CHINA-PLA: MARITIME AMBITIONS
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Captain Li Jie of the PLA’s Naval Research Institute (NRI) in Beijing and known to be an influential voice in Chinese naval strategy development, wrote an interesting article in the Fall Special issue of Military Digest. In the second paragraph of the essay, he asserts: “Externally, [the strategy] responds to the imperative to break the American blockade chokehold” He adds “The United States is continuously compressing China’s strategic space on the maritime flank, so that the East Sea passages are at great risk.” Likewise, Li Jie points to India as a potential threat to China’s maritime trading routes. Captain Li Jie also emphasises the importance of the Maritime Silk Route (MSR) for China’s economy and explains, “In China, there has already arisen a production excess, financial excess and capital excess.” Steel and cement are two industries among many that he identifies as requiring a greater export orientation to escape from “production excess” and that can benefit from the MSR. He advocates that Beijing seek to undermine the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve trading currency adding that Washington is sowing discord all around China’s borders in order to encourage global capital investment to return to the more stable United States.
The essay uses the term “blockade” many times, but also acknowledges other nontraditional security threats. For example, Captain Li Jie notes that of the “world’s five major terror sea area”, four exist along the planned MSR. A particularly interesting passage comes near the end, when Li suggests that ground and air forces can be difficult to deploy in an expeditionary way, but that naval forces can do as they please, because “in international waters . . . there are no limitations at all.” Li Jie concludes with an appeal for China to accelerate the building of large and medium-sized aircraft carriers, as well as other expeditionary capabilities, such as amphibious assault ships and oilers.
(Comment: Such articles indicate that the PLA is thinking about its role in China’s grand Belt-and-Road (OBOR) Initiative. There is a clear strain of threat perception in the piece. Li Jie, IS a naval expert from the Chinese Naval Research Institute.)
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