QINGDAO (China): At its peak some 600 years ago China’s navy ruled Asia’s waves, sailing unrivalled from the Yellow Sea to Java and west across the Indian Ocean.
It wielded the kind of maritime muscle Rear Admiral Ding Yiping, commander of China’s Northern Fleet, dreams of today.
Sitting on the pier in the eastern port of Qingdao in front of the guided-missile destroyer named after it, Ding proudly invokes the legend of Ming Dynasty eunuch admiral Zheng He.
Zheng, said to have towered over his crew at seven ft tall, commanded one of the mightiest armadas the world had ever seen with 62 warships and some 30,000 men.
It journeyed to the Arabian Sea and the coast of east Africa, navigating with the then high-technology compass and keeping time with graduated incense sticks.
One scholar even says Zheng’s “Treasure Fleet” circled the globe seven decades before Columbus reached the New World. But within 10 years, a new emperor had ordered Zheng to destroy his fleet and China turned inward for the next half millennium.
Now, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is striving to live up to Zheng’s legacy, spending billions of dollars each year on new ships and weapons systems.
On September 23, the destroyer Qingdao and a supply vessel returned home to much fanfare after what was billed as the Chinese navy’s first circumnavigation of the world, a four-month show of force to build relations with foreign navies.
SIGNIFICANT STEP: The flotilla was small, but military analysts said the voyage was significant. It was a reminder of China’s naval ambitions and underscored its plans for the navy to play a growing role in security strategy.
“It’s very much more the implications of the ability to do this trip than the actual ability itself,” said Andrew Kennedy, head of the Asia Programme at London’s Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies.
However, the trip also raised questions about the longer-term goals of Chinese naval modernization.
Stung by US accusations it is hiding a fat military budget to fund upgrades, the PLA has tried to improve transparency this year, allowing reporters on a rare tour of army and air force bases in July and then aboard the Qingdao.
But there is little debate about the immediate tactical direction the PLA navy is developing. Beijing views the self-governed island of 23 million people as a renegade province and has vowed to reunify it with the mainland, by force if necessary.
OTHER AMBITIONS: The improvements also serve China’s interests away from the Taiwan Strait, including its longer-term security goals and ensuring China’s continued emergence as an economic powerhouse. The South China Sea looms large on naval planners’ radar screens, politically and economically.
Maps printed in China define its claims there with a U-shaped line snaking down the coast of Vietnam, cutting south to Borneo, then north along the Philippine chain to the east coast of Taiwan.
The loop includes the disputed Spratly and Paracel islands, a source of diplomatic and naval conflict with several Southeast Asian countries which also claim the archipelagos in whole or in part. Key shipping lanes also cut through the South China Sea.
China became a net importer of oil in 1993 and the government also probably sees the navy as essential to keeping oil coming from the Middle East, analysts say.
And over the horizon, if China wants to be a regional power it will have to field a navy that can contend with Japan’s technologically advanced Self Defence Force fleet.—Reuters