– China, Growing Superpower

Will China rule the waves again?
Venkatesan Vembu

Hong Kong: In the early 15th Century, the Chinese eunuch-mariner Zheng He undertook an epic sea voyage that, from historical accounts, took him to many uncharted parts of the world.

Even if one discounts the controversial claim that his journey helped map the Americas some 70 years before Christopher Columbus did, his experience testifies to a time when China once ruled the seas.

Today, however, China isn’t a significant maritime power, and in military terms it still lacks the naval capability to project force over great distances or even the power to defend its sea lanes of communication (SLOCs).

As China emerges as an economic superpower, and sources vast amounts of energy resources from across the world to fuel its extraordinary growth, it is justifiably concerned that in the event of an international crisis, it could find itself cut off from energy resources.

China has in recent years given repeated voice to its concern that its oil supply lines from West Asia and Africa could be vulnerable to disruption at the Straits of Malacca, the piracy-infested waterway between Indonesia and Malaysia.

Nearly 75 per cent of China’s imported oil is currently routed through there, and a blockade by a hostile force could shut down factories in China and lead to large-scale disruption.

In November 2003, Present Hu Jintao even confessed to a “Malacca dilemma”. “Certain powers,” he said, “have all along encroached on and tried to control navigation through the Straits.”

Policy think tanks and the official media then took up that theme from a national security perspective. Zhang Yuncheng, an academician at the government-run Institute of

Contemporary International Relations, told a Hong Kong newspaper that China would face an energy crisis if its oil supply lines at sea were attacked, and that “whoever controls the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean could interdict China’s oil transport route.”

The Chinese government, he added, “has strategic interests over oil supply routes and would use naval force to control the shipping lanes.”

Chinese military experts have also articulated new naval strategies to protect energy security — including “the capability of reciprocal deterrence”.

And, as Dr David Zweig, Director of the Centre on China’s Transnational Relatons at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, points out, Chinese military journals have called for reorienting the country’s naval strategy from “brown water” ( coastal defence) to “blue water” (on the high seas).

It will take China a long while to build a blue-water navy fleet that can adequately defend its sea-lanes; meanwhile, strategists note that China will have to rely on diplomatic and economic measures to ensure a steady supply of resources.

Increasingly, however, China is also looking to bypass its “Malacca dilemma” by going in for a system of on-land oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia and Russia. But in addition to being time-consuming, it has huge cost implications.