Sino-American War

China's Plan to Sink the U.S. Navy

By Lyle J. Goldstein

Whether or not we accept Gu’s interpretations of history and his critiques of current diplomacy on both sides of the Pacific, we can all at least agree that it is profoundly positive that scholars at China’s most prestigious universities are poring over this history in painstaking detail to gain insights into how and why great powers can unwittingly blunder into catastrophic wars.

At a minimum, this tendency should inspire new interest in China’s proposed “new-type great power relations” 新型大国关系—a concept rejected some time ago by the Washington foreign policy establishment.
(This first appeared several years ago.)
Grave tensions in Russo-Turkish relations serve as a timely reminder that great power tensions can spiral downward all too rapidly. 

The escalation spiral in the Black Sea region has echoes in East Asia, of course, where Beijing and Washington have been attempting to manage intensifying great-power competition for the last two decades.
More than a few scholars have pointed out the importance of analogies in structuring elite perceptions concerning evolving rivalries. 

With the centenary of the First World War, a new research agenda has blossomed with bountiful comparisons between 1914 and the present era . 

Keeping the upcoming hundredth anniversary of the Jutland battle—the largest single naval engagement of World War I—close in mind, this edition of Dragon Eye will explore a Chinese analysis of the pre–World War I Anglo-German rivalry, and in particular the role of Berlin’s “big navy” buildup in sparking the bloodletting.
The author, Gu Quan from Peking University, of the article published in a mid-2015 edition of Asia-Pacific Security and Maritime Research 亚太安全与海洋研究 entitled “Prejudice, Distrust and Sea Power: Discussing the Reversal and Influence of Pre-WWI Anglo-German Relations” suggests numerous times at the outset that the historical lessons may well be applicable to contemporary U.S.-China relations. 

But he is somewhat reticent about making explicit and detailed comparisons. 

Rather, as is quite frequently the case in Chinese academic writing, certain threads are perhaps intentionally left untied, so that it is up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. 

Still, one plausible reading of this article is that it represents an impressively candid and rather dark appraisal of Beijing’s present foreign policy direction. 

However, a complete understanding of the paper’s argument illustrates the author’s appreciation that it is the complex intermingling of mounting “strategic prejudice” 战略偏见 on both sides of the Pacific that makes U.S.-China relations ever more precarious.
To be sure, the singular focus in the paper on Germany’s prewar naval buildup as the most severe irritant in the relationship most likely bespeaks a critique of the urgent striving increasingly evident in China’s shipyards over the last decade. 

In a seeming echo of recent Chinese strategic assessments , the author notes that the German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had bemoaned his country’s historical “neglect of sea power”. 

Berlin’s big navy project reflected a turn away from the more cautious policies of Bismarck toward a new “daring” approach that might employ the threat of force or “blackmail” for the purpose of “yielding diplomatic victories,” that would also pay dividends in German domestic politics. 

Thus, Tirpitz’s grand fleet is interpreted in this Chinese rendering as the key enabler for Berlin’s new Weltpolitik.
Gu demonstrates ample familiarity with the dynamics of the Anglo-German rivalry.
The Chinese scholar relates how the naval arms race accelerated dangerously after Germany embarked on building its own Dreadnought-class battleship in 1908–9.
At that point, London was forced to rely more on the “quantity” than the “quality” of its vessels to outpace Berlin’s fleet development.
A closely related strategic rebalance led the Royal Navy to enhance naval partnerships, not just with France, but with the United States and Japan as well, in order to ensure its quantitative superiority in home waters.
England also pursued naval organizational reform and combat planning.
All these measures caused Germany’s naval development to be “hard-pressed,” and “confronting the daily increasing threat posed by the British Navy, the German Navy diligently surmounted every kind of difficulty…”
Still, Gu maintains that Germany’s crash naval building program was built on a variety of bogus premises, including especially “blind optimism”.
Then, there was the mistaken belief in Berlin that France, Russia and Britain would never really succeed in cooperating.
According to Gu, the Kaiser and other German leaders deluded themselves with grand naval visions, believing that “landing a big fish requires a long line” and, further, that “time was on their side.”
On the other hand, this Chinese scholar does not place all the blame on Berlin, but sees London as also culpable for “strategic prejudice.”
Gu observes that, to London’s credit, its approach to Berlin, at least initially, was not simply “meeting force with force”, and even had elements of trying “to convert an enemy to a friend”.
Yet the “German threat theory” gradually gained adherents in Britain, nourished by thinkers like Eyre Crowe, the British diplomat discussed in some detail in the conclusion of Henry Kissinger’s tome On China . 
Underlining the importance of this analogy, by the way, is the interesting revelation from a citation in Gu’s article that the Crowe Memorandum has been translated into Mandarin by Guangxi Normal University and was published two years ago.
In 1909, writes Gu, London developed an acute case of “naval panic” as the Anglo-German rivalry became a “contest of life and death”
In this atmosphere, London not only took measures to strengthen the fleet, but energetically reinforced its alliance with France and Russia.
However, Gu suggests that London went wrong in that it ceased to consider Germany’s actual intentions, and started to push its “Entente policy” as an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Moreover, Gu notes that the Royal Navy’s hypothetical role in a European great power military struggle was thought to include either blockading or bottling up the German fleet, thus limiting Britain’s exposure and constituting a form of “low-cost” military intervention.
Obviously, that line of thinking proved gravely inaccurate.
Ultimately, this appraisal faults Britain for placing its alliances above all else and thus taking a myopic “one-size-fits-all” approach to great power diplomacy.
While the Chinese author does not take the next step and directly compare the historical policies elaborated above to contemporary diplomacy as practiced by Washington or Beijing within their nascent rivalry, some historical echoes are obvious.
Perhaps U.S. leaders have fallen into a kind of spiral of “naval panic,” within which intensifying alliance diplomacy seems the only option, but that carries definite (if somewhat veiled) risks of escalation and entrapment?
Even more likely, it seems logical that the piece is primarily intended as a critique of Beijing’s own readily apparent “big navy” strategy in support of Weltpolitik with Chinese characteristics.

Sina Delenda Est

Royal Navy warship confronted by Chinese military in South China Sea
By Chris Graham

HMS Albion passed by the Paracel Islands in recent days to challenge Beijing's excessive claims

A Royal Navy warship has sailed close to islands claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea, a move denounced by China as a "provocation".
In a sign of Britain increasingly flexing its military muscle in the region, HMS Albion last week passed by the Paracel Islands, where it was confronted by the Chinese military.
The Albion, a 22,000 ton amphibious warship carrying a contingent of Royal Marines, was on its way to Saigon, where it docked on Monday after a deployment in and around Japan.
Beijing dispatched a frigate and two helicopters to challenge the British vessel, but both sides remained calm during the encounter, a source told Reuters.
China said Britain was engaged in "provocation" and that it had lodged a strong complaint. 

In a statement to Reuters, the Foreign Ministry said the ship had entered Chinese territorial waters around the Paracel Islands on August 31 without permission, and the Chinese navy had warned them to leave.
A source told Reuters that the Albion did not enter the territorial seas around any features in the hotly disputed region but demonstrated that Britain does not recognise excessive maritime claims around the Paracel Islands. 

Twelve nautical miles is an internationally recognised territorial limit.
The Paracels are occupied entirely by China but also claimed by Vietnam.
A spokesman for the Royal Navy said: “HMS Albion exercised her rights for freedom of navigation in full compliance with international law and norms.”
Dr Euan Graham, a Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia, said the move followed an earlier passage by a Royal Navy ship through the Spratly Islands.
He said it was a clear indication of Britain's support for the US, which has said it would like to see more international participation in such actions.
"Also, the fact that Albion was coming from Japan and on her way to Vietnam gives the signal a sharper edge to China," he told The Telegraph.
The Albion is one of three Royal Navy ships deployed to Asia this year, along with HMS Argyll and HMS Sutherland.
"The UK has impressively deployed three Royal Navy surface ships to Asian waters this year, after a long gap between ship visits, to this part of the world," he added. 

Military vehicles are seen in the loading dock of the HMS Albion, the British Royal Navy flagship amphibious assault ship, after the ship's arrival at Harumi Pier in Tokyo.

Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, said in June that deployment of the three ships was intended to send the “strongest of signals” on the importance of freedom of navigation.
Dr Graham said "the bigger test of UK commitment to regional security in the Indo-Pacific is about the consistency of its military presence into the future".
"The Royal Navy is making encouraging noises about sending assets to participate in FPDA (the Five Power Defence Arrangement) exercises as well as forward basing in future."
The FPDA is a regional security institution between Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
China’s claims in the South China Sea, through which some $3 trillion of shipborne trade passes each year, are contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Both Britain and the United States say they conduct FONOP operations throughout the world, including in areas claimed by allies.
The British Navy has previously sailed close to the disputed Spratly Islands, further south in the South China Sea, several times in recent years but not within the 12 nautical mile limit, regional diplomatic sources have said.
FONOPs, which are largely symbolic, have so far not persuaded Beijing to curtail its South China Sea activities, which have included extensive reclamation of reefs and islands and the construction of runways, hangars and missile systems.

Foreign aircraft and vessels in the region are routinely challenged by Chinese naval ships and monitoring stations on the fortified islands, sources have said previously.
In April, warships from Australia -- which like Britain is a close US ally -- had what Canberra described as a close "encounter" with Chinese naval vessels in the contested sea.

Sina Delenda Est

Is Great Britain Preparing for a War with China?
By Michael Peck

The Pacific Ocean does not exactly bubble with happy memories for Britain. 

In December 1941, Japanese torpedo bombers sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off Malaya. 

In early 1942, the Japanese captured eighty thousand British soldiers at Singapore.
Already overstretched fighting the Nazis in Europe, Britain couldn’t do much in the Far East during World War II. 

For almost a century, America has been the big stick in the Pacific.
So why is Britain vowing to send its military muscle to the Pacific?
Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the United States, recently told a Washington think tank that Britain will send aircraft carriers to the Pacific once they become operational in the 2020s. 

Four Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters, which arrived in Japan in October for joint exercises, are scheduled to fly over the South China Sea.
“Certainly, as we bring our two new aircraft carriers onstream in 2020, and as we renew and update our defense forces, they will be seen in the Pacific,” Darroch announced. 

“And we absolutely share the objective of this U.S. administration, and the next one, to protect freedom of navigation and to keep sea routes and air routes open.”
Naturally, Beijing warned that these moves could threaten relations between China and Britain.
There are two questions here. 

The first is technical: What exactly does Britain think it can accomplish militarily against China? 

The Royal Navy is now down to just nineteen destroyers and frigates, and is phasing out its antiship missiles, leaving British warships to slug it out with cannon like the Grand Fleet at Jutland in 1916. 

The Royal Air Force is shrinking, and the British Army has fewer infantrymen than were killed on the first day of the Somme in 1916.
Compare this to China, whose defense spending has surged 12.9 percent per year between 1989 and 2011. 

Even with the Chinese economy slowing, the defense budget was still expected to increase by 7.9 percent in 2016.
Assuming the Queen Elizabeth–class carriers and their F-35B aircraft are ready by 2020—two big ifs, given the history of these two programs—then each carrier will accommodate perhaps fifty aircraft at most, including F-35B vertical/short takeoff and landing strike fighters, as well as assorted airborne early-warning and antisubmarine aircraft and helicopters.
If the Americans, with their bigger carriers and sophisticated Aegis-equipped escorts, are worried about Chinese submarines, hypersonic weapons and carrier-killer ballistic missiles, how would a British carrier task force fare? 

If a time warp could take a Queen Elizabeth battlegroup back to 1982, it could possibly take on the entire Argentine air force and navy. 

But China in 2020? 

Not likely.
Which in turn brings up the question of what Britain hopes to accomplish. 

As a means of asserting British influence in East Asia, the British military presence probably won’t help much unless London is prepared to somehow wield a bigger stick (nuclear weapons don’t count—China has them too). 

As deterrence against a Chinese attack on Taiwan or Japan, if Beijing isn’t afraid of the United States, then it’s not likely to be afraid of Britain.
Militarily, despite some claims that Britain could defeat China under some conditions, this seems a risky proposition at best. 

With Chinese GDP almost five times greater than Britain’s, it is a proposition that will only get riskier. 

In the high-tech arms race between America and China, Britain simply doesn’t have the resources to compete.
Nor should it. 

Regardless of what China does, there is still the emerging Russian threat in Europe. 

Wouldn’t it make sense to concentrate the Royal Navy in Europe and the Mediterranean, as in World War II, and let the United States worry about the Pacific?