The U.S. military press recently reported that although China currently has the world’s largest navy, it currently faces a dilemma: Compared to the United States, Beijing is unable to find professional ship workers and modern maintenance equipment overseas to keep its fleet in a state of readiness while away from Home, and this shortcoming will be a major stumbling block for China in becoming a global military power.
According to the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI), Tsutomu Yoshihara, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a U.S. think tank and author of the report, while China is eager for the PLA to have the same freedom of access to The Japanese port of Yokosuka or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia as the U.S. Navy, it still has a long way to go to achieve this goal, because, after all, the U.S. Navy’s huge global advantage in bases and allies has been built up gradually since World War II.
The report notes that while China has already established an overseas base in Djibouti and is trying to set up bases on the east coast of Africa and in the South Pacific on a commercial basis (e.g., Belt and Road), China must bear the costs of these commercial means (dams, airports, seaports, etc., for landowners), which can add up to far more than the cost of maintaining the U.S. military.
Moreover, such military partnerships are not built overnight; they are forged by the intangibles of trust, shared values, routine interactions, and close cooperation over Time, which are missing between China and its potential allies.
The report also notes that while friendly relations with Russia over the past 30 years have led to a shift in China’s strategic orientation toward the sea, China’s most immediate challenge is Taiwan, which is located in the first island chain. While the U.S. will increase arms sales to Taiwan and send senior officials to Taipei frequently for this purpose, the Taiwanese government will also need to revise its defense philosophy, for example by reducing investment in large legacy weapons systems, focusing more on asymmetric warfare, and increasing military cooperation with Japan to counter the Chinese threat.
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