The Influence of Sea Power on China, or the Influence of Mahan on Yoshihara and Holmes?

Abstract

Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy is part of the growing body of literature that examines China’s expanding naval capabilities. Based on an extensive survey of Chinese language sources regarding the role of navies and maritime power, Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes conclude that China will pursue a maritime future and posit that Chinese decisionmakers will follow the logic of Alfred Thayer Mahan, even if they do not necessarily hew to his specifics (or “grammar”) (p. 18). Thus, the authors laud the Chinese for “an impressive synthesis of strategic theories from foreign and indigenous sources,” with Mahan providing the “geopolitical logic” and Mao providing the specific “strategies and tactics” (p. 30). But while an intriguing hypothesis, the authors’ approach neglects to address the possibility that China may be pursuing policies that are at times consistent with Mahan but not motivated by his writings at all. The authors note in the foreword that by 2004 they had begun to notice that Chinese strategists were regularly citing Mahan, which suggests that these strategists were “studying and internalizing his writings in anticipation of China’s entry into the nautical domain” (p. ix). If so, to the authors, better understanding what kinds of military and non-military strategies, operations, and tactics China might develop was imperative, given that they might well be applied against the United States. In short, the volume is dedicated to trying to understand “how an aspiring or established sea power thinks about strategy [as] indispensable to forecasting how it will fare on the high seas” (p. 3). To this end, Yoshihara and Holmes discuss the growth of Chinese maritime thinking, examine potential approaches by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to fleet tactics, discuss the possible role of antiship ballistic missiles, survey U.S. maritime strategy in Asia, and analyze the growth of imperial German naval power as a possible parallel to China’s experience (and argue that China will not follow the same path). The book astutely notes that Chinese thinking on sea power is likely to differ, often fundamentally, from that of Western counterparts, given that the intellectual struggle over ideas often extends into realms such as geography