China’s Naval Moves Show the Scale of Its Ambition

In the last two weeks, the People’s Liberation Army conducted live-fire naval drills in the international waters off Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam, and shooting drills in the Taiwan Strait. These exercises are a sign of China’s growing confidence as a maritime power. 

This show of military might is a signal to its closest neighbors that they’ll have to start relying on each other, or boost their own defense capabilities far more than they originally thought. They can’t expect to depend on the US for backup.

President Donald Trump has a message from the world: Do things for yourself first, and then we might help you out — if it suits us. In just the first month of his term, his team have told Europe that it needs to pay more for its own security, lectured allies on democracy, and pulled funding from America’s aid and development programs. 

As Washington retreats from the international stage, Beijing is advancing — militarily at least. China now has the world’s largest maritime fighting force, with 234 vessels compared to the US Navy’s 219. It’s also producing more warships at its shipyards at a faster pace; about 70% were launched after 2010, compared to 25% for the US Navy. 

While China’s vessels aren’t necessarily superior — yet — the US Office of Naval Intelligence assessed in 2020 that its ships were increasingly of comparable quality. Last year, Beijing also passed the milestone of achieving more than 50% of the US Navy’s firepower in vertical launch system missile cells on its surface ships. This gives Beijing the capability to take more advanced weapons systems further out into the oceans. 

The recent Chinese drills took place in international waters, and are permissible under international law. The US Navy traverses the world’s oceans, including the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, along with partners and allies. Freedom of navigation, and what’s known as “right of innocent passage,” are central tenants of the rules-based order. 

Those principles bring with them an implicit contract — a polite adherence to international norms. But Beijing didn’t give any notice about the drills in the Tasman Sea or the Taiwan Strait. Australia found out about them from a commercial pilot via radio communications. 

The message from the mainland is hiding in plain sight, suggests Anne-Marie Brady, professor of political science and international relations at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury. “China is now a sea power in the Pacific. They want to rule the waves.” The intent was clear — its actions disrupted commercial air travel in the Tasman Sea, and were a show of intimidation to smaller opponents.

Taiwan has condemned the exercises, saying they severely disrupt regional peace and stability, and are blatant acts of provocation. The self-ruled island, which China claims as its own, understands Beijing’s military might better than most. Warships and planes from the mainland cross the median line between them on an almost daily basis, fatiguing Taipei’s defense forces. 

The scale of these manoeuvres though, is different. What they are partly conveying is that we’re no longer dealing with simply a superpower in East Asia, but rather a “great maritime power” whose presence is to be more ubiquitous, as Elena Collinson and Corey Lee Bell at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, note. 

Resistance, Beijing appears to be saying, is futile. This means we should anticipate China to project power in places far beyond domains subject to its territorial claims.

Trump is making things easier for Beijing. Under previous administrations, the US has said that it is a Pacific nation, and built a network of partners in the Indo-Pacific to help maintain influence. But with the new president, none of this is guaranteed. He’s imposed tariffs on allies, and has tied potential security guarantees to economic interests.

This has left many in Asia with the impression that America First means America Alone — and that means they’re on their own. Asian countries will have to invest more in their own defense as Europe and the UK are also considering. Some of this is already happening. Taiwan and Japan have announced plans to boost their defense budgets. Singapore and India continue to make it a priority, while Australia and New Zealand are weighing their options.

Still, bigger defense spending is no guarantee of a secure military alliance with the US. Washington risks missing the bigger picture with this approach. The PLA has long had aspirations to extend its reach to greater distances. By conducting live-fire military exercises in quick succession around the Indo-Pacific, it’s showing China is able to build out that capability.

China is getting militarily stronger in an age of great power adventurism. The question is whether the US will do anything about it. 

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Karishma Vaswani is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia politics with a special focus on China. Previously, she was the BBC's lead Asia presenter and worked for the BBC across Asia and South Asia for two decades.

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