seek ways to project its interests in the ocean-spanning sea lanes west of Malacca. Yet there is relatively little detail of how this might occur—suggesting, perhaps, a paucity of evidence at this stage in Chinese open-source writings. The logic of an eventual focus on the Indian Ocean makes sense, but for the time being Beijing is almost wholly

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preoccupied with troubles on China’s own maritime periphery, not only with problems caused by Japan and Taiwan and in the South China Sea but also with those caused by its unruly little brother, North Korea. Moreover, other recent writings, such as an excellent perspective by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, underline how stretched and limited Beijing’s capabilities for out-of-area naval operations still are.1

Even if there is an absence of plentiful primary sources, some informed speculation about how China might become an Indian Ocean power would not have been amiss. Likewise, it would be useful to know more about the authors’ assessments of how China, India, the United States, and others might cope—or not—with maritime competition in that western part of the Indo-Pacific strategic system. To be fair, the authors elsewhere in their prolific output have explored India’s own emerging naval strategy as well as questions about Sino-Indian maritime relations. But since the Mahanian logic of this new book suggests the centrality of the Indian Ocean to China’s turn to the sea, the dynamics of prospective India-China security relations would have benefited from a reprise, especially on questions of whether the two countries can manage their simultaneous emergence or whether the world’s two most Mahanian navies are doomed to clash.

Likewise, the analysis ends with some vital and unanswered questions about what the United States can or should do. The book neatly identifies the shortcomings in Washington’s 2007 maritime strategy—more a hopeful public relations document than a plan—and highlights the need to maintain and bolster a powerful U.S. naval presence in East Asia in the decades ahead. Yet, having emphasized Washington’s need to understand war, sea, and strategy through Chinese eyes, the authors seem to deliberately refrain from outlining precisely how the risks of U.S.-China maritime confrontation might be managed. Perhaps that is one of their forthcoming projects.

1 Christopher D. Yung, Ross Rustici, Isaac Kardon, and Joshua Wiseman, “China’s Out of Area Naval Operations: Case Studies, Trajectories, Obstacles and Potential Solutions,” Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, China Strategic Perspectives, no. 3, December 2010.

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Is the PLA Navy Channeling Mahan? And Does it Matter?

Michael McDevitt

T oshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, both associate professors in the Strategy Department of the Naval War College with PhDs from the

Fletcher School at Tufts University, have written a follow-on to the their excellent work Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan, a work I greatly admire because of its focus on and exploitation of Chinese sources. Published two years later, Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy is a companion volume that is intended to “validate, refine, and expand” the authors’ earlier survey of Chinese maritime strategic thought (p. ix).

This is a difficult review to write because this expanded work covers so many distinct topics. The central arguments of the first volume remain, but new or expanded material has been added—in some ways the new work is characteristic of an edited volume of discrete essays. There are a number of chapters on various topics, ranging from an extended case study comparing the rise of imperial Germany (sort of a cautionary tale of a Mahanite gone bad) and China, to a curious chapter entitled “Fleet Tactics with Chinese Characteristics” that unsuccessfully blends commentary on Alfred Thayer Mahan, Mao Zedong, retired navy captain Wayne Hughes’s classic works on tactics, South China Sea scenarios, weapons capabilities, and the anti-access concept of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This chapter is a bit of a hodgepodge that lacks focus.

There is no question that the authors have provided a great service by pointing out that Chinese maritime theorists and strategists have studied Mahan and find his judgments useful. There is also no question that there is a debate taking place in China regarding maritime strategy, and that Mahan is a starting point for discussing maritime power. The great utility of both this and the earlier volume is in bringing to light Chinese-language sources that help us understand the debate going on in China over its maritime future.

Yet although I admired their earlier work, I must confess that for me a little bit of Mahan goes a long way. Clearly, Yoshihara and Holmes are two of the leading interpreters of Mahan’s strategic theories on the planet. But they push these theories too far for my taste, using Mahanian theory as the yardstick against which virtually everything that Chinese experts write is measured.

michael mcdevitt, U.S. Navy (Ret.), is Vice President and Director of Strategic Studies at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

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To my mind, there is also no question that the Chinese as “scientific strategists” are perfectly capable of conceptualizing a maritime strategic approach for China that best suits its geography, interests, and perceived threats without giving Mahan a second thought. In fact, that has always been my problem with Mahan: his work illustrated that the British, and before them the Dutch and the Venetians, were perfectly capable of putting in place an integrated economic and maritime strategy. Smart people over the centuries have managed to do that without the help of Mahan. I have always thought of him as more of an ex post facto interpreter of what happened, and why it happened, than a visionary like Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell, who theorized about airpower in the early years of aviation.

Given the importance to the PLA Navy’s decision to revise and update the “Historic Missions of the PLA,” I was surprised I could not find a reference to Hu Jintao’s 2004 speech that announced these changes. Hu identified expanding national interests beyond China’s borders as a mission of the PLA. I consider this speech historic, given that it generated a political demand signal for the PLAN to begin to focus and operate globally. Hu argued that China’s global economic interests had created global political interests. For the first time, the PLA (and therefore the PLAN) was being assigned responsibilities well beyond China and its immediate periphery. This was official recognition that China’s national interests now extend beyond its borders and that the PLA’s missions are to be based on those expanding interests, not just geography. This certainly has a Mahanian ring to it but is also a statement of the obvious facts of the matter in today’s globalized world—it would be interesting to learn if the individuals who did the staff work and wrote the speech had ever heard of Mahan.

There is an excellent chapter dedicated to Chinese “soft power at sea,” which is an extended discussion of how China is exploiting the purportedly benign deployments of Zheng He, the Ming dynasty eunuch admiral who made seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 along the Indian Ocean littoral, as representative of how China is peacefully rising today. Beijing’s soft-power focus is Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral. Yoshihara and Holmes make good use of Indian naval officer commentary to illustrate that not everyone along that long littoral is buying Beijing’s “peaceful rise” claims.

In this regard, I wish the authors had elaborated more on the findings of the late Edward Dryer. In Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433, his superb book relying solely on original sources, Dryer concludes that Zheng was not a peaceful explorer, as China would have us believe, but was instead conducting the fifteenth-century equivalent

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of power projection. This is an important corrective to the mythology that has surrounded Zheng He. In any event, I, along with many generations of admirals since Zheng He, am eternally grateful that the concept of eunuch admirals did not grow in popularity.

I found the chapter on China’s emerging undersea deterrent to be an important discussion of a topic that has received scant attention. The authors focus on the political and psychological aspects of a significant Chinese strategic submarine ballistic nuclear (SSBN) force, and point out that a survivable Chinese dyad would enhance China’s minimalist retaliatory doctrine—unless, that is, PLAN SSBNs are easy to find, as Soviet boomers were, because they are noisy. In that case one has to take extraordinary measures to protect them against marauding attack submarines. That is what the Soviets needed to do—it was not something they wanted to do. Similarly, if China’s new SSBNs prove to be noisy and easy to detect, they too will be forced to adopt Soviet-style bastions. Yet, once again, this will be out of necessity and not because it is a desirable deployment option, as the authors imply. In fact, such an outcome could cause China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) to reconsider the utility of having more than a token SSBN force, given that solid-fueled, road-mobile, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) may be more survivable hidden in the vastness of China.

Chapter eight, “U.S. Maritime Strategy in Asia,” does a nice job of comparing the 1986 Maritime Strategy with the U.S. Navy’s current Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. The chapter highlights the fact that during the Cold War strategizing against the accepted enemy, and publicly saying so, was far easier than it is today when, aside from North Korea, the United States has no official enemy nations. Yoshihara and Holmes go on to explain quite well why for political and policy reasons it was not sensible for the extant strategic document to call out China explicitly as a maritime foe. Then in the last few sentences of the chapter, almost as an afterthought, the authors do an about-face and harshly criticize the current document for “dissembling about uncomfortable subjects such as the Sino-American naval rivalry” (p. 208). They call for an end to “soft pedaling” the chance for naval conflict and for “forthright” discussion in order to justify why the U.S. Navy requires high-end ships (p. 208).

It was hard for me to sort out the authors’ views on anti-access. While they share current concerns about a potential antiship ballistic missile (ASBM) and modernizing PLAN submarine force, I was left with the impression that they consider anti-access as merely a transitory phase in China’s maritime strategy, a way station en route to a Chinese version of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

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In other words, this strategy would lose its raison d’être were Taiwan to cease being an issue. I disagree. Anti-access/area denial is how China defends itself more broadly against a conventional maritime-launched attack by the United States. China’s economic center of gravity will remain on the country’s eastern seaboard, where it is vulnerable to attack from the sea for the foreseeable future. China has not forgotten that the century of humiliation, starting with the Opium Wars, was caused by threats that came mainly from the sea. Anti-access/area denial has the potential to secure China’s maritime approaches for the first time in the country’s long history. Unfortunately, the way Beijing has elected to solve this problem creates insecurity for U.S. allies and friends in the region, since the concept is based on keeping credible U.S. military power as far away from East Asia as possible. Thus, even if the prospect of conflict over Taiwan evaporates, the PLA capabilities associated with anti-access will almost certainly not disappear.

Finally, the last chapter criticizes other China watchers who in the authors’ judgment were not discerning enough to appreciate the naval implications of China’s rise. Although they do so politely, and in fairness make several good points, to use assessments of China’s ability to seize Taiwan as a way to compare the evolution of opinion regarding the PLAN seems to me like mixing apples and oranges. The reality is that the PLAN would play a relatively limited role in a direct assault on Taiwan. It is the Second Artillery Corps and PLA Air Force that would need to beat down Taiwan air defenses and gain air superiority over the Taiwan Strait. Once done, the navy would have the relatively mundane job of getting the army to Taiwan.

In an anti-access campaign, the PLAN submarine force would share the leading role, along with the Second Artillery Corps and PLA Air Force, in keeping the U.S. Navy at arm’s length. The PLAN surface fleet would probably remain within the first island chain lest it becomes easy pickings for U.S. attack submarines. (This, of course, is why a Chinese “replay” of the Imperial Japanese Navy seems far-fetched as long as USN attack submarines have such a huge asymmetric advantage.) The point is that the growth of the PLAN is not what has introduced pessimism into current assessments by China scholars about the defense of Taiwan. The reason that many security analysts believe that the cross-strait balance has tilted so dramatically in the mainland’s favor is because increasing numbers and capabilities of the PLA Second Artillery’s ballistic and cruise missiles and the PLA Air Force’s modern aircraft could allow the PLA to seize control of the airspace over the strait.

Although Yoshihara and Holmes do an excellent job of framing the debate over China’s maritime future, the broad scope of the volume overburdens

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the reader with too many digressions, some interesting and some not. They have thus allowed their erudition on a wide range of related topics to diffuse focus on the really important issue for the future—the viability of U.S. strategy in East Asia, which rests on a strong foundation of naval power, compared with that of an increasingly powerful and influential China, who is already uncomfortable with the idea of U.S. maritime predominance in the Western Pacific and is doing something about it.

Does Mahan Help Us Understand China’s Maritime Strategy?

Bernard D. Cole

T he authors of Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy are skilled literary craftsmen: Toshi Yoshihara

provides the linguistic ability to access documents in the original Chinese, while James Holmes draws on his brief experience as a naval officer, including service in a battleship during the first Iraq war in 1991. The fact that these two prolific authors have published Red Star over the Pacific as their latest major work is by itself significant—all too few American analysts are focusing on China’s navy, and Holmes and Yoshihara are leading scholars on that topic. It is fitting that both are faculty members at the U.S. Naval War College, where they can contribute to knowledge about Beijing’s maritime programs as well as to appropriate policy developments for the U.S. Navy.

This reviewer is also an analyst of the Chinese navy. My most recent work, The Great Wall at Sea, looks at the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) in order to understand how it may meet China’s national security concerns now and in the future. Much of the analysis in my book informs this review of Yoshihara and Holmes’s work.

There is much to recommend in Red Star over the Pacific, but I must note some points that detract from its analysis. The book presents a partial synergism of which the first element is “Mahanian grammar,” a phrase that is neither clear nor helpful in understanding Beijing’s maritime developments or their effect on U.S. interests in Asia. Viewing China’s 21st-century

bernard d. cole is Professor of International History at the National War College, where his research focuses on China-U.S. relations and the Chinese military. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

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maritime power through the lens of the 19th-century theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who based his theories on England’s 18th-century maritime status and campaigns, is misguided. If Chinese naval officers in 2010 believe Mahan is the apostle they should follow, then much of the concern about PLAN modernization will prove unfounded.

The second element in this apparent synergism is Mao Zedong’s theory of “people’s war.” What is missing is the concluding step: if one agrees that Mahan’s theories (or grammar) play a major role in PLAN analysis and planning, and that Mao remains a dominant strategic theorist in China, then what is the result?

Another general caution applies to all of us who try to analyze China’s military policies and intentions: what sources are the most meaningful? Is an article by an obscure PLA lieutenant colonel or PLAN senior captain worthy of attention? Though Yoshihara and Holmes recognize this issue, they appear no better than other analysts at sorting out which sources are the most meaningful.

Moving to specifics, chapter one states that “as one civilization [presumably the United States or simply the non-Sinic] vacates the oceans, then, another is crowding the seas and skies with ships and warplanes that bristle with offensively oriented weaponry” (p. 3). This statement is simply incorrect:

No “civilization” is “vacat[ing] the oceans”—certainly not the United •States, whose navy continues to dominate the global seas, nor Japan’s military and commercial maritime forces.

China’s navy certainly is not “crowding the seas and skies,” as evidenced •in the PLAN’s very moderate—other than for conventionally powered submarines—ship and aircraft acquisitions of the past two decades.

Even that modernizing fleet is not “bristl[ing] with offensively •oriented weaponry,” as an examination of the PLAN’s new platforms demonstrates.

In chapter one the authors also explain that their intention in writing the book is to help the United States manage a disturbance to the regional order—to the extent possible. However, this work seems to offer no such assistance. It fails, for instance, to address the biggest shortfall in U.S. naval power: the lack of ships. More importantly, it offers an inadequate theoretical construct to explain the Chinese navy now at sea.

Early in chapter two the statement is made that “after years of studied denials and obfuscation” Chinese leaders have admitted to wanting aircraft carriers (p. 15). However, any brief survey of the literature dating back

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to the 1970s, when Beijing acquired the ex-Australian carrier Melbourne, demonstrates the longevity of this desire. This is followed by the claim that China has “negotiated basing rights throughout the Indian Ocean,” a mischaracterization of current Chinese port developments that lacks supporting evidence. Furthermore, in the following paragraph the authors argue that “the only time [India] lost its national independence was to a seaborne invader” (p. 15). Yet this statement focuses on the European investiture of the subcontinent in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries while ignoring previous Indian history, including the depredations of Alexander, the Islamic tides of the twelfth (and earlier) centuries, and various assaults by the Persians, Huns, and other groups.

The book’s use of Mao Zedong as a current strategic icon in China, one held high for anything more than propagandistic purposes, is also problematic. Citing Mao’s “strategic wisdom” (p. 29) is strange, given his failure to defeat the pre–World War II Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, his admission that Japan’s defeat rested on non-Chinese combatants, the PLA’s employment of conventional military tactics to defeat an incompetently led Nationalist military in 1946–48, the heavy losses suffered in Korea as a result of Mao’s interference with his field commanders, his concomitant failure to seize Taiwan when China had the opportunity, and his use of military pressure against Taiwan in 1953–54, which was the major factor in Chiang Kai-shek obtaining a mutual defense treaty with the United States. Such actions cast doubt on Mao’s “strategic wisdom.” The authors correctly note that Chinese strategists are not marching in lockstep on maritime strategy, and acknowledge the “divergent trends” in China, with implications that “[remain] unclear” (p. 42). Yet this simply weakens the Mahanian-Mao theory of Chinese maritime developments on which their argument is based.

Chapter three compares 21st-century China to early 20th-century Germany and concludes that “Chinese maritime history may rhyme with—but will not repeat—that of Imperial Germany” (p. 72). However, other than the fact that imperial Germany and Communist China both decided to modernize their navies, there seems little basis for this comparison or the conclusions drawn from it.

Chapter four begins with another encomium to Mahan and his view that “whoever could control the sea would win the war” (p. 77). Yet with the exception of the employment of U.S. submarines and sea-based airpower in the defeat of Japan in World War II, there is scant historical evidence that this is true. The two most famous modern naval battles are probably those at Trafalgar in 1805 and at Midway in 1942. The former was fought against the

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forces of Napoleon, but he was only defeated ten years later by land power. Likewise, the Battle of Midway was followed by more than three years of all-out war against Japan, including the use of atomic bombs, before victory was obtained. In fact, no major war has been decided by sea power alone.

The discussion of sea power in this chapter omits a few important details as well. Specifically, it neglects to list all the claimants to South China Sea territory and overlooks that basing the PLAN’s new fleet of ballistic missile submarines at Sanya on Hainan Island places them out of range for the DF-31 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to reach most of the United States, making the South China Sea more of a “capture net” than a useful “tactical exterior line” of operation. However, the chapter concludes with an astute warning against being entranced by the net assessment approach: quantification and operations analysis are certainly useful tools but are inadequate to forecast future Chinese maritime campaigns in specific, limited scenarios.

Chapter five addresses missile warfare at sea, offering useful analysis of the role those weapons might play in a U.S.-China confrontation. Chapter six then considers China’s sea-based nuclear deterrent. One gap in the book’s discussion of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear-powered submarine stand-off during the Cold War is the failure to mention the Walker spy ring, whose betrayal reportedly spurred the Soviet Union to adopt the bastion strategy for ballistic missile submarines. In addition, the statement that China “demonstrated its ability to fire ballistic missiles at intercontinental ranges in 1980” is only marginally applicable to the maritime realm (p. 133). Although a rather limited range JL-1 missile (with a maximum range of 1,350 nautical miles) was apparently fired successfully by a Golf-class conventionally powered submarine in the early 1980s, the Xia-class submarine that was designed and built to carry the JL-1 has never been able to conduct successful operations at sea.

Chapter seven’s analysis of China’s significant move to embrace a soft-power role for the PLAN is hampered by the problematic conclusion that current operations in the Gulf of Aden have “demonstrated capabilities that had eluded it to date” (p. 149). In fact, previous long deployments by the PLAN, including a circumnavigation by a small task group in 2003, had already provided the navy with baseline knowledge and experience, which the deployments after December 2007 have only built on. Furthermore, discussions with senior U.S. naval officers who have operated with the Chinese task groups engaged in these counter-piracy operations do not agree with the book’s claim that the PLAN deployments to the Gulf of Aden have “compelled Western observers to revise their once-mocking estimate of Chinese aptitude for naval expeditionary operations” (p. 149).

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Chapter eight, “U.S. Maritime Strategy in Asia,” offers a laudable comparison of Cold War and 21st-century U.S. strategy statements. The description of a parochial U.S. naval leadership is applicable to some senior officers, but fails to acknowledge the perceptive understanding of Soviet maritime strategy evidenced in the writings of Kenneth McGruther, Robert Herrick, Steve Kime, and many other U.S. naval analysts, both civilian and uniformed. Additionally, the explanation of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s fleet reduction would be strengthened by noting the deleterious effects on the military budget that followed the conclusion of the Vietnam War, including the end of the line for a thousand-ship navy largely composed of World War II ships that were simply too expensive to keep steaming.

The difficulties in predicting the future of Chinese maritime strength is evidenced in the authors’ praise of China’s “astute diplomacy to ease worries about its return to regional eminence...benefiting all Asians” (p. 192)—a conclusion already proved questionable by Beijing’s confrontations with Japan, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations, South Korea, and the United States during the past six months or so. The book’s concluding chapter quite correctly describes the difficulty of such forecasts and, despite being clothed unhelpfully in so-called Mahanian grammar, perceptively makes the authors’ most compelling point: it is not necessarily accurate to evaluate Beijing’s maritime strategy, or the PLAN’s goals, according to U.S. standards.

Understanding China’s Military Strategy: The Challenge to Researchers

Zheng Wang

Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy is a timely work that offers an important perspective on how the

United States can evaluate and adapt its strategies in the face of China’s rapidly growing sea power. Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes provide a careful analysis of China’s military capabilities and strategies. Whereas most books on Chinese military development focus primarily on analysis of capabilities, this

zheng wang is Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C, and a Professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

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book probes more deeply to explore China’s strategies, motives, and military doctrines. The central question of the recent debate about China is not so much how to measure the country’s strength but how to gauge its strategy—how China chooses to use its power. The authors’ efforts to address this issue are praiseworthy.

Given the lack of transparency, availability, and accessibility of strategic discourse inside Beijing, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find accurate and dependable sources on naval strategic thinking. The authors have worked hard to collect open-source literature for their research. While I fully understand the challenges they faced and appreciate their efforts, I believe it is my responsibility to critically assess the Chinese-language literature used in this book.

Although the book’s arguments are carefully crafted overall, much of the supporting evidence—for example, China’s embrace of Mahanian theory—comes from popular Chinese magazines. Though magazines such as Modern Ships (Xiandai Jianchuan), Modern Weaponry (Xiandai Bingqi), Naval and Merchant Ships (Jianchuan Zhishi), Ordnance Knowledge (Bingqi Zhishi), and Shipborne Weapon (Jianzai Wuqi) may appear to be serious academic or professional journals, in fact, they are for-profit publications marketed to aficionados of a certain specialized genre. The articles are often written by people with little access to inside information, and in order to help sell the magazines, they often cater to the tastes of certain groups of people. In China, there is a large number of military aficionados. Many Chinese believe that the “national humiliation” that China suffered under imperial foreign powers from 1840 to 1945 was basically due to inferior weaponry. As a result, many fans enthusiastically follow the development of new weapons and see them as a means to overcome past humiliations and demonstrate Chinese power. The reading interests of this quite substantial group of people have supported the existence of these magazines.

Unique to China are some popular magazines that, although affiliated with official organizations or even People’s Liberation Army (PLA) institutions, do not serve as official newsletters or research journals of the organization. Therefore, they cannot be compared with, for example, the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, as the authors claim. Such magazines are simply not a dependable source of information on Chinese military doctrine or strategy. It is also important to point out that there is a fundamental difference between the influence of external publications on military strategy and policymaking in the United States and the corresponding situation in China. Due to the barriers between the military and civilian arenas in China, and the lack of

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transparency of the Chinese military in general, though popular magazines may influence public opinion, there is little basis for believing that they reflect or influence military strategy and policymaking.

For a long time, official documents were major sources of information for China watchers, and these observers developed the ability to interpret Communist Party literature as a basic skill. In recent years, however, attention to these highly important official texts has been decreasing as scholars have started to rely on popular writings. The reason, of course, is that China’s rapidly growing civil society is now full of this kind of material, which did not exist in the past. In recent decades, Chinese society has evolved inexorably from a simple to a complex system, with many different views being expressed. More importantly, the market economy and political relaxation have coalesced to create a popular culture market that may be interpreted as comparable to that in Western countries. Consequently, many China scholars, in the absence of governmental transparency, have turned their attention to these new texts and “voices” (for example, mass-circulation books, magazines, movies, posters, cartoons, television shows, and Internet chats), which are so much more intriguing and colorful than the official texts. Though these novel sources have no doubt enriched and expanded studies on Chinese society, it is important to point out that they can be misleading when it comes to understanding China’s official policy. The leaders of the ruling party make decisions on foreign policy without parliamentary hearings or public canvassing. Despite increased attention to public opinion, Beijing has not made any fundamental change in its decisionmaking process in the last two or three decades. It is true that official sources “suffer from rigid ideological correctness and unimaginative analysis,” as the authors of the book say (xi). They are, however, still the most important sources when studying policies and strategies, and should therefore not be neglected.

Beijing often complains that Chinese policies are being misunderstood by the outside world, and that China’s “peaceful rise” has been mistakenly interpreted as a “China threat.” However, Beijing does not realize that the major reason for these misunderstandings is actually its own secretive practices. The lack of transparency, the obscure nature of official documents, and the existence of a popular, often rabidly nationalistic market for public culture all contribute to possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations of China. To conduct accurate research on Chinese policy, strategy, and intentions is perhaps an impossible mission. While doing a good job in organizing a discussion based on the literature they can access, the authors needed to better identify the limitations of the open-source materials that they cite.

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A good idea might be to focus on the linkages between China’s military strategy and foreign and domestic policy. China’s military doctrine should be placed within the wider context of China’s grand strategy, as this emerges from official texts as well as from Chinese actions. For example, in understanding the importance of Taiwan to Chinese strategic thinking, it is insufficient to focus solely on relative military capabilities. One should also look at the economic, political, and dynamic changes in cross-strait relations. Similarly, the effects of the economic recession, the upcoming leadership transition in Beijing, and China’s perception of U.S. policies and actions—an important but often ignored factor—can all significantly influence China’s military strategy. Furthermore, a country’s military strategy should be consistent with its grand national strategy. If there is no evidence that China has already changed its long-term national policy from prioritizing economic development to asserting military dominance, it would be hard for readers to fully understand why China has an ambitious naval strategy that is independent from the country’s grand strategy

In general, this book offers a balanced argument. The authors argue that making historical parallels with other rising sea powers skews analysis, and caution that predicting intentions often falls prey to circular logic. Some readers may seek a clear-cut conclusion; however, I understand the difficulties of offering an answer to such a complex and multilayered topic. In presenting their analysis, Yoshihara and Holmes have been careful not to draw swift conclusions. Given the lack of precise knowledge about the intentions behind the build-up of China’s military forces, the authors instead identify possible motives and advise the United States to devise strategies to adapt to these possibilities. This is a good approch and contributes to saving the book from some of the criticisms raised above concerning the quality of its sources.

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Authors’ Response: Varieties of Mahanian Experience

James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara

W e are grateful that some of the top scholars on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invested their time in reviewing our book Red Star over

the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy. We address three cross-cutting themes from their essays before turning to specifics.

Inexorable Logic, (Mostly) Outdated Grammar

Bernard Cole laments our employing “Mahanian grammar” as a prism through which to examine Chinese sea power. This, he says, is “neither clear nor helpful” and even “misguided.” This would be damning—except that Cole has misconstrued our argument by inverting it.

To review, our approach originates with Carl von Clausewitz, who penetratingly analyzes the relationship between statecraft and war. In On War, Clausewitz proclaims that war proceeds under a unique “grammar” of violent political intercourse that distinguishes it from peacetime diplomacy. At sea, this grammar governs fleet operations. Contrary to Cole’s interpretation, however, we consider and explicitly discard the possibility that China draws meaningful guidance from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s writings on operational and tactical matters (see pp. 7–11, 77–78, 84). Given that Mahan exhorts tacticians to clear vital waters of the enemy’s flag, thereby seizing “command of the sea,” Beijing must look elsewhere for specifics.

Nevertheless, time spent consulting Mahan is not time wasted. Clausewitz vouchsafes that the same higher-order “logic” of political purpose impels both peacetime endeavors and war. Our basic premise is that the Mahanian logic of commercial, political, and military access to important regions endures. However perishable Mahan’s commentary on operations and tactics proved, his logic of sea power remains at once universal and inescapable. The Clausewitzian structure of our analysis is neither arcane nor especially complex. In essence, we maintain that seafaring states can pursue timeless Mahanian ends through non-Mahanian ways and means. The logic and

james r. holmes is an Associate Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and an affiliate member of the China Maritime Studies Institute. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

toshi yoshihara is an Associate Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College, where he also holds the John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies, and an affiliate member of the China Maritime Studies Institute. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

note u The views voiced here are those of the authors alone.

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grammar of sea power, then, are not indivisible. Chinese thinkers reared on Maoist active defense rediscovered Mahan, in effect retrofitting his overarching strategic guidance to preexisting operational and tactical preferences.

Michael McDevitt protests that “smart people” can devise maritime strategies without Mahan’s help. Although this is certainly true, recall the words of the late Michael Handel, who averred that strategists can be Clausewitzian without reading Clausewitz. On War codifies logic and common sense yet remains a keen instrument for analyzing strategic questions. According to Dean Cheng, we contend that the discovery of Mahan caused China to turn seaward, in a kind of “Eureka!” experience. Far from it. We maintain that Beijing cast its attention seaward during the Deng Xiaoping years. As Chinese wealth and material strength started to match the country’s maritime aspirations a decade ago, Chinese strategists did what good strategists do. They investigated great works of strategic theory—works whose logic transcends time and technology.

In sum, one need not consult Mahan to be Mahanian, but it does spare smart Chinese people from reinventing the wheel. They see little need to try, judging from how often they invoke Mahanian logic.

Sea Power Is More than Fleets

McDevitt and Cheng seem to imply that we divorce fleet operations from shore support, slighting the joint dimension of sea power. This, however, is not the case. Sea power is more than naval power. Maritime forces include not only ships underway but land-based antiship missiles and combat aircraft flying from air fields ashore. Indeed, such a merger is central to what we call “fleet tactics with Chinese characteristics” (pp. 73–100). As we see it, the PLA is creating a two-tiered architecture of sea power. Chinese commanders are forging shore- and sea-based platforms and weaponry into a joint sea-denial capability. Once they have erected an effective PLA anti-access shield, the PLA Navy (PLAN) surface fleet—a viable “fortress fleet,” in Mahanian parlance—can roam Asian waters with impunity, backed by shore-based fire support.

Such grand sea-denial would exempt the PLAN from building symmetrically against the U.S. Navy, its chief rival. If access-denial measures can hold the U.S. fleet at bay, why bother planning to slug it out? It would doubtless break Mahan’s heart to see humdrum systems such as truck-launched missiles take primary responsibility for maritime defense, supplanting “capital ships.” Still, we doubt he would object to our analysis. His standard for command of the sea was to rid crucial expanses of enemy

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fleets. If a seagoing state can meet this standard with relatively inexpensive land-based hardware, why not do so? McDevitt and Cheng are thus right to caution against reducing Chinese sea power to the PLAN fleet—although we protest our innocence!

There Is No Single Meaning of “Mahanian”

Our reviewers seemingly assume there is a single meaning of the word “Mahanian” and that we are hyping the Chinese nautical challenge by describing China as a Mahanian sea power. For them a Mahanian power apparently must boast a world-straddling fleet comparable to today’s U.S. Navy or, before U.S. maritime ascendancy, Great Britain’s Royal Navy. On the contrary, rising and established maritime powers—notably imperial Japan and imperial Germany, as well as Britain and the United States—have interpreted and applied Mahanian theory in many different ways. It could be argued that none of these powers, including the United States of Mahan’s own time, put his ideas into practice strictly as he intended.

During the 1890s, Mahan beseeched the United States to cast off its history of commerce raiding and coastal defense and construct a fleet able to defend the approaches to the isthmus against all likely comers. In short, he envisioned a locally dominant U.S. Navy, not the “navy second to none” built to prosecute World War I or the “two-ocean navy” bolted together for World War II. Still less did he counsel the U.S. leadership to outbuild the Royal Navy, wresting away global mastery for itself. Yet all these approaches to U.S. sea power went by the name Mahanian, as did the radically different strategies drawn up in London, Berlin, and Tokyo.

We liken China today to the United States in the 1890s. To our eyes, it is a rising sea power with grand ambitions in its home region and, increasingly, capabilities to match. In any case, we urge China watchers to strive for precision. Important terms such as Mahanian lose all meaning when deployed too cavalierly.

Odds and Ends

We now turn to specific comments from our interlocutors. In the remaining space available to us, we focus most of our attention on Bernard Cole’s review. Having mischaracterized our basic approach, he spends the balance of his review nitpicking away at the book. This warrants a detailed response lest readers assume we concede his points.

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To begin with, he denies our claim that Chinese warships are “bristling” with offensive weaponry. This would come as news to U.S. or Japanese mariners who find themselves targets of the saturation antiship missile attacks on which Beijing has founded its anti-access strategy and around which it has designed its men-of-war. Offense is the heart of Maoist active defense (see p. 73ff.).

Cole questions our claim that Chinese leaders long dissembled about wanting aircraft carriers for the PLAN fleet. He opines that the purchase of the retired Australian flattop Melbourne during the “1970s” (1985, to be precise) constitutes evidence of the long-standing Chinese desire for carriers. We suppose that’s true in a vague sense, but studying old hulks is different from fielding operational carriers. Only in 2010 did Beijing officially confirm that it intends to put a working carrier fleet to sea, making the hypothetical real. That was our point, and it stands.

Turning to the Indian Ocean, Cole disputes our claim that Beijing has negotiated basing rights throughout the region. Yet “basing rights” can mean vastly different things. During the Cold War, U.S. agreements with host nations authorized everything from anchoring a submarine tender off Scotland to erecting massive installations at Yokosuka and Sasebo. China is not constructing its own Yokosuka at Gwadar or Hambantota. Indeed, we were among the first to question assumptions about a full-blown Chinese “string of pearls.”1 Still, it is naïve to think that Beijing would bankroll port infrastructure at such sites without arranging some form of access for PLAN warships. In addition, Cole wrongly claims that we contend that India has never been conquered except from the sea. To the contrary, what we argue—alongside scholars such as K.M. Panikkar—is that mountain passes channeled, slowed, and moderated overland invasions, allowing Indian civilization to assimilate the invaders. British rule represented the sole exception to this pattern. This point is neither new nor especially controversial.

Cole waves aside chapter three without really addressing our comparison between China and imperial Germany. However, such comparisons are well-founded in international relations theory and commonplace among Western commentators like Henry Kissinger, not to mention among the Chinese themselves. There assuredly is value in comparing two rising economic and military powers whose emergence disrupted the international system around them, and who sought to make themselves into great sea powers. China is not

1 James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “China’s Naval Ambitions in the Indian Ocean,” Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no. 3 (June 2008): 367–94.

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imperial Germany. We point that out ourselves (p. 72). We cannot, however, accept the view that history holds no lessons whatsoever.

Cole reports that chapter four starts with “another encomium to Mahan,” implying that this paean is ours. It is not. It comes from Chinese scholar Ni Lexiong and is clearly marked as such. Cole next argues strenuously against Ni, whose “encomium” maintains that “whoever could control the sea would win the war” (p. 77). Cole proffers the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) and the Battle of Midway (1942) as counterexamples to this principle. From the trivial observation that no single, discrete event decided the Napoleonic Wars or World War II, he concludes that “no major war has been decided by sea power alone.” He evidently believes this settles matters. This was a misguided choice of historical evidence, however, because Ni’s remark holds true for both conflicts. One battle decided neither war, but “whoever could control the sea” went on to win both wars. This round goes to Ni.

With regard to China’s burgeoning undersea nuclear deterrent, Cole observes that nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBN) based on Hainan Island would be unable to strike “most of the United States” from the South China Sea. Their missile range remains too short. But Beijing can deter the United States just as easily by menacing Honolulu and Guam as by menacing Washington. We point out, moreover, that Sanya offers Chinese boats ready egress into the Western Pacific. That would be doubly true should the mainland recover Taiwan, emplacing forces on the island to safeguard the passage of SSBNs into waters closer to the United States. In passing, furthermore, Cole faults us for overlooking the fact that China’s decrepit Xia-class SSBN never conducted a deterrent patrol. That fact, however, is noted on p. 144.

Cole’s review further takes us to task for neglecting to mention that a small PLAN task force circumnavigated the globe in 2003. This, he says, renders “problematic” our claim that the Chinese counterpiracy deployment to the Gulf of Aden “after December 2007” (this actually took place after December 2008) demonstrated capabilities that eluded the PLAN until recent years. But surely a veteran seaman like Cole knows that a single voyage—even a world cruise—is far different from mounting sustained operations that involve multiple flotillas’ performing convoy duty across a vast sea area, interacting with commercial shippers and other multinational forces, and honing tactics, techniques, and procedures seldom used before the mission. Oddly, after insisting that the 2003 cruise sped the PLAN along the learning curve, Cole reverses himself to dispute our guardedly upbeat view of Chinese mariners’ performance off Somalia. He takes refuge behind unnamed “senior

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U.S. naval officers” who supposedly disagree. He should provide specifics. We know senior U.S. naval officers who tell a different tale.

Last, Cole notes that we praised Beijing for deft “soft-power” diplomacy. He then counters that Beijing vitiated its narrative in 2010 through rash words and deeds. However, we spotlighted the dangers that soft-power diplomacy entails for China, recounting how it fell on deaf ears among some audiences while setting a nearly unreachable standard for future Chinese conduct (pp. 172–78).

We agree wholeheartedly with McDevitt that China’s quest for sea power transcends the Taiwan imbroglio. This constitutes one of our central points. As we maintain, “China’s march to the seas will not end with Taiwan. Far larger forces are at work” (p. 11). A Taiwan contingency nevertheless remains a reasonable yardstick for both China’s anti-access strategy and the United States’ standing in Asia. If the U.S. Navy cannot enter an important combat theater, or if Washington is deterred from even making the attempt, then in what meaningful sense can we say (as does Robert Ross, to whose work McDevitt seems to allude) that the U.S. Navy remains dominant? The capacity to set the terms for U.S. entry is the true measure of Chinese anti-access strategy.

Zheng Wang is right to exhort analysts to uphold rigor when surveying Chinese open-source literature. Analysts should never ask more of the sources than they can actually deliver. His critique of our research methodology misfires, however. We sample the literature far more widely than Wang seems prepared to admit. Beyond what he dubs “popular Chinese magazines” (more on this below), we assess official sources, military outlets, reputable academic journals, and authoritative technical periodicals. We liberally cite China’s National Defense, Science of Military Strategy, Science of Second Artillery Campaigns, China Military Science, Liberation Army Daily, People’s Navy, Peace and Development, Contemporary International Relations, and Winged Missiles. Curiously enough, Wang overlooks the fact that the sources of which he approves lavish as much praise on Mahan as the outlets he denigrates.

We do not, as Wang implies, claim that the military journals reflect policy. Indeed, we explicitly acknowledge that these sources do not enjoy official sanction (p. xi). Furthermore, Wang, like Cole, mischaracterizes how we use specialized military periodicals. We did not consult these sources for what Wang delicately calls “inside information”—the anonymous, supposedly authoritative personal contacts that are common currency among China specialists. Instead, we carefully vetted hundreds of Chinese articles to discern how analysts perceive foreign navies and the PLAN. We rigorously tested these

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works to determine whether they manifest independence and originality. The works we cited passed these tests with flying colors. We also took pains to identify Chinese misperceptions (p. 110). Investigating a wider swathe of the literature, moreover, helps capture China’s national strategic mood toward sea power, whereas official sources reveal little about the zeitgeist. Constricting our inquiry would amount to self-induced myopia.

In our extensive survey of the literature, we were continually impressed with the savvy demonstrated by Chinese writers. These are no amateur enthusiasts. They supply a wealth of accurate data and informed speculation comparable, if not superior, to commentary in the West. In this context, we are puzzled by Wang’s objections to our comparison with the U.S. Naval Institute’s journal Proceedings, which is no front of the U.S. Navy. Quality of thought, not government affiliation, is the yardstick for gauging rigor. Accordingly, such a parallel is entirely fitting. More importantly, if Wang is so unhappy with the purported failings of these writings, he should specify how they err. He offers not one example of how the sources we cited were factually incorrect or analytically unsound.

We concur with Wang that “military doctrine should be placed within the wider context of China’s grand strategy.” Focusing tightly on grand strategy, however, yields limited insight into the intersection of PLA strategy and operations, which is the focus of our study. Wang’s research standard would require foreign scholars to deduce U.S. military doctrine and tactics from National Security Strategy documents—documents couched in platitudes and banalities. The findings from such a project would elicit giggles. Finally, we disagree with Wang that economic development and military build-ups are mutually exclusive. This is a narrow, if not wrongheaded, conception of grand strategy.

If Wang and like-minded China watchers had their way about research on Chinese sources, policymakers would heed advice only from people who appear graced with “the ability to interpret Communist Party literature as a basic skill.” This smacks of intellectual gatekeeping. As new sources—and those able to exploit them—proliferate, China watchers’ monopoly on interpretation of Chinese thinking will erode further. Specialists ought to welcome alternative voices, if indeed they believe that policymakers benefit from more—and increasingly varied—perspectives to inform decisions. Wang’s closed-shop mentality is unpromising.

Finally, Rory Medcalf wishes we had given our book a more “Indo-Pacific” flair. Point taken. His review reminds us that Asian states afford the rise of China far closer scrutiny than audiences in the United States and the

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West have given it. Asians can hardly do otherwise, since geography has situated them—like the weaker states bordering imperial Germany—near a rising power whose future direction remains unclear. They cannot neglect a potential challenge of this magnitude. As Medcalf concedes, moreover, we have hardly remained silent about Indian Ocean affairs.2 He is quite right that we are starting to grapple with the mechanics of Chinese maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean. Some of this work is now seeing print, and we look forward to heeding his and McDevitt’s advice to expand our research now that we have ventured some analysis of the challenge cited in the subtitle of our book.3 Red Star over the Pacific is a way station, not the final stop.

2 James R. Holmes, Andrew C. Winner, and Toshi Yoshihara, Indian Naval Strategy in the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2009).

3 See for instance James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “U.S. Navy’s Indian Ocean Folly?” Diplomat, January 4, 2011; and James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “Mao’s ‘Active Defense’ Is Turning Offensive,” Proceedings, 137, no. 4 (April 2011): 24–29.

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