The initial sea trials of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN’s) third aircraft carrier, Fujian, have concluded—a fitting point to reflect on its tremendous growth. The PLAN is not an exception. All of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) nuclear and conventional military capabilities have grown from modest ones—barely able to protect its borders—to global ones that rival those of the United States.
In an exceptional new book, Li Xiaobing, a professor of history at the University of Central Oklahoma, has written a history of the PLAN, “China’s New Navy: The Evolution of the PLAN from the People’s Revolution to 21st Century Cold War” (Naval Institute Press, 2023). The work is a careful examination of the PLAN’s growth from the service’s early focus on coastal defense to its present worldwide reach. Mr. Li draws upon CCP and other Chinese language sources to document his arguments, making the work invaluable for the U.S. national security community.
From its creation on April 23, 1949, through its youth centered upon the coastal defense of China, Mr. Li documents the specular growth of the PLAN. Other than the personnel and vessels it gained from defections among the Republic of China’s (ROC’s) navy, the PLAN had no experience with the major missions of the sea services—coastal defense, amphibious operations, commerce raiding, or Mahanian “blue water” engagement to establish command of the sea. Its doctrine was shaped by the ROC’s navy and then by the Soviet navy, as Soviet influence gained.
The PLAN’s early successes included supporting the conquest of Hainan and Xiamen. However, the PLAN failed to conquer Jinmen, which remains in Taiwan’s hands today. Mr. Li documents how the failure to conquer Jinmen had important ramifications, with Mao Zedong ordering Lin Biao—then the commander of the Fourth Field Army, the victors of the conquest of Manchuria and much of China—to suspend all amphibious landings. The PLAN was cognizant that the enormous gap in capabilities between the CCP’s and ROC’s navies would preclude an attack on Taiwan.
That frustration would cause the PLAN to be receptive to Soviet assistance. As Mr. Li notes, there was an expectation that Soviet assistance would make a rapid conquest of Taiwan possible. That was not to be, as North Korea’s invasion of the South resulted in President Harry Truman ordering the U.S. Seventh Fleet to protect Taiwan.
Mr. Li also notes that while Soviet support for the PLAN’s training, doctrine, ship construction, and surface and submarine fleet, as well as PLAN Air Force (PLANAF, established in May 1952), was prodigious, the pace of its expansion was slowed due to the Korean War and Mao’s emphasis as a result of that war on the Air Force. As Mr. Li argues: “Many senior naval officers attributed the PLAN’s slow start, a decade-long budget restraint, and poor performance in the 1950s to the Korean War.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, the PLAN focused on fighting “local wars,” principally against Taiwan. This limited success in the Taiwan Strait Crises, most importantly the conquest of Yijiangshan in 1955. This period also brought the Sino-Soviet split, and thus the end of Soviet support, the “de-Russification” of the PLAN, and the termination of talk, principally by the Soviets, of a joint Soviet-CCP fleet. The 1960s also entailed clashes with Taiwan, the close monitoring of the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea, and support for North Vietnam, including the “Ho Chi Minh Trail at Sea” where supplies would transit from ports in China, including in Hainan, to Sihanoukville in Cambodia. In 1974, the PLAN and the South Vietnamese Navy clashed over the Paracel Islands (Xisha in Chinese and Quan Dao Hoang Sa in Vietnamese), and Saigon’s forces were soundly defeated.
These activities had a significant impact on the PLAN due to the disparity between the performance of Soviet-designed vessels and those of the U.S. Navy, which resulted in the demand for new warships and because during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the People’s Liberation Army from 1967 to 1971 moved to the center of domestic politics through military administration. Mr. Li notes that during this time, the PLAN made great strides in centralizing shipbuilding that would bear fruit in the decades to come.
But the PLAN came to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s. Admiral Liu Huaqing became PLAN commander in 1982. Liu was known as the CCP’s Alfred Thayer Mahan or Sergei Gorshkov. He had a strategy to make the PLAN a “blue water” navy capable of competing with the U.S. Navy and received strong support from Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin.
Liu intended for the PLAN to operate far more than a coastal defense force but to be able to protect China’s sea lines of communication against any foe and for the PLAN to be able to support the CCP’s global ambitions. While that was optimistic in the 1980s, year-after-year expansion of PLAN and, more broadly, all CCP military capabilities has yielded that result. The shift from a continental to maritime emphasis and from regional to global ambitions is evidenced by the Chinese regime’s actions. Perhaps most importantly, Liu advanced the concept of the “sea as territory,” that is, Beijing’s sovereign territory, which fueled expansion in the East and South China Seas.
The analysis of naval developments under Jiang, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping is also presented but is brief compared with the earlier chapters.
The book’s great value is its analysis of the PLAN’s first decades. Due to its focus, the developments of the last decade have received less attention. Nevertheless, this is a sterling assessment of the PLAN’s foundation and development and merits close review by the U.S. national security community and media to inform the understanding of why the PLAN has increased capabilities and aggression against key U.S. allies like Japan and the Philippines and partners like Taiwan.
