China's New Aircraft Carrier

It is not clear when the Type 002 will be launched and eventually commissioned, but the Chinese are thought to have a set a goal of having four carrier strike groups in operational service by 2030.

By Dave Majumdar


China has apparently started construction of its third aircraft carrier, but details about the new vessel are scant. 

However, unlike the two previous Chinese carriers, the Type 001 Liaoning—formerly the Soviet Kuznetsov-class Varyag—and the Type 001A Shandong, the new Type 002 ship will be equipped with catapult launch systems similar in concept to those found onboard U.S. Navy vessels.
The Chinese are known to be working on the development of an Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS ) hardware similar to those found onboard the latest USS Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, but development of those advanced electromagnetic catapults has proven to be difficult even for the United States. 

According to Chinese media, Beijing intends to forego conventional steam catapults and move directly to EMALS technology. 

Assuming, that the Chinese are moving forward with an EMALS-equipped vessel, it is an indication that Beijing’s third carrier will be of an indigenous design—albeit one likely aided by technology gleaned from the United States through espionage.
“China is expected to begin construction on its first catapult-capable carrier in 2018, which will enable additional fighter aircraft, fixed-wing early-warning aircraft, and more rapid flight operations,” reads the Pentagon’s 2018 report to Congress on the Chinese military .
Indeed, Chinese media reported earlier this year that the Shanghai Jiangnan Shipyard Group was given the green light to start construction on China’s third carrier. 

“But the shipyard is still working on the carrier’s hull, which is expected to take about two years,” a Chinese defense industrial source told the South China Morning Post . 

“Building the new carrier will be more complicated and challenging than the other two ships.”
There are few specific details available about the specifications of the Type 002. 

However, Chinese media have suggested that the new vessels would displace roughly 80,000-tons, which is comparable in size to the now-retired USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67). 

At a displacement of roughly 80,000-tons, the prospective Chinese aircraft carrier would be similar in size to the nuclear-powered Project 1143.7 Orel-class design, the only example of which, Ulyanovsk, was scrapped on the ways after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991.
Given that China acquired Liaoning and all of her blueprints from a newly independent Ukraine, it is possible that Beijing also acquired the design for Ulyanovsk from Kiev under a similar arrangement. 

Beijing’s engineers would have benefited greatly from the acquisition of such technology from the fragmented remains of Soviet Union, having never previously designed or built a combat vessel of such a massive scale. 

Moscow had completed development of most the critical technologies—such as steam catapults—needed for a fully capable carrier on Ulyanovsk before the implosion of the Soviet state.
Even if Beijing did not obtain the design for Ulyanovsk, the Chinese are clearly benefiting from Soviet technological developments that they gleaned from Liaoning. 

Indeed, Chinese media is reporting that Ukrainian engineers have been assisting Beijing’s shipbuilders with the development of the new carriers. 

“China has set up a strong and professional aircraft carrier team since early 2000, when it decided to retrofit the Varyag to launch as the Liaoning, and it hired many Ukrainian experts ... as technical advisers,” a Chinese defense industry source told the South China Morning Post.
Nonetheless, there are indications that Beijing is looking towards the West for inspiration for the Type 002, particularly for the design of ships’ topsides. 

“The new vessel will have a smaller tower island than the Liaoning and its sister ship because it needs to accommodate China’s carrier-based J-15 fighter jets, which are quite large,” a Chinese defense industry source told South China Morning Post. 

“It has been suggested that they look to Britain’s warship, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, which has two small tower islands on the deck. That would create more space for the runway and aircraft, but no final decision has been made yet.”
It is not clear when the Type 002 will be launched and eventually commissioned, but the Chinese are thought to have a set a goal of having four carrier strike groups in operational service by 2030.

Sina Delenda Est

With Ships and Missiles, China Is Ready to Challenge U.S. Navy in Pacific
By Steven Lee Myers

China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, at sea in April. First launched by the Soviet Union in 1988, it was sold for $20 million to a Chinese investor who said it would become a floating casino, though he was in reality acting on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

DALIAN, China — In April, on the 69th anniversary of the founding of China’s Navy, the country’s first domestically built aircraft carrier stirred from its berth in the port city of Dalian on the Bohai Sea, tethered to tugboats for a test of its seaworthiness.
“China’s first homegrown aircraft carrier just moved a bit, and the United States, Japan and India squirmed,” a military news website crowed, referring to the three nations China views as its main rivals.
Not long ago, such boasts would have been dismissed as the bravado of a second-string military. 

No longer.
A modernization program focused on naval and missile forces has shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in ways the United States and its allies are only beginning to digest.
While China lags in projecting firepower on a global scale, it can now challenge American military supremacy in the places that matter most to it: the waters around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.
That means a growing section of the Pacific Ocean — where the United States has operated unchallenged since the naval battles of World War II — is once again contested territory, with Chinese warships and aircraft regularly bumping up against those of the United States and its allies.
To prevail in these waters, according to officials and analysts who scrutinize Chinese military developments, China does not need a military that can defeat the United States outright but merely one that can make intervention in the region too costly for Washington to contemplate. 

Many analysts say Beijing has already achieved that goal.
To do so, it has developed “anti-access” capabilities that use radar, satellites and missiles to neutralize the decisive edge that America’s powerful aircraft carrier strike groups have enjoyed. 

It is also rapidly expanding its naval forces with the goal of deploying a “blue water” navy that would allow it to defend its growing interests beyond its coastal waters.
“China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States,” the new commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip S. Davidson, acknowledged in written remarks submitted during his Senate confirmation process in March.
He described China as a “peer competitor” gaining on the United States not by matching its forces weapon by weapon but by building critical “asymmetrical capabilities,” including with anti-ship missiles and in submarine warfare. 

“There is no guarantee that the United States would win a future conflict with China,” he concluded.
Last year, the Chinese Navy became the world’s largest, with more warships and submarines than the United States, and it continues to build new ships at a stunning rate. 

Though the American fleet remains superior qualitatively, it is spread much thinner.
“The task of building a powerful navy has never been as urgent as it is today,” Xi Jinping declared in April as he presided over a naval procession off the southern Chinese island of Hainan that opened exercises involving 48 ships and submarines. 

The Ministry of National Defense said they were the largest since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.
Even as the United States wages a trade war against China, Chinese warships and aircraft have picked up the pace of operations in the waters off Japan, Taiwan, and the islands, shoals and reefs it has claimed in the South China Sea over the objections of Vietnam and the Philippines.
When two American warships — the Higgins, a destroyer, and the Antietam, a cruiser — sailed within a few miles of disputed islands in the Paracels in May, Chinese vessels rushed to challenge what Beijing later denounced as “a provocative act.” 

China did the same to three Australian ships passing through the South China Sea in April.
Only three years ago, Xi stood beside President Barack Obama in the Rose Garden and promised not to militarize artificial islands it has built farther south in the Spratlys archipelago. 

Chinese officials have since acknowledged deploying missiles there, but argue that they are necessary because of American “incursions” in Chinese waters.
When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited Beijing in June, Xi bluntly warned him that China would not yield “even one inch” of territory it claims as its own.
Ballistic missiles designed to strike ships on display at a military parade in Beijing in 2015.

‘Anti-Access/Area Denial’
China’s naval expansion began in 2000 but accelerated sharply after Xi took command in 2013. 

He has drastically shifted the military’s focus to naval as well as air and strategic rocket forces, while purging commanders accused of corruption and cutting the traditional land forces.
The People’s Liberation Army — the bedrock of Communist power since the revolution — has actually shrunk in order to free up resources for a more modern fighting force. 

Since 2015, the army has cut 300,000 enlisted soldiers and officers, paring the military to two million personnel over all, compared with 1.4 million in the United States.
While every branch of China’s armed forces lags behind the United States’ in firepower and experience, China has made significant gains in asymmetrical weaponry to blunt America’s advantages. 

One focus has been in what American military planners call A2/AD, for “anti-access/area denial,” or what the Chinese call “counter-intervention.”
A centerpiece of this strategy is an arsenal of high-speed ballistic missiles designed to strike moving ships. 

The latest versions, the DF-21D and, since 2016, the DF-26, are popularly known as “carrier killers,” since they can threaten the most powerful vessels in the American fleet long before they get close to China.
The DF-26, which made its debut in a military parade in Beijing in 2015 and was tested in the Bohai Sea last year, has a range that would allow it to menace ships and bases as far away as Guam, according to the latest Pentagon report on the Chinese military, released this month. 

These missiles are almost impossible to detect and intercept, and are directed at moving targets by an increasingly sophisticated Chinese network of radar and satellites.
China announced in April that the DF-26 had entered service. 

State television showed rocket launchers carrying 22 of them, though the number deployed now is unknown. 

A brigade equipped with them is reported to be based in Henan Province, in central China.
Such missiles pose a particular challenge to American commanders because neutralizing them might require an attack deep inside Chinese territory, which would be a major escalation.
The American Navy has never faced such a threat before, the Congressional Research Office warned in a report in May, adding that some analysts consider the missiles “game changing.”
The “carrier killers” have been supplemented by the deployment this year of missiles in the South China Sea. 

The weaponry includes the new YJ-12B anti-ship cruise missile, which puts most of the waters between the Philippines and Vietnam in range.
The Chinese military is preparing for a limited military conflict from the sea, according to a 2013 paper in a journal called The Science of Military Strategy.
Lyle Morris, an analyst with the RAND Corporation, said that China’s deployment of missiles in the disputed Paracel and Spratly Islands “will dramatically change how the U.S. military operates” across Asia and the Pacific.
The best American response, he added, would be “to find new and innovative methods” of deploying ships outside their range. 

Given the longer range of the ballistic missiles, however, that is not possible “in most contingencies” the American Navy would be likely to face in Asia.

Soldiers with the People’s Liberation Army Navy patrolling Woody Island in the disputed Paracel archipelago in 2016.

Blue-Water Ambitions
The aircraft carrier that put to sea in April for its first trials is China’s second, but the first built domestically. 

It is the most prominent manifestation of a modernization project meant to propel the country into the upper tier of military powers. 

Only the United States, with 11 nuclear-powered carriers, operates more than one.
A third Chinese carrier is under construction in a port near Shanghai. 

Analysts believe China will eventually build five or six.
The Chinese military, traditionally focused on repelling a land invasion, increasingly aims to project power into the “blue waters” of the world to protect China’s expanding economic and diplomatic interests, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
The carriers attract the most attention but China’s naval expansion has been far broader. 

The Chinese Navy — officially the People’s Liberation Army Navy — has built more than 100 warships and submarines in the last decade alone, more than the entire naval fleets of all but a handful of nations.
Last year, China also introduced the first of a new class of a heavy cruisers — or “super destroyers” — that, according to the American Office of Naval Intelligence, “are comparable in many respects to most modern Western warships.” 

Two more were launched from dry dock in Dalian in July, the state media reported.
Last year, China counted 317 warships and submarines in active service, compared with 283 in the United States Navy, which has been essentially unrivaled in the open seas since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Unlike the Soviet Union, which drained its coffers during the Cold War arms race, military spending in China is a manageable percentage of a growing economy. 

Beijing’s defense budget now ranks second only to the United States: $228 billion to $610 billion, according to estimates by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
The roots of China’s focus on sea power and “area denial” can be traced to what many Chinese viewed as humiliation in 1995 and 1996. 

When Taiwan moved to hold its first democratic elections, China fired missiles near the island, prompting President Bill Clinton to dispatch two aircraft carriers to the region.
“We avoided the sea, took it as a moat and a joyful little pond to the Middle Kingdom,” a naval analyst, Chen Guoqiang, wrote recently in the official Navy newspaper. 

“So not only did we lose all the advantages of the sea but also our territories became the prey of the imperialist powers.”
China’s naval buildup since then has been remarkable. 

In 1995, China had only three submarines. 

It now has nearly 60 and plans to expand to nearly 80, according to a report last month by the United States Congressional Research Service.
As it has in its civilian economy, China has bought or absorbed technologies from the rest of the world, in some cases illicitly. 

Much of its military hardware is of Soviet origin or modeled on antiquated Soviet designs, but with each new wave of production, analysts say, China is deploying more advanced capabilities.
China’s first aircraft carrier was originally launched by the Soviet Union in 1988 and left to rust when the nation collapsed three years later. 

Newly independent Ukraine sold it for $20 million to a Chinese investor who claimed it would become a floating casino, though he was really acting on behalf of Beijing, which refurbished the vessel and named it the Liaoning.
The second aircraft carrier — as yet unnamed — is largely based on the Liaoning’s designs, but is reported to have enhanced technology. 

In February, the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation disclosed that it has plans to build nuclear-powered carriers, which have far greater endurance than ones that require refueling stops.
China’s military has encountered some growing pains. 

It is hampered by corruption, which Xi has vowed to wipe out, and a lack of combat experience. 

As a fighting force, it remains untested by combat.
In January, it was embarrassed when one of its most advanced submarines was detected as it neared Japanese islands known as the Senkaku. 

The attack submarine should never have been spotted.
The second aircraft carrier also appears to have experienced hiccups. 

Its first sea trials were announced in April and then inexplicably delayed. 

Not long after the trials went ahead in May, the general manager of China Shipbuilding was placed under investigation for “serious violation of laws and discipline,” the official Xinhua news agency reported, without elaborating.

Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea. The deployment of missiles on three man-made reefs in the disputed Spratly Islands — Subi, Mischief and Fiery Cross — has prompted protests from the White House.

Defending Its Claims
China’s military advances have nonetheless emboldened the country’s leadership.
The state media declared the carrier Liaoning “combat ready” in the summer after it moved with six other warships through the Miyako Strait that splits Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and conducted its first flight operations in the Pacific.
The Liaoning’s battle group now routinely circles Taiwan. 

So do Chinese fighter jets and bombers.
China’s new J-20 stealth fighter conducted its first training mission at sea in May, while its strategic bomber, the H-6, landed for the first time on Woody Island in the Paracels. 

From the airfield there or from those in the Spratly Islands, the bombers could strike all of Southeast Asia.
The recent Pentagon report noted that H-6 flights in the Pacific were intended to demonstrate the ability to strike American bases in Japan and South Korea, and as far away as Guam.
“Competition is the American way of seeing it,” said Li Jie, an analyst with the Chinese Naval Research Institute in Beijing. 

“China is simply protecting its rights and its interests in the Pacific.”
And China’s interests are expanding.
In 2017, it opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, saying that it will be used to support its participation in multinational antipiracy patrols off Somalia.
It now appears to be planning to acquire access to a network of ports and bases throughout the Indian Ocean. 

Though ostensibly commercial, these projects have laid the groundwork for a necklace of refueling and resupply arrangements that will “facilitate Beijing’s long-range naval operations,” according to a new report by C4ADS, a research organization in Washington.
“They soon will be able, for example, to send a squadron of ships to somewhere, say in Africa, and have all the capabilities to make a landing in force to protect Chinese assets,” said Vassily Kashin, an expert with the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
The need was driven home in 2015 when Chinese warships evacuated 629 Chinese and 279 foreigners from Yemen when the country’s civil war raged in Aden, a southern port city.
One of the frigates involved in the rescue, the Linyi, was featured in a patriotic blockbuster film, “Operation Red Sea.”
“The Chinese are going to be more present,” Mr. Kashin added, “and everyone has to get used to it.”

Fighter jets on the Liaoning in the East China Sea in April.

Chinese Curse

China's swine fever outbreak may spread in Asia
AFP

BEIJING -- An outbreak of African swine fever in China may spread to other parts of Asia, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned Tuesday (Aug 28), as the world's largest pork producer scrambled to contain the disease.
China has culled more than 24,000 pigs in four provinces to stop the disease from proliferating, the FAO said in a statement.
The first outbreak was reported in early August.
The FAO said the cases have been detected in areas more than 1,000km apart, meaning it could cross national borders.
"The deadly pig virus may spread to other Asian countries anytime," the FAO said.
The "diverse geographical spread of the outbreaks in China have raised fears that the disease will move across borders to neighbouring countries of Southeast Asia or the Korean Peninsula where trade and consumption of pork products is also high", it added.
China reported its first case of the disease in northeast Liaoning province earlier this month.
Last week, the eastern city of Lianyungang announced it had culled 14,500 pigs in an attempt to check the disease's spread.
"The movement of pig products can spread diseases quickly and, as in this case of African swine fever, it's likely that the movement of such products, rather than live pigs, has caused the spread of the virus to other parts of China," explained Juan Lubroth, FAO's chief veterinarian.
African swine fever is not harmful to humans but causes haemorrhagic fever in domesticated pigs and wild boar that almost always ends in death within a few days.
There is no antidote or vaccine, and the only known method to prevent the disease from spreading is a mass cull of the infected livestock.
In a report to the World Organisation for Animal Health, Beijing said an emergency plan had been launched and control measures taken to halt the spread of the disease.
The FAO warned in May of the risk of the spread of African swine fever from Russia.
Around half of the world's pigs are raised in China, and the Chinese are the biggest consumers of pork per capita, according to the FAO.

Fake Empire

Another Chinese Region Faked Fiscal Data, Anti-Corruption Agency Says
REUTERS

BEIJING — Some parts of northern China's Inner Mongolia have fabricated fiscal data, China's anti-corruption agency said, making it the third Chinese region exposed for data falsification after the rust-belt provinces of Liaoning and Jilin.
The latest finding will bolster long-existing scepticism about the reliability of Chinese economic data, reflects local governments' penchant for inflating statistics amid a protracted slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.
In a summary of its findings from an inspection tour of eight provinces and government institutions, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said on Sunday that "some places" in the autonomous region had faked data.
It did not provide details.
In January, the northeastern province of Liaoning said in its annual work report that the government had falsified reporting of fiscal data from 2011 to 2014, an incident that prompted authorities to ramp up rhetoric against data fraud and to improve data "quality".

Chinese Peril

Why China’s new aircraft carrier is significant
By Christopher Bodeen 

In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, a newly-built aircraft carrier is transferred from dry dock into the water at a launch ceremony at a shipyard in Dalian in northeastern China’s Liaoning Province, Wednesday, April 26, 2017. China launched its first aircraft carrier built entirely on its own on Wednesday, in a demonstration of the growing technical sophistication of its defense industries and determination to safeguard its maritime territorial claims and crucial trade routes. 

BEIJING — China on Wednesday launched the navy’s second aircraft carrier, its first to be entirely homebuilt.
While the 50,000-ton ship still needs considerable work before commissioning, analysts say its launch telegraphs China’s ambitions to become the region’s most powerful and influential country. That’s an alarming prospect to others.
Here’s a look at how the new carrier came into being and what impact it is expected to have.
___
CARRIER SHOWS CHINA’S MILITARY PROGRESS
China’s carrier program got off the ground with the purchase of the Varyag, an incomplete carrier begun during the 1980s and then inherited by Ukraine after the breakup of the former Soviet Union. Beijing bought the ship in 1998 and towed it to China, where it underwent years of extensive refurbishing before being commissioned as the Liaoning in 2012. 

It was originally described as being mainly for training and research but last year was declared combat-ready. 

Development of the new carrier began in 2013 and moved into high-gear in 2015. 

Based on the same original Soviet design, its construction is believed to have benefited greatly from lessons learned in fitting-out the Liaoning. 

Both ships suffer some of the limitations inherent in the design, including a ski jump-style launching system that limits the amount of fuel and bombs its Chinese J-15 fighters can carry. 

Michael Chase of the U.S. think tank RAND Corporation said the carriers reflect the progress China’s has made in shipbuilding and other defense industries, and future carriers will be even more sophisticated, particularly in their propulsion and aircraft launch systems.
__
CARRIER AT HEART OF CHINA’S MILITARY AMBITIONS
China had long said it needs aircraft carriers to protect its shoreline and other maritime interests. That’s seen as reflecting Beijing’s desire to put teeth behind its increasingly assertive claims to territory in the East China and South China seas, while establishing itself as the region’s most powerful and influential nation and challenging America’s global influence and leadership. 

Carriers also factor into China’s threat to use force to gain control over self-governing Taiwan, from which it separated amid civil war in 1949. 

Carriers could be deployed to intimidate the island’s government and 23 million residents, something it apparently attempted earlier this year when it sailed the Liaoning through the Taiwan Strait. 

Fueled by a fast-growing defense budget that is now the world’s second biggest after the U.S., China’s navy has also been acquiring destroyers, nuclear submarines and other ultramodern vessels. 

Its air force is meanwhile rapidly introducing fourth-generation fighter jets and has produced prototypes of two different kinds of fifth-generation stealth fighters.
___
CARRIER RAISES CONCERNS AMONG NEIGHBORS
Apart from Taiwan, Chinese carriers are seen as a threat primarily by China’s historical rivals Japan and India. 

Beijing and Tokyo have long feuded over a collection of tiny uninhabited islands in the East China Sea and China in recent years increased the presence of its navy and coast guard in the area while repeatedly sending military planes to patrol the nearby airspace. 

Many Chinese consider the dispute to be a legacy of Japan’s brutal invasion and occupation of much of their country during the 1930s and 1940s, memories of which are kept fresh by state propaganda and the education system. 

India has looked on nervously as the Chinese navy expands its presence in its traditional sphere of influence, the Indian Ocean. 

That includes the development of ports and airports with potential military uses in Pakistan and elsewhere, along with China’s first overseas military base in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti. 

Chinese carriers are seen as less threatening to the region’s leading military power, the U.S., although American officials have called for more transparency from Beijing about how it intends to use the ships. 

Rather than a military threat, the carriers are more of an indirect challenge to U.S. influence in the region.

Congenital Mythomania

Fake China data: was it just one province? 
Revelations Liaoning fabricated statistics raise questions over rest of rust belt 
By Lucy Hornby and Archie Zhang in Beijing and Jane Pong in Hong Kong

Sceptics about China’s economic statistics have taken a special pleasure in revelations of fake data in the north-eastern province of Liaoning dating at least to 2011.
Along with an officially reported contraction in its economy last year, they have given the impression that Liaoning’s economy is unusually troubled.
That impression may be unfair to Liaoning.
In 2007 when Li Keqiang was party secretary of Liaoning, he made waves when he declared China’s gross domestic product figures “man-made”. 
Last week, even Xi Jinping weighed in on Liaoning’s data-faking, telling the province’s delegation to China’s annual legislative meeting that “the practice must be stopped”.
But is Liaoning the only province to have doctored its statistics?
The map below shows the share of metals and mining (a category that includes crude oil output) in the nominal gross domestic product of Chinese provinces in 2011.
China stopped publishing this data in 2012, the same year the commodity cycle turned sour.

The FT examined four provinces that are more reliant than Liaoning on the coal, steel and oil industries.
Shanxi, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia comprise China’s coal heartland; Liaoning and Hebei together account for almost one-third of China’s steel output. 
In regions where resources or steel dominate, the commodity cycle is more extreme.
Booms inflate the service sector, consumer spending and property prices; busts have an outsized effect on employment and government finances.
“China has a rust belt just like the US or UK,” says Andy Rothman, investment strategist at Matthews Asia. 
Below are coal, oil and steel prices since 2010.

These benchmarks were multiplied by each province’s reported output of coal, oil and steel, and charted against the reported growth in GDP.
Below is Liaoning.
Strangely, when it admitted to a contraction in 2016, steel, coal and oil were already recovering. 

The other provinces show a similar pattern in the three key industries.
Output values weakened in 2012, briefly recovered in the second half of 2013 and then took a deep dive.
Below is Hebei, home to one-quarter of Chinese steel production:

The worse period was the winter of 2015-2016, followed by a recovery in 2016, as seen below in Shaanxi...

and Inner Mongolia...

This pattern diverges from reported GDP figures, which show growth speeding up from early 2015. Below is Shanxi, the most mining-dependent of all Chinese provinces.
Metals and mining (mostly coal) made up 62 per cent of its industrial output in 2011 and 37 per cent of GDP.

Did Liaoning underperform last year, or were its reported data suddenly brought back in line with reality?
And what does that imply about the other rust-belt provinces?
“Liaoning is the most developed and diversified of the three north-eastern provinces, therefore it should have been performing better, not worse,” says Andrew Batson, economist at research group Gavekal Dragonomics.
In 2013 the Communist party pledged to implement a unified system for compiling provincial GDP. Rather than relying on provincial agencies to produce GDP figures in parallel with the national survey, the pledge called for the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing to take charge of the process. The goal was to avoid the perennial problem of provincial GDPs summing up to a higher number than the national figure. 
NBS circulated a draft plan for the unified system in late 2014.
Ning Jizhe, director of NBS, told official media on Sunday that phase-in will begin in 2017 and be complete by 2020.
Observers must await the release of four years of corrected data from Liaoning — if indeed the true numbers are ever divulged — if they are to find out what really happened to northern China’s economy when the economic books were being cooked.

Chinese province’s GDP fall hints at extent of past exaggeration

Liaoning data blamed on fall in output and corrections to rosy historic numbers 
By Yuan Yang in Beijing

Shrinking economy: oil wells in Liaoning province
Economic output in China’s northeastern industrial province of Liaoning shrank by 23 per cent in nominal terms last year, according to official statistics — showing the extent to which officials had previously exaggerated performance in China’s struggling rust-belt.
The sudden drop in provincial gross domestic product is only partly due to a fall in the real economy — in inflation adjusted terms, GDP fell by 2.5 per cent according to the national statistics bureau. The main reason for the decline, analysts say, was officials’ attempts to undo the effects of previous over-reporting.
China’s problem of industrial overcapacity has led to factories defaulting on debt, cuts in output and the planned lay-off of millions of coal and steel workers, all of which have hurt Liaoning’s steel-dependent local economy.
Last April the province was the first in China to report a quarter of negative growth in seven years. Last month Liaoning’s governor admitted to state media that fiscal revenues in the province had been inflated by at least 20 per cent from 2011 to 2014. 
The official revelations gave credence to economists’ suspicion that China’s economic figures are manipulated by officials for political gain. 
Local governors are given growth targets to hit, although recently the government has tried to move towards a broader set of performance indicators.
Further evidence of data fabrication can be seen in Liaoning’s fixed-asset investment figures, which fell 64 per cent in 2016.
China International Capital Corporation, a partly state-owned investment bank, said the drop in investment raised doubts about previous years’ figures. 

“The sharp decline was not only a result of economic downturn but also reflected the correction of its previously inflated data,” wrote CICC last week.
“Liaoning have had stark issues with their data over the past few years. Does that mean other provinces do too? That's definitely the case — provincial GDP is always higher than national GDP,” said Jonas Short, head of China research at NSBO, an investment bank.
Li Keqiang, who was the top official in Liaoning from 2004 to 2007, once decried GDP data as “man-made” and therefore unreliable. 
Instead, he preferred three indicators of industrial activity: electricity consumption, railway cargo volume and loans extended by banks.
However, such indicators are less relevant to measuring China’s economic output now that the dominance of traditional industries is fading.
Some economists, however, believe China’s GDP figures now underestimate the true size of the economy.
The current method of calculating GDP relies on data from businesses that are large, state-owned and industrial.
This overlooks the growth of fast-growing private start-ups in the technology sector, according to economists who have calculated a “new economy index”.
China is due to revise the way it samples data from firms next year to take account of new sectors.

Sick Carrier of Asia

China flexing aircraft carrier muscle, but so far it's a paper tiger
By KATSUJI NAKAZAWA

The Liaoning, China's first and only aircraft carrier, at sea on Dec. 24, 2016. 

TOKYO -- In an unprecedented show of force, China dispatched its first and only aircraft carrier on an extensive training mission amid rising tensions with the U.S. late last year.
The Liaoning left its home port in Qingdao, Shandong Province, on Dec. 20, a month before Donald Trump's inauguration as the new U.S. president, and entered the Western Pacific via the East China Sea.
The Liaoning then went to the South China Sea and sailed north, passing through the Taiwan Strait, before returning to Qingdao on Jan. 13. 

The carrier's long voyage made a big splash internationally as it involved transiting three flashpoints along the way.
The three flashpoints are the East China Sea, the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
"The aim of the Chinese aircraft carrier's latest cruise was [to send a message to] China's own people, not Trump or Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen," said a Chinese researcher specializing in China's domestic politics and national security issues.
The researcher made the remarks at the end of last year, without elaborating. 

A close look at subsequent Chinese media reports gives some insight into the researcher's thinking.
Chinese media outlets gave extensive coverage to what they described as the Liaoning's "practical" training exercises, with state-run China Central Television reporting on them on its main 7:00 p.m. news program on Jan. 13.
Chinese media outlets are all under the sway of the Communist Party's Publicity Department, the ruling party's propaganda body. 

The recent flurry of media reports about the Liaoning is part of China's "public opinion warfare."
China's "three warfares" strategy consists of "public opinion warfare," "psychological warfare" and "legal warfare."
It would be safe to say that the Publicity Department tried to reassure the public about the strength of the Chinese military and dispel concerns over anticipated threats from the Trump administration.

Paper tiger
But the truth is that the Liaoning still lacks combat capabilities.
"Carrier-based aircraft are slow to take off. Even if many such planes finally took off in the event of a military contingency, most of them would have to [return and] land on the carrier before actually launching operations," said a source familiar with the Chinese military.
There are at least three reasons for the Liaoning's lack of combat capabilities.

The Chinese aircraft carrier is not equipped with catapults for aircraft launches. 

Chinese carrier-borne planes cannot carry enough fuel for long operations. 

China also lacks know-how about the combat operations of carrier battle groups, which include numerous support ships.
The Liaoning, therefore, pales before its U.S. rivals.
A U.S. aircraft carrier is equipped with multiple catapults, allowing up to 50 planes to take off in quick succession. 

The U.S. Navy has also accumulated extensive know-how about conducting combat operations of carrier battle groups over the past half-century.
The aircraft catapult is a difficult technology to master. 

The Liaoning has no such device for launching aircraft at speeds sufficient for flight. 

The carrier can carry up to 20 planes. But they cannot quickly take off from the carrier.

The Liaoning entered service a little over four years ago.
China purchased the Varyag, an incomplete ex-Soviet aircraft carrier, as scrap from Ukraine, as it did not have the ability to build a carrier on its own. 

The Varyag was refurbished in Dalian, Liaoning Province, and rechristened the Liaoning. 

The ship was commissioned in 2012.
Chinese media outlets reported on the Liaoning's training exercises with great fanfare. 

But the carrier is still at the stage of conducting takeoff and landing drills and making trial voyages.
Including a new vessel to be commissioned in the near future, the U.S. possesses a total of 11 aircraft carriers. 

Obviously, China's carrier fleet would not be able to take on a U.S. carrier battle group.
Defense officials from many countries agree that the Chinese carrier is still just just for show -- a "paper tiger," a term often used by Mao Zedong, the revolutionary leader who led China to communism.
Before China acquired its nuclear weapons capability, Mao resorted to bluster. 

He called such weapons possessed by the U.S. and other countries "a paper tiger."
But ordinary Chinese people cannot easily understand the huge gap in military capabilities between their country and the U.S. 

That is why the barrage of propaganda reports by domestic media outlets can be highly effective.
China has made strenuous efforts recently to build an aircraft carrier on its own.
A Chinese company claiming to be private also purchased the retired ex-Soviet aircraft carrier Kiev. The Chinese military studied the ship's construction, and it is now open to the public at a theme park in Tianjin, China.
China also acquired another retired ex-Soviet carrier, the Minsk, for study through a South Korean company. 

After being scrutinized, the Minsk was also opened to the public in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.
China is now building two homegrown aircraft carriers, with one of them, China's second carrier after the Liaoning, expected to be launched in the near future.
If the second Chinese aircraft carrier forms a battle group and starts operating in the Western Pacific and the South China Sea in a few years' time, the security situation in the region could change as the gap in U.S. and Chinese military capabilities will narrow gradually.

Economic tensions
Tensions between China and the U.S. are rising on the economic front as well.
Trump has harshly condemned China for racking up trade surpluses with the U.S. through unfair practices such as manipulating its currency, the yuan. 

He has also vowed to give top priority to protecting American jobs.
In response to Trump's anti-China rhetoric and "America First" policy, Chinese private companies have started talking about expanding their investments in the U.S.
The move comes despite the Chinese government's desperate bid to resolve the problem of serious capital outflow.
Trump's "America First" policy is giving Chinese companies a convenient excuse to legally transfer funds out of their country to boost their holdings of safer dollar-denominated assets.
Chinese authorities have repeatedly conducted large-scale market interventions to stem the yuan's plunge amid the capital outflow.
As a result, the country's foreign exchange reserves shrank sharply to just over $3 trillion at the end of December 2016, compared with a record high of nearly $4 trillion registered at the end of June 2014.
At the beginning of this year, Chinese authorities imposed stricter controls on foreign currency exchanges, marking the latest in a series of steps to tackle the serious capital outflow problem.
In China, individuals are allowed to convert up to $50,000 worth of yuan into foreign currency a year.
Under the new regulation, they must effectively pledge not to use the money to purchase houses, securities, life insurance and some other products abroad when they submit applications to major banks.
The number of Chinese tourists visiting Japan has been rising in recent years. 

They will also have to comply with the new regulation. 

Some wealthy Chinese people have been on a property-purchase spree in Japan. 

But the new regulation will also likely put a damper on their spending.
Meanwhile, China's foreign direct investment is also slowing down sharply. 

Such investment tumbled about 40% in December 2016 on a year-on-year basis in terms of value, apparently as a result of Chinese authorities' guidance.

Sensitive year
With tensions running high between China and the U.S. both militarily and economically, Xi's regime needs to be vigilant against a possible surge in anti-U.S. feelings at home.
In a move that broke with long-standing U.S. diplomatic protocol and angered Beijing, President Trump spoke by telephone with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party on Dec. 2, 2016.
Beijing still regards Taiwan as a renegade province that must be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary, and has pressured the Taiwanese leader to acknowledge the "One China" principle.
Trump has also repeatedly expressed doubts about the "One China" principle, which the U.S. has upheld for many years.
If the situation remains unchanged, a campaign to boycott American products or anti-U.S. demonstrations could take place in mainland China. 

Xi wants to prevent any such incidents that could lead to social instability as he prepares for a crucial political event.
If history is any guide, Xi has good reason to tread carefully. 

When a U.S. military plane mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999, killing three Chinese, large-scale demonstrations were held by angry Chinese protesters in Beijing.
This year is also politically sensitive. 

The Chinese Communist Party is to hold its next five-yearly national congress this autumn. 

A tug-of-war within the ruling party is expected to further intensify over the lineup of a new leadership team to be chosen there.
The Trump administration will probably try to unsettle the Xi regime in various ways.
Under such circumstances, the Xi regime needs to reassure the public. 

That is why it has made the most use of the Liaoning. 

The first and only Chinese aircraft carrier is a treasured military asset of the Xi regime, although it is in reality just a paper tiger.

China's Creative Statistics

Chinese Province Admits to Fabricating Financial Data For Four Years
By Joseph Hincks

Worker repairs steam locomotive's parts on July 6, 2015, Fuxin, Liaoning Province, China. 
China's northeast industrial province of Liaoning falsified its fiscal data over a period of four years, local officials have said, adding to concerns over the validity of China's economic statistics.
From 2011 to 2014, fiscal revenues for Liaoning were massaged up by at least 20%, said provincial governor and Deputy Communist Party Secretary of Liaoning Province, Chen Qiufa, Bloomberg reports, citing the state-run People's Daily (link in Chinese).
Over-egging the growth figures and other acts of fraud were, according to Chen, committed by both city and county government officials in the Liaoning region who wanted to advance their careers. 

The fabricated figures impacted the central government's assessment of the economic status of Liaoning, Chen said, citing a 2016 report from the country's National Audit Office. 

The Financial Times reported that the false data led to residents paying $146 each in additional taxes, according to the state-run China Daily.
The revelation comes just days before China is scheduled to post its full-year national growth report and at a time when officials have stressed the need for more scrupulous economic reporting. According to Bloomberg, the head of China's National Bureau of Statistics, Ning Jizhe, has urged the country to increase the quality of its statistics and to crack down on fraudulent economic data.
More than 500 deputies accused of vote-buying and bribery have reportedly been purged from Liaoning's legislature. 

Last year, Wang Min, former provincial Communist party chief from 2009 to 2015, was expelled from the party in a corruption crackdown.

Statistical Mythomania

China's creative GDP numbers: Why does it even bother?

By Stephen Letts

To the absolute surprise of no one, Chinese economic growth came in at an annualised growth rate of 6.7 per cent in 2016.
There was a moderate surprise that annualised fourth quarter figure came in at 6.8 per cent, but not enough to shift sentiment significantly.
By happy coincidence the 2016 result not only lines up with Xi Jinping's call at the World Economic Forum in Davos that it would be thereabouts, but also is right in the middle of the 6.5 to 7 per cent target band drummed up at the National People's Congress in March last year.
The quality of Chinese GDP data is often questioned, given the National Bureau of Statistics can pull together all the threads of the world's second biggest economy into a coherent narrative just three weeks after the quarter ends.
The admission this week from the boss of Liaoning province that the GDP books for his steel and coal-dominated jurisdiction had been cooked for years has not helped matters.
The National Audit Office found revenues from Liaoning's industries and state-owned enterprises were at least 20 per cent higher than what should have been reported between 2011 and 2014, with 2013 representing the peak in creative accounting for one area at 130 per cent over the odds.
To be fair, the practice appears to be frowned on.
The head of the NBS seems to be getting grumpy with this suspect reputation, warning local officials -- who funnel the raw data to the central statisticians and whose chances of promotion are linked to meeting economic targets -- dodgy accounting is a very "serious" offence and culprits would be punished.
The old boss in Liaoning who was allegedly responsible for overstating the industriousness of his patch has been arrested and is facing a trial later this month.
Liaoning, now equipped with a fresh and more credible approach to statistics, is the first and still only province to have fessed up to sliding into recession in 2016.

China's growth rate slows as economy grows
Despite the dubious nature of the numbers a trend has been established; China's economic growth is slowing.
For the past six years, since GDP growth came in at 10.6 per cent in 2010, the economy has been steadily decelerating.

Growth last year was slower than at any time since 1990.
Much of that is due to the fact that the economy is that much bigger.
However, authorities are quite accepting of the inevitability of the situation.
As the chief of China's National Development and Reform Commission, Xu Shaoshi, recently pointed out, a 6.7 per cent -- or 5 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) -- expansion in 2016 equated to growth of 10 per cent in 2011.

The perils of reporting on China's GDP
By Stephen McDonell

Whenever China's GDP figures are released, foreign correspondents fly into action with plenty of analysis about what they might mean.
Does the Chinese economy appear to be stronger or weaker than previously thought?
Where is steel production?
What about the explosion in service industries?
Of course there are the international implications: What do the numbers mean for other economies?
Will Asia's powerhouse look to buy greater volumes Australian iron ore?
Could a growing consumer sector mean more tourists heading to France or Vanuatu?
Then we have to remind ourselves… hang on!

Unlikely but possible
Plenty of economists think that GDP is a massively flawed form of measuring the health of any economy but in this country it is even worse.
There is significant proportion of China watchers who don't believe the GDP figures are real at all.
For example, in 2016, the country's (year on year) GDP was exactly 6.7% for three quarters in a row.
Suspicion regarding growth statistics in the Middle Kingdom is not a new phenomenon.

'Deception'
For years, some provinces are thought to have been artificially inflating their numbers in order to create an appearance of improved economic performance on the part of their local leaders.
Others may have underestimated their growth so as to attract more favours from the national government.
In 2012 when you added the GDP of all provinces together this came to a greater number than the national total.
Now, for the first time, we have official confirmation that GDP here has been fabricated.
According to the Governor of Liaoning, Chen Qiufa, his province has been "involved in a large-scale financial deception" from 2011 to 2014. 
He said that fake data from city and county level officials misled the central government about the area's economy.
His announcement was made a meeting of the local legislature giving it even more gravitas.
Alternatives?
If China's GDP is not to be trusted then how to judge this country's economic health?
Some analysts turn to electricity consumption or seaborne cargo believing that these are actual measurable indicators of activity expanding or contracting.
Other potential yardsticks could include building construction per square metre or domestic freight volumes.
Using these measures there are those who think that, in recent years, China's actual GDP should have dropped much more dramatically from 8% down to more like around 4% rather than just below 7%.

China Taunts a U.S. Distracted by Putin

In both actions and rhetoric, Chinese officials have ratcheted up the conflict over disputed territories, looking to capitalize on a distracted U.S.
By David Axe

While the U.S. media and political establishment were focused on Russia’s hacks of the recent U.S. presidential election—and the retaliatory sanctions the outgoing Obama administration announced on Dec. 29—the Chinese navy was moving aggressively into the contested waters of the strategic South China Sea.
In a move that combined actions and words, China’s sailed its aircraft carrier boldly through disputed waters while prominent Chinese figures voiced rhetoric significantly escalating Beijing’s global ambitions.
It will mostly fall on president Donald Trump and his administration to formulate a response.
It’s customary for Beijing to tease an incoming U.S. presidential administration with some kind of military or diplomatic demonstration. 

American experts expected the Trump administration to face some kind of challenge. 

And indeed on Dec. 15, the crew of a Chinese navy ship briefly hijacked a U.S. Navy underwater research drone, drawing a flurry of indignant and contradictory tweets from Trump.
But the far greater challenge came 10 days later—and could represent a sneak peak of China’s forceful approach to the United States’ military and diplomatic posture for at least the next four years.
The first obvious sign of China’s big move came on Christmas Day, when Japanese forces detected Liaoning, the Chinese navy’s first and so far only aircraft carrier, sailing out of the East China Sea into the Western Pacific for the first time.
China is currently building a second carrier, and has said it will eventually begin construction on a third flattop. 

The U.S. Navy possesses 10 large carriers plus nine carrier-like assault ships that can carry a modest number fixed-wing planes.
Liaoning, a former Soviet vessel that China acquired and rebuilt at great expense starting in 1998, entered Chinese navy service in 2012. 

Normally based at Dalían in northern China, Liaoning has spent the past four years periodically venturing into coastal waters for training. 

The Christmas Day sortie qualifies as the 1,000-foot vessel’s first frontline deployment.
With fighter jets and helicopters arrayed on her deck and accompanied by five heavily-armed escort vessels, Liaoning cut an arc through the Pacific just 60 miles off the coast of Japan’s Okinawa prefecture before heading southwest.
The Obama administration reacted with a practiced shrug. U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner pointed out that all countries have the right the sail their warships in international waters. 

“It’s freedom of navigation,” Toner said.
Taiwan was less sanguine as the Chinese flattop closed to within 90 miles of the island country on her way back toward China. 

The defense ministry in Taipei announced it “will pay close attention to [Liaoning’s] future movement.”
Tensions between the United States, Taiwan and China lately have been running higher than usual. On Dec. 2, President Trump shattered decades of protocol when he spoke on the phone with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen.
Since 1979, the U.S. government has carefully avoided officially recognizing Taiwan as a fully independent country—in order to avoid inciting the wrath of China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province and has threatened to invade if the island ever makes official its own independence.

It’s possible to read Liaoning’s passage near Taiwan as a forceful retort to the Dec. 2 phone call. 

Even then, Beijing wasn’t done.
Sailing into the resource-rich South China Sea—where China, The Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei have all asserted overlapping, and unresolved, territorial claims—Liaoning hailed at Hainan, an island province of China in the South China Sea southwest of Taiwan.
Starting in 2012, China massively expanded Hainan’s port facilities to accommodate not just one full-size carrier but two. 

By contrast, the United States keeps just one large carrier and one assault ship in the Western Pacific. Both vessels are homeported in Japan.
Liaoning briefly stopped at Sanya on Hainan in 2013, at a time when tensions in the South China Sea were arguably much lower. 

The flattop’s visit three years later served as a clear reminder to nearby countries and the United States that, before too long, China will be able to quickly deploy naval power in the South China Sea that roughly matches America’s own naval contingent in the region.
And in a sharp break from the past, a Chinese official matched his country’s swelling military might with new, bombastic rhetoric. 

The South China Sea is China’s “ancestral sea” and also “China’s territorial waters,” Xing Jincheng, a Chinese-military political commissar on Hainan, wrote in a Dec. 29 op-ed.
Xing, who was appointed in 2013 to oversee Hainan’s naval militia, wrote that he considered it his job to wage “the first battle for the rights to the South China Sea.”
That kind of rhetoric is becoming more prominent among Chinese officials and government proxies. In a Nov. 12 speech, Zhu Feng, the director of the China Center for Collaborative Studies of the South China Sea at Nanjing University, spoke forcefully about China’s rise as a “global” military power.
In recent years, Chinese leaders have shied away from describing Beijing’s ambitions as global, instead insisting that the country merely wants to be a “regional” power—in other words, a force incapable of challenging America’s worldwide military dominance.
“To become a successful country, one must be a global power, and the global powers must be the world’s military powers,” Zhu said.
Describing the Hainan carrier base as “China’s most important naval port,” Zhu predicted that the sea route from Hainan into the South China Sea would become “the world’s most important channel.”
Just one force stands in the way of China’s “free access” to the South China Sea, Zhu stated. 

“For China to become a maritime power, we must limit the United States’ global naval freedom of intervention.”
“I tell you very frankly that the South China Sea dispute has just begun,” Zhu added.

Should America Really Fear China's Growing Navy?

By James Holmes

Contain yourselves, folks. 

Putting out to sea without mishap is a rather basic function for navies—not the apex of naval achievement. 

Grand geopolitical ambitions for China’s navy are likely to go unfulfilled for quite some time.
Prompting this outburst: the editorial staff at the Global Times is crowing about the latest voyage of the aircraft carrier Liaoning. 

Last week China’s lone flattop transited through the Ryukyu island chain into the Western Pacific, cruised past Taiwan, and entered the South China Sea. 

The Japanese Defense Ministry confirmed that this represented the ship’s first egress into the open ocean. 

Taiwanese spokesmen fretted publicly.
Message received!
The Times’s Christmas Day victory lap is premature. 

Sailors hone their craft not by sitting pierside but by plying the briny main—a lot. 

While China’s navy goes to sea more now than in bygone years, its operational practices still can’t compare to the U.S. Navy’s. 

Even Asian rivals like the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force upstage China in the human dimension of seamanship and combat.
Moreover, bear in mind what Liaoning and her indigenously built sisters are likely to be: rather humble aircraft carriers, with air wings dwarfed by those sported on board American flattops. Chinese carriers can project influence and hard military power within reach of shore-based fire support, manifest in anti-ship missiles, tactical aircraft, and small surface and subsurface craft. 

But carrier formations will have to leave that protective umbrella behind to voyage to remote expanses—and will revert to being the humble vessels they are. 

They may disappoint.
Still, the idea is sound by and large. 

The Global Times writers have either done their homework on strategic theory or, perchance, alighted on a winning formula for sea power on their own.
First, a navy enjoying robust logistics can cause problems for a stronger antagonist at many places on the map—siphoning off forces from critical theaters or, at a minimum, compelling that antagonist to accept more risk to its interests. 

The editorialists opine that the People’s Liberation Army Navy must amass the wherewithal and experience to appear in distant waters—especially waters important to the United States. 

“If the fleet is able to enter areas where the U.S. has core interests,” they say, “the situation when the U.S. unilaterally imposes pressure on China will change.”
That insight is solidly grounded. 

Sea-power pundit Julian S. Corbett observes that one competitor can allocate a “contingent” of seagoing forces to make trouble for another. 

Lord Wellington’s modest expeditionary army inflicted an “ulcer” on Napoleon in Portugal and Spain—bogging down French forces in hybrid warfare at a time when the little emperor was struggling to subdue stronger foes to France’s east. 

Statesmen and commanders can pose the threat of such an ulcer in peacetime. 

They too can harness the power of troublemaking strategies.
Second, staying power is crucial to such endeavors. 

The strategist Woody Allen reputedly declared that showing up constitutes 80 percent of life. Maritime forces have to do the other 20 percent as well. 

They have to show up and stay to make a diplomatic statement. 

To appear in American waters and stay, advises the Global Times, “China needs to think about setting up navy supply points in South America right now.”
Historian Alfred Thayer Mahan codified that commonsense insight a century ago, depicting international commerce, merchant and naval shipping, and forward naval outposts as the pillars on which sea power rests. 

China is a major trading partner of many Latin American states. 

It can try to parlay economic clout into seaport access—helping the PLA Navy stage a sustained presence in the Western Hemisphere.
Third, the editorialists claim that mounting such a presence will leave Washington more pliant about Beijing’s demands in the South China Sea and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific. 

A kind of reciprocity will take hold whereby one competitor defers to the other in its own home region: “When China’s aircraft carrier fleet appears in offshore areas of the U.S. one day, it will trigger intense thinking about maritime rules.”
This, it appears, is the purpose impelling Chinese maritime strategy for the Global Times scribes (and potentially for their masters in the Chinese Communist Party, with which the paper is affiliated).

And there’s something to that. 

The United States could hardly yield supremacy to the PLA Navy in, say, the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico. 

Washington would probably see the need to reinforce the U.S. Navy presence in southern waters—keeping some of that shiny 350-ship navy the Trump administration wants close to home rather than deploying it to faraway seas.
But Beijing shouldn’t invest too much hope in a grand bargain over “maritime rules.”

Americans rightly view freedom of the sea as indivisible, and the presence of foreign warships along its shores as the price of keeping it that way. 

They tolerated the Soviet naval presence in American and European waters for forty years of cold war. 

They can—and, I hope, will—do so again as freedom of the sea comes under stress.
In short, it’s whimsy to think America will forfeit nautical freedom in the China seas to safeguard American seas. 

No likely PLA Navy expeditionary presence will change that.