THIS question brings us to a discussion with Prof. John Joseph Mearsheimer in Peter Navarro’s best-selling book, Crouching Tiger. Recall that Mearsheimer insists that over time, because of the dynamics of great-power politics, China must inevitably seek to be the regional hegemon in Asia as a matter of both self-defense and survival.
An American political scientist and international relations scholar, Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
Our next question, therefore, should be: Just what might China’s strategy looks like over the next several decades to achieve its goals?
The answer, of course, is whether there is any real evidence beyond the speculation of a political scientist to support the provocative assertion that China seeks to drive the US military out of Asia.
The best place to start looking for the real answer is in the actions, thoughts and writings of one of China’s great military folk heroes—Admiral Liu Huaqing.
“Vietnam best knows Admiral Liu,” said Navarro, “as the commander who ordered the slaughter of Vietnamese sailors and soldiers during China’s taking of the Paracel Islands in 1974. In a similarly dark vein, Chinese dissidents first think of Admiral Liu as the commander of the troops responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.”
According to Navarro, “Admiral Liu will likely be best remembered as the father of the modern Chinese navy, who once famously quipped that he would ‘die with his eyes wide open’ if China did not have its own aircraft carrier before he passed away.
“For a figure as important as Liu, he is surprisingly obscure outside of China. However, during the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping was famously converting China into a mercantilist global trader, it was Liu, as Deng’s right-hand man, commanding China’s navy.
“At this propitious time of Deng’s economic revolution, China was still primarily a continental power with little perceived need for the global projection of naval power. However, even as Deng was busy opening China to global trade, Admiral Liu was having a parallel vision.
“In this vision, Liu could see very clearly that it would eventually fall upon his own navy to protect the global trading routes Deng was busily building; Liu began working in earnest to forge a navy to rise to that globalized China occasion.”
To Professors James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara of the US Naval War College, Liu was very much a “Mahanian” figure, referring to “Alfred Thayer Mahan—second president of the college and himself the forefather of the modern American navy—who pioneered the concept of global naval force projection as being critical to the economic prosperity of a nation.”
They emphasized that “in Mahan’s world, it was only through the command of the seas that such prosperity could be assured. Such command, in turn, depended on two key parameters: [1] the industrial capacity of a nation to produce sufficient merchant ships and naval fleets to access vital trading routes and [2] a system of forward bases that could service both merchant and military vessels.”
Holmes and Yoshihara explained: “While Liu staunchly denied
being a follower of the Western imperialist
Mahan, his actions have belied his Mahanian intentions. Indeed, it was Liu who
first articulated the three-step Mahanian strategy that China appears to be
closely following to this day.
“In Liu’s vision,” they said, “the critical first step was for China to break out of what he called the “near seas” and the “First Island Chain” (FIC) that runs from the northern tip of the Kuril Islands, down through the home islands of Japan, all the way to the southern tip of Japan’s Okinawan territories.
“As the centerpiece and rough center point of the FIC, the line defining this chain next passes through Taiwan and then across the Luzon Strait to the Philippines and down to Malaysian Borneo.
“The FIC metaphor though is just that: there are no real chains strung across the waters of the East and South China Seas,” the book said.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.