By All Means Necessary (27 page)

China is, however, slowly becoming more involved in distant missions, which over time could give it greater ability to secure its own resource trade. For example, despite China's lack of military assets in the Mediterranean area, the PLAN and PLA Air Force (PLAAF) were still able to contribute to the rescue effort of Chinese nationals in Libya in February 2011. Beijing was able to divert one missile frigate from the PLAN's anti-piracy task force off the coast of Somalia and provide four PLAAF transport aircraft from Xinjiang.
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There has been just one extended deployment of naval forces far from China's coastal seas; it gives important insight into China's limits and how it might work with others abroad. In 2008, Chinese ships suffered seven pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden, a passage between Yemen and Somalia that ships must cross after exiting the Bab el-Mandeb en route to the Indian Ocean. In November 2008, a Chinese fishing ship was attacked and seized by Somali pirates, and a month later pirates attacked a largely empty cargo ship in December 2008.
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On the same day, Chinese sources told state-controlled media that China was preparing to deploy PLAN vessels in response.
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A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Liu Jianchao, stated a day later, “Piracy has become an international enemy that poses severe threat [sic] to international navigation, maritime trade and security.”
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He expanded on the new challenge: “During the first 11 months of this year…twenty percent of [Chinese ships] were attacked. This year, there are seven hijack cases involving China…to date, there remains one Chinese fishing boat and 18 crew members held captive.”
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In response, China dispatched its first Chinese Naval Escort Taskforce (CNET) to the Gulf of Aden at the end of 2008, and the country's first counter-piracy effort in the Gulf of Aden became operational in January 2009. It was the first long-distance deployment by the PLAN.
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As of August 2013, fifteen such task forces (each lasting about four months) had been deployed to the Gulf of Aden to provide escort convoys and protection to commercial Chinese vessels.
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Beijing claims that its task forces have completed
more than 500 escort missions for over 5, 000 Chinese and foreign vessels, and salvaged or rescued over sixty ships.”
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These deployments appear to be directly connected to concerns about pirate attacks on Chinese vessels rather than to broader concerns about piracy in general. This sets Chinese involvement apart from others', which has been aimed at safeguarding ships in general, including participant countries' own vessels only incidentally. Recent Chinese media reports reinforce the idea that China's counter-piracy activities are directly related to the number and frequency of pirate attacks on Chinese ships. For example, in 2010,
China Daily
reported that China was increasing its counter-piracy activities after “a series of pirate attacks on Chinese ships in the past two weeks.”
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The focus on Chinese ships does not mean, however, that China has acted entirely independently. In particular, some have argued that the deployment was helped considerably by the existence of a UN framework. They point out that passage of several UN resolutions in 2008 assuaged Chinese worries that deployment to the Gulf of Aden might carry international repercussions.
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Interest in having its activities legitimated by an international framework, however, has not extended to a desire to participate in internationally directed operations. Several of those—such as EU and NATO efforts—are exclusive to members of the organizations. But others, such as CTF-151, which at various times has been led by the Thai, Danish, South Korean, Pakistani, Turkish, and U.S. navies, are not.
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China has also declined requests to join collective command efforts to patrol the International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), the preferred passageway for ships traveling through the Gulf of Aden. Defense Ministry officials have, however, said that China is “willing to strengthen intelligence and information exchanges and, when necessary, take part in humanitarian relief operations with all countries, including the United States.” To this end, China has been a member of the multilateral Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS) and also participated in Shared Awareness and Deconfliction (SHADE) meetings, forums convened by other
countries to improve information sharing, increase coordination, and avoid redundancy.
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As China participates in more overseas missions, then, it appears to be partly drawn into the sorts of collaborative efforts other countries typically pursue, but it has not been fully integrated. Other countries have not had to change how they pursue high-seas security. Yet Chinese involvement in high-seas security efforts is starting to change some of the details of how high-seas security functions, with at least a very small amount of the burden increasingly shared.

The Gulf of Aden deployment also brought Chinese capabilities and limitations into stark relief. The PLAN has been able to protect Chinese ships transiting through the Gulf of Aden. Yet that endeavor—opposed only by weakly armed pirates—has stretched the limits of PLAN capabilities. The PLAN has also been forced to improvise arrangements for supplying and maintaining naval capabilities thousands of miles away from their home bases. The deployment has thus “highlighted the need for shore-based logistics support for PLAN forces operating in the Indian Ocean, ” in the words of one U.S. analyst.
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Others have gone further and divined a Chinese plan for overseas naval bases.

Much of this has revolved around the so-called String of Pearls. This strategy did not originate in China; it is an idea first expressed in a 2004 report,
Energy Futures in Asia
, produced by a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense. The term has since become common to U.S. and others' thinking about Chinese strategy in the Indian Ocean. One scholar describes it as indicating “China's growing geopolitical influence through efforts to gain access to ports and airfields, develop special diplomatic relationships, and modernize military forces” extending through the full sweep of the Indian Ocean, from the Strait of Malacca to East Africa.
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Speculation has focused on Chinese commercial engagement with a string of countries—Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan,
Mauritius, and the Seychelles, among others—that dot the boundary and interior of the Indian Ocean. In some cases, notably with Sri Lanka and Pakistan, contractors have been involved in the construction of port facilities that have raised suspicions that Beijing is intending to develop distant naval bases. Without exception, though, the speculation rests on thin ground.

Take the much-talked-about Chinese involvement in Pakistan's Gwadar port. In early 2013, reports that a Chinese company would take over the management of the port from the Singapore Port Authority raised widespread alarm.
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Yet there is little evidence China will actually be building and maintaining a naval base on the rim of the Indian Ocean in Pakistan. Indeed, the
Financial Times
reported in 2011 that Pakistan had requested that China build a naval base at Gwadar, and China did not accept the offer.
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(This pattern reflects a pervasive dynamic whereby Pakistan pushes China to develop Gwadar, playing on energy security concerns, but repeatedly fails; Gwadar is currently a “port to nowhere, ” with no infrastructure connecting it to the rest of Pakistan.)
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A 2012 RAND report prepared for the U.S. Air Force noted that the various ports under development by China “are not military bases.” Instead, it argued, “they could serve as supply depots for China's naval forces, enabling it to conduct operations further from its shores.”
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It is far from clear that China has an interest in overseas bases; at a minimum, any desire to build up bases would need to be weighed against the backlash it is likely to spur. Citing the Chinese government's longstanding policy against overseas bases in keeping with its emphasis on nonintervention, senior U.S. naval analyst Daniel Kostecka noted in 2011 that “there is no substantive evidence in Chinese sources or elsewhere to support the contentions of commentators, academics, and officials who use [the String of Pearls concept] as a baseline for explaining Beijing's intentions in the Indian Ocean.” Instead, he argues, Chinese strategists are debating whether to create “places, ” not full-fledged bases.
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This is a common view among specialists, though it is far from universal. The Chinese scholar Shen Dingli, for example, has written, “Setting up overseas military bases is not an idea we have to shun; on the contrary, it is our right.”
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To be certain, there is more to the speculation about Indian Ocean activities than the belief that China desires to secure its flows of energy from the Middle East. India in particular worries that Chinese activities are aimed at bolstering its position in future combat between the pair. This concern has been particularly acute for Chinese-funded efforts to develop a port in Sri Lanka, efforts that one analyst describes as looking “like a dagger pointed directly at India.”
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Yet if that port were developed into a robust base, its proximity to India could be more liability than asset during conflict, given weak capabilities to defend it against air attack.
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In any case, for the time being, Chinese aspirations to provide security for the resource trade are far from being translated into real capabilities. A serious effort to be the lead supplier of security for the sea lanes that it depends on would require not only a logistical network to support them far away from China but also far more investment and technological progress in ships and accompanying aircraft.

How might this change beyond the next decade, as Chinese blue-water naval capabilities develop further? Analysts have occasionally suggested that the United States and China should ultimately share the burden of sea-lane security. The idea may seem appealing in principle, since both countries benefit from secure sea lanes. But it is far less likely to be attractive in practice. For the United States, sharing sea-lane security ultimately means entrusting the security of some important trade routes to China. U.S. strategists, though, are likely to be at least as skeptical of any Chinese commitment to keeping trade routes open to all as Chinese strategists are currently of U.S. promises to do the same (despite the long U.S. track record of providing open access to sea lanes for trade). Any U.S. decision to cede control of critical Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian sea lanes would also come with grave consequences for U.S. allies in the region. Japan and South Korea depend critically on Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian sea lanes for imports of oil, gas, and other commodities. It is difficult to imagine their comfortably relying on China for the free flow of goods that are vital to their economies.

Moreover, absent major changes in the rules of international trade, U.S. withdrawal from providing Middle Eastern stability and Southeast Asian sea-lane security could well have dangerous economic consequences for the United States. Shortfalls in commodities imports to China caused by problems in producing regions or critical transit routes would leave China looking to replace its supplies with materials from elsewhere. That scramble would make the commodities in question scarcer for all consumers—the United States included—with resulting economic damage to all. The only way out of this would be if the world essentially divided itself into trading blocs that privilege U.S. consumers over Chinese ones during such a crisis. This makes the prospect of U.S.-Chinese sharing of sea-lane security even more remote.

China has, in principle, an alternative option to relying on U.S. provision of sea-lane security to ensure reliable access to resource supplies: when it comes to oil and gas, it can use pipelines. Pipelines are all but a necessity when moving oil and gas from Central Asia. China has, however, endeavored to build pipeline routes for oil transport even where seaborne commerce is common. This is almost certainly driven by fears that it could lose access to the Strait of Malacca during a conflict with the United States or another foreign power. But the Chinese track record in these more purely strategic (rather than also commercial) efforts has been mixed.

Chinese strategists have talked in particular about four areas: pipelines from Russia, a pipeline through Burma, one traversing Thailand, and a pipeline through Pakistan. Only the first two have been successful so far. The East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline carries oil from Siberia to Chinese refineries in Daqing and Fushun.
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The shipments are priced according to market-based rates. The ESPO pipeline differs from other Chinese efforts in that it makes at least some economic sense independent of worries about sea-lane disruptions during wartime, and it does not cross areas marked by political instability.

China has also successfully built a pipeline from the Indian Ocean port of Sittwe in Burma to Yunnan province. In 2007, after many years of discussions, China and Burma agreed to the construction of a $1 billion natural gas pipeline (to be supplied by Burmese gas; Burma is a relatively large but underdeveloped resource holder) and an accompanying $1.5 billion oil pipeline. CNPC owns a narrow majority of the project.
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The project has encountered challenges in Burma related to land acquisition, a common problem for pipelines around the world but one made worse there by the lack of clear benefits for the local population.
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The economics of the oil pipeline have also been repeatedly questioned.
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And even the security advantages remain unclear to many Chinese; as one researcher at the China University of Petroleum noted, “The Sino-Myanmar [Burma] pipeline does little to relieve China's dependence on Malacca, as the 22 million tons of oil imports are just a drop in the ocean compared with China's large energy consumption.”
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Yet in 2013 the pipeline was successfully brought into service, perhaps demonstrating that Chinese companies can be called on to pursue strategically important projects that are designed to improve resource security even when those projects' economics and actual security benefits are not transparently compelling.
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