12/30/2004
Power games: China Navy fans out into Pacific
New York Times Service
Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands), Dec. 30: One day in November, a nuclear-powered Chinese Navy submarine quietly slipped past this western Pacific island, home port for five supply and ammunition ships positioned here by the US military for rapid deployment around the world.
"We are watching them," a crew member of a US Navy nuclear attack submarine said at an American fast-food restaurant while on shore leave here. The Chinese are a real concern."
Ever since the US Marine Corps defeated Japanese forces here 60 years ago, the Marianas have been widely considered an American lake. Now, the United States may have to get used to sharing the western Pacific with China, the world’s rising naval power.
According to military analysts, China is rapidly expanding its submarine force to about 85 by 2010, about one-third more than today.
"They want to become the dominant power in the western Pacific, to displace the United States, to kick us back to Hawaii or beyond," said Richard Fisher Jr., who studies Chinese Naval strengths and strategies for the International Assessment and Strategy Centre, a Washington research institute.
China is embarking on a $10 billion submarine acquisition and upgrade program and is buying destroyers and frigates and equipping them with modern antiship cruise missiles, according to Eric McVadon, a retired US Navy admiral who served as defence attaché in Beijing in the early 1990s.
"The Chinese are converting their surface Navy into a truly modern antiship cruise-missile surface navy," McVadon, now an East Asia security consultant, said after attending a naval review conference in Hawaii. "The modernisation of their Navy has taken a great leap forward." In contrast, Russia, which once had 90 submarines in the Pacific, has mothballed all but 20. Japan has 16 submarines and no plans to buy more. The US Pacific Fleet has 35 submarines, with many considered to be the most modern in the world.
"We don’t have to worry about losing control of the seas anytime soon," Richard Halloran, a military affairs analyst based in Honolulu, said by telephone. "But the Chinese are moving a whole lot faster on military modernisation than anyone expected a short time ago."
For its open-water navy, China is concentrating on submarines. The immediate goal, analysts say, is to blockade Taiwan, an island nation seen by Beijing as a breakaway province.
In response, the US Navy is reversing an old Soviet-era formula, where the United States had 60 per cent of its submarines in the Atlantic and 40 per cent in the Pacific. In addition to shifting toward keeping 60 per cent in the Pacific, the United States recently set up an antisubmarine warfare center in San Diego.
In January, Guam is to receive a third US nuclear attack submarine, the Houston. In three years, the United States will have brought from zero to three its forward deployed submarines in Guam, the US territory 240 kilometres, or 150 miles, south of here. Since March, the United States, using satellites and maritime surveillance planes, has detected Chinese submarines in waters west of Guam.
The Chinese Han Class submarine that passed near here cruised first near Guam. From the Marianas, the Chinese submarine went north to Okinawa, where Japanese forces detected it November 9 as it shadowed a joint naval exercise between the United States and Japan.
Violating international law, the submarine passed between two Japanese islands without surfacing and identifying itself. Japan protested strongly, and Japanese officials said they had won a private apology from Chinese officials. The rise of China’s Navy is watched with apprehension in the Pacific, where, down through the centuries, the islands have long been playthings for the world’s maritime powers: Spanish, American, British, French, German and Japanese.
"I have talked to several residents who are quite proud that China will have a big Navy again," Samuel McPhetres, regional history professor at Northern Marianas College.