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Culture

Navy Officers, André Malraux, and Chinese Culture

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By Bill Bray

The U.S. military spends quite a bit of money and time educating a segment of its personnel on foreign cultures. Too much or not nearly enough, depending on who you ask and at what moment you ask them. Recall the relatively short run of the Afghanistan/Pakistan Hands Program. As a colleague at the U.S. Naval Academy who is the director of the Center for Experiential Leadership Development program, which arranges for various cultural immersion programs for midshipmen, relayed to me recently, in the era of renewed great power competition the emphasis on “cultural education” is waning in favor of more traditional technical warfighting knowledge.

The Army and the Marine Corps will probably continue to prioritize foreign culture knowledge without much debate, for obvious reasons. The Navy, however, may not. This is a service that tried and failed to establish a several times in the past half century before finally succeeding in the late 2000s. The Navy’s FAO debate was emblematic of the service’s larger struggle with determining what learning to emphasize in addition to technical knowledge, if anything at all. At the start of my career in the mid-1980s, the prevailing consensus regarding Navy officer education, as I recall it, was that understanding foreign cultures is a luxury. Not bad to have, but not terribly important for the vast majority. We may be drifting back to that place, and that would be a mistake.

The right answer is that Navy officers need both technical and cultural knowledge to compete against a sophisticated adversary in both peace and war. China will be the dominant threat concern for new officers during their entire careers. Officers in particular should strive for much more than a superficial understanding of Chinese culture as it pertains to matters of politics and warfare.

Malraux and Eastern Thought

For those that have little or no background on Chinese culture, a book with which to start is one recommended to me long ago when working on a graduate degree in Asian studies—André Malraux’s slender epistolary The Temptation of the West (La Tentation de l’Occident), published in 1926 but remarkably durable in capturing the differences in Western and Chinese thought. Two characters, the young Frenchman A.D. and Chinese student Ling-W.-Y., correspond about art and culture, specifically about a decaying European culture and how it, in turn, has infected Chinese culture. This is a conversation that had been playing out in Malraux’s mind for some time, at least from the point he first came to “the Orient” in 1923 to search for (in actuality probably to pilfer for sale) ancient Khmerian sculptures along the Royal Road in Cambodia (an adventure that landed him a three-year prison sentence by French colonial authorities, subsequently suspended).

Born in 1901 into a seafaring family in Dunkirk, Malraux took an interest in art and archaeology at an early age. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet and later at the Ecole des Langues Orientales. He ventured to Cambodia with his young wife, Clara Goldschmidt. From his humiliating arrest in Cambodia, to his return to Indochina (Vietnam) in 1925 (after briefly having returned to France), and later political activities in China supporting both nationalist and communist movements, the facts of what exactly he did, with whom, and when are shrouded in myth, mystery, and conjecture—an opaqueness he did little to clear up later in life. What we can know for certain is that by the mid-1920s, while running a newspaper in Hanoi, Malraux was writing prolifically. He published his first full-length novel, The Conquerors, in 1928, followed by The Royal Way in 1930, and Man’s Fate in 1933, a story set against the failed 1927 communist uprising in Shanghai (written before Malraux ever set foot in Shanghai) that won the Goncourt prize.

That Malraux was at least a communist sympathizer into his 30s is without question. Yet even in the most fervent years of his left-wing political activities, Malraux was more interested in examining the human condition through art and culture than in political doctrines. In fact, according to early Malraux chronicler and late Harvard professor of French literature W. M. Frohock, Man’s Fate was viewed with some suspicion by orthodox communist hardliners. “Did Malraux have a party card? The legend holds that he did not. And on his trip to the 1934 Writers’ Congress in Moscow . . . he was billed on the program as a ‘Marxist humanist’ and, according to reports, placed his emphasis much more on the human than on Marx.” Malraux was always searching and never comfortable with the doctrinaire. His politics shifted continually over the course of his life. In the Second World War he served in the French Army and later the French Resistance, and after the war as Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Information (1945–46) and France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs (1958–69).

Reading The Temptation of the West today, nearly 100 years after it appeared, reminds us of the hold culture retains on our thinking, even in an age of hyper-globalization. Malraux was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical critique of Western culture. In his introduction to the 1961 edition, Robert Hollander notes, “In Nietzsche, with his analysis of Western decadence, Malraux found an exalted precursor, more important for showing the way toward developing cultural generalizations than for shaping specific concepts.” Malraux also admired Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782), widely considered the best epistolary novel ever written in the French language. Nietzsche provided the philosophical foundation and de Laclos the form for Malraux to carry the critique further in the context of the West’s interaction with Chinese culture. The demise of a culture is not something one can truly appreciate from a distance. It is not an abstraction, of interest only to anthropologists and historians. It is personal and we must feel it—and we do through the letters of A.D. and Ling. We feel how they are inextricably caught in this crisis, how the uncertain future is their future.

One can forgive a young Malraux for so harshly dismissing a European culture he worked so hard in his later years to preserve. What could Europe but seem in the years immediately following the Great War? Europe was still convulsing, the old order still gasping, while vile political extremism was gaining currency. The center was never more than tenuous, and of course it collapsed like a house of sand by the end of the 1920s. In 1927 Malraux published the essay “D’une Jeunesse Europeenne” (“From a European Youth”) in Les Cahiers Verts in which he “proclaimed a personal alienation from European culture to match the one expressed by the focal character in La Tentation.”

An Enduring Epistolary

Only 18 letters comprise the book, and 12 are from Ling in Europe to A.D. in Asia. In the brief forward we learn A.D. is 25 years old and Ling 23. We never learn how Ling and A.D. know each other or why they correspond in the way they do. We are told at the end of the forward that the letters have been “selected and edited” and are intended to evoke in readers “some arresting thoughts on the seemingly unusual sensuous and spiritual lives of these two men.” Who selected and edited them? We have no idea. With this device Malraux seems to want us to know the bare minimum of background, as too much detail will unduly influence our interpretation and understanding of the subtle and finely wrought conversation.

The opening letter is from A.D., written from the liner Chambord as it carries him to China. We are not sure where Chambord is, only that A.D. has “seen savages suddenly appear and offer seafarers horn-shaped fruits from primitive trays. . .” He goes on to describe a wondrous flow of exotic sensations. Before leaving Europe, he experienced the rest of the world only through books and the gathered cultural treasures and animals one finds in museums and zoos. “Man, capturing living forms one by one and locking them up in books, has prepared the present condition of my mind.” A.D. is embarking on an adventure to a strange world. He is a colonial man—not the incurious or rapacious variant, but also not above indulging in the luxuries on offer. Asia is a place for the taking. The culture must be protected, not for its own sake, but rather because it is interesting to the Western man.

Ling is already in France, and he’s unimpressed. He writes his first letter from Marseilles. From the opening line we see that Ling has ventured to Europe with much suspicion—“Europe calls forth few beautiful ghosts, and I have come to her with hostile curiosity.” He is curious to know how Europe is so strong that it could colonize peoples around the world, including parts of China. China in the 1920s is sick, and Ling believes Europe the source of the disease. The remaining letters from Ling are sent from Paris, although he does make mention of visiting other European cities.

What transpires from the third letter onward is an inquiry into the European and Chinese minds—how each character thinks and sees the world. Religion, art, architecture, myth, literature, philosophy, even dreams—these are the methods of cultural expression Malraux examines. Ling studies and inquires, but also compares and explains. He is on a mission to understand how something he longs to preserve is slipping away. A.D. is less didactic. He is not determined to defend European culture. He is a product of it and all its excesses and tragedies, and that has convinced him that life is ultimately absurd. Searching for meaning is a fool’s errand. The existential concept “the absurd”—the realization that man’s attempt to understand and order the world is a fruitless exercise because no such order exists—is a Malraux motif. It is no wonder he influenced Sartre, Camus, and other French existentialists.

Malraux’s observations of both Chinese and European culture—East and West—rush at us in exquisite blossoms of language. When A.D. surfaces, such as in letters 8 and 12, he seems in implicit agreement with Ling on many points, as we see him explaining Europe rather than defending it. In letter 8, A.D. writes, “The excessive importance we have been led to give to ‘our’ reality is doubtless just one of the means the mind employs to defend itself … The absurd, the beautiful absurd, linked with us like the serpent to the tree of Good and Evil, is never completely hidden …” And in letter 12, “Europeans are weary of themselves, of their crumbling individualism, of their exaltation. What sustains them is less a thought than a delicate framework of negation.”

The denouement occurs in letter 17. Ling responds to A.D.’s description in the previous letter of his long discussion with the ex-politician Wang-Loh, whom he met in Shanghai. Wang-Loh pronounces the traditional culture of China dead. He pours scorn on young Chinese who have been infected with Western ideas. Ling is in sorrowful agreement with Wang-Loh, and the tone of the letter resonates a deep sadness. “He believes China is going to die. I believe it too.” For thousands of years, a propriety where elders are held in high esteem and revered for wisdom was being upended by a Western-educated youth—the “new elite.” But the new elite are not entirely happy to adopt European culture and shed their native culture. They believe they can have both. They are “tortured souls.” This is the tragedy unfolding in China. Ling sees it and is helpless to stop it. His countrymen thought they could absorb Europe like “learning a foreign language,” with no adverse repercussions to their own culture and identity. “How can I express the feelings of a disintegrating soul? All the letters I receive come from young men as desperate as Wang-Loh or myself, barren of their own culture, disgusted with yours…”

In a preface to the 1992 University of Chicago edition, noted China historian Jonathan D. Spence wrote, “It is never safe, and often folly, to call any writing ‘prophetic,’ but the closing two pages of this last letter of Ling’s read now as if they had been designed as an epilogue and benediction to the hopes and fears of China’s long revolution, and to the millions who died for the future…” What to make of The Temptation of the West today, nearly 30 years after Spence wrote those words? Like Malraux himself, the book refuses to be neatly distilled. It is heartbreaking to read about a culture dying, but we do not get the sense that it was ever avoidable. It seems a fate, a destiny, and not the result of a chosen direction that existed aside other paths just as easily taken. Ling comes closer to A.D. in concluding that all human existence lies in the “metallic realms of the absurd.” What awaits them both is only a “naked horizon and the mirror of solitude’s old master, despair.”

Culture Still Matters

When I first read this book in the early 1990s, a debate was raging on what the world was becoming in the post-Cold War era. Francis Fukuyama had recently published the article “The End of History?” in The National Interest. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and before the Soviet Union formally dissolved, Fukuyama resurfaced an argument first coherently offered by the German philosopher George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in the early 1800s that history—meaning the trajectory of man as a political and social creature, and not the academic subject—is not haphazard, but rather evolves with purpose and will have an end. The purpose, according to Hegel, is man’s quest for freedom and the end is a political system that fulfills this quest in all its citizens. In the 1930s, the Russian-French philosopher Alexander Kojeve gave a series of lectures incorporating Hegel’s concepts into 20th-century European democratic political theory. Fukuyama essentially reargued Kojeve’s thesis (and openly credited Kojeve) in his subsequent book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992.

Fukuyama has since had a legion of critics, some who I am convinced still misunderstand his argument, but also some very learned and distinguished. In his 1993 book, Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida dismissed Fukuyama’s book as “Western triumphalism and Christian eschatology.” For the American defense establishment, however, the Fukuyama critic more widely and warmly read was Samuel Huntington, whose essay “The Clash of Civilizations” appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1993. For Huntingdon, the end of the Cold War signaled not the affirmation of a political ideology, but the loss of a transcendent ideology’s hold on the more ancient and deeply held drivers of human conflict. At least one lid had come off a boiling pot. Both communism and liberal democracy always struggled to tame the forces of cultural identity in the service of universal principles, and now that at least one of the ideologies proved a failure, vast swaths of humanity will more likely find purchase in their civilizational identity than in the principles of liberal democracy. Huntingdon predicted a new wave of conflict in the 21st century, the fault lines of which will be between ancient civilizations.

It has been more than a quarter century since the ideas of Fukuyama and Huntingdon captivated so many of us, and in that time plenty of evidence has surfaced to support both viewpoints. Fukuyama has since revisited and moderated his position to account for group identity as a more potent political force than he had anticipated. But what is hard, if not impossible, to deny is that culture still matters. Listen carefully, for example, to the speeches of Chinese President Xi Jinping. He regularly appeals to Chinese culture to help justify the party’s legitimacy. The Hong Kong Chinese in the streets defending the city’s democratic structures are traitors not to the communist party, but to China—to being Chinese. At its core, Beijing’s great-power restoration project is much about the primacy of Chinese culture. Xi aims to restore what the fictional Wang-Loh thought was dead.

Given that reality, how much should young Navy officers educate themselves on Chinese culture? Quite a lot, in my view. China, with its highly capable, modernizing navy and its grand ambitions, is the great problem of their careers. The letters of Ling and A.D. add an interesting and different way to help do that.

Bill Bray is a retired Navy captain and deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.

Featured Image: French President Emmanuel Macron, left, and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping attend a wreath laying ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe monument in Paris, March 25, 2019. (AP Photo)

History

Orit: The Fishing Boat That Saved Hundreds of Lives

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By CDR (ret.) Dr. Eyal Pinko

The Yom Kippur War (1973) was a war of great victory for the Israeli Navy, in contrast to the Israeli Air Force and Army. The Navy’s success in the Yom Kippur War was the fruit of lessons learned by the Navy during the Six-Day War (1967), in which the Navy failed in most of its missions, even though they were insignificant in the grand campaign conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

After the Six-Day War, the Navy suffered a wide budget cut, with most of the IDF’s budget directed to strengthening the Air Force and the ground forces, which had proved their importance and capabilities in the war against the Arab armies. Moreover, during these years, the Navy experienced two disastrous events: the sinking of the INS Eilat by a barrage of anti-ship missiles from Egyptian missile boats (October 1967); and the loss of the submarine INS Dakar (January 1968).

In the process of drawing lessons from the Six-Day War and the other two events, the Navy realized that it must act with its relatively limited resources to build its power and develop a response to the naval threats of Syria and Egypt. The two countries’ navies began a buildup process that intensified in the 1960s by acquiring Soviet Osa-class missile boats, equipped with advanced Styx anti-ship missiles, a fairly novel capability at the time.

Following the war, Israel’s navy changed its combat doctrine and started operating with small and fast missile boats (which replaced larger surface combatants equipped with cannons). From the INS Eilat sinking’s lessons and insights, the Navy realized that it had to equip the new ships with advanced radars for long-range target detection and surface-to-surface missiles against the potential threat of dozens of Egyptian and Syrian Osa missile boats.

The Gabriel anti-ship missiles developed indigenously by the Israeli defense industry in the late 1960s were short-range missiles (about 11 nm). This range was significantly shorter than the Russian Styx missiles’ range (about 24 nm). The difference in the ranges of the two missiles created a significant operational problem for the Israeli Navy. The Israeli missile boats had to operate within the weapons engagement zone of the Russian Styx missiles’ to fight against the Osa missile boats.

To cope with the operational problem and enable the effective firing of the Gabriel missiles against the Osas, the Israeli Navy developed electronic warfare systems. The systems were meant to transmit electromagnetic signals based on understanding how the attacking missile’s homing seeker operates (active electronic warfare), along with the launch of decoy rockets scattering clouds of metal particles (chaff). The jamming signals, together with the chaff, made it possible to mislead the attacking missile’s seeker, thus diverting it from its flight trajectory and preventing it from hitting its target.

During the Yom Kippur War, more than 50 Styx missiles were fired from Syrian and Egyptian missile boats against the Israeli missile boats, but none of them hit intended targets. The Israeli Navy missile boats all returned to their base safely after sinking most of the Syrian and Egyptian Navy ships by firing Gabriel missiles under the electronic warfare systems’ protective umbrella.

When designing the electronic warfare systems to protect the vessels, the Navy assumed that the Soviet Styx missiles were designed for use against large ships and would not be able to hit small targets such as the Sa’ar-class missile boats. But an incident in 1970 completely changed the Navy’s mindset.

In May 1970, a fishing boat named Orit was sunk off the Egyptian coast by Styx missiles fired by the Egyptian Navy. The sinking of the fishing boat proved that the Styx missiles were also effective against small ships, forcing the Navy to change its electronic warfare systems’ design, capabilities, and doctrine. The sinking of the Orit and the deaths of two fishermen arguably saved the lives of hundreds of missile boat sailors three years later in the Yom Kippur War.

The Orit fishing boat

These were the days of the war of attrition. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, was unwilling to accept the results of the Six-Day War, and in a speech delivered on May 1, 1970, he threatened to attack Israel by air, land, and sea. In his speech, Nasser emphasized that the Egyptian Navy would sink any Israeli ship found in Egyptian maritime territory without warning.

During the period between the two wars, many Israeli vessels sailed in the Bardawil Lake area (in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt). Most of them were fishing boats, trying to make a living from the fisheries in the area. In order for the Navy to guarantee their safety, the fishing boats were required to report their location to the Navy four times a day (08:00, 13:30, 16:30, and 00:30).

The Orit was a relatively small fishing boat (about 20 meters long and with a tonnage of about 75 tons) that regularly operated from the port of Ashdod. The fishing boat had a four-person crew led by Captain Adam Yassar.

On Wednesday, May 13, 1970, about two weeks after Nasser’s speech, the fishing boat crew decided to sail towards Bardawil Lake, where there was a large quantity of fish and where nighttime fishing was relatively easy. That evening, about twenty miles from Bardawil Lake, the Orit sent its last location report on its way north. 

At about 22:30, between three and four Styx missiles were fired by the Egyptian Osas toward two Israeli Sa’ar-class missile boats that were in the Bardawil Lake area. The Israeli missile boats used their electronic warfare systems and were not hit by the Egyptian missiles, which were heard exploding in the distance. But shortly after the Styx missiles’ blasts were heard, the Orit mark disappeared from the radar screens of the Israeli missile boats. The attempts to call Orit went unanswered.

The next morning, May 14, no further report had been received from Orit and the loss of communication caused a great deal of concern. Extensive searches for the Orit began at sea using other fishing boats and Navy missile boats. That day, remnants of the fishing boat were discovered floating on the water. The remains of the boat were removed from the water and brought to Israel. Most of the boat’s hull remained on the seabed.

Two of the Orit’s crew survived the missiles and managed to float on the water. They swam for over a day toward the Sinai coast where their lives were saved. But two of its crew members, Segal Ackerman and Captain Adam Yassar, did not survive.

Ackerman’s body was found floating on the water, and Adam Yaasar was trapped in the wheelhouse and drowned with the boat’s remains. Adam Yassar’s body was found only after about eight days by a commando unit team, who dived to search for him in the wreck of the boat left on the seabed.

One of the survivors, Oded Kopelnik, reported what happened and said that two Styx missiles exploded over the fishing boat and caused it to disintegrate and sink.

Following the incident, the Israeli Navy and its commander, Admiral Avraham Botzer, were severely criticized by the press, with concerns about the Navy’s ability to secure Israeli fishing boats and merchant ships in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. The allegations were that the Navy did not build the maritime picture as required, did not maintain continuous contact with the Israeli fishing boats operating in the arena, and did not provide them with spatial protection from the threat of warships and Egyptian missile batteries.

The allegations were that the Navy had not drawn lessons from incidents in the years before the Orit’s destruction. The Orit’s sinking came two years after INS Eilat, the Navy destroyer, sank in the exact same area by the same model missiles fired by Egyptian missile boats. What is more, in February and April 1970, several months before Orit sank, the Navy was unable to prevent an Egyptian commando force’s daring operation to mine a vessel in the port of Eilat.

The Orit  incident was another layer in the allegations made against the Navy about its inability to fulfill its obligations to maintain the Israeli maritime border and the merchant ships’ security at that time. There were calls for establishing a state commission of inquiry to investigate the Navy’s sequence of failures, including the Orit incident, although an inquiry commission was never formed.

Epilogue

The Styx missiles fired from the Egyptian Osas were tracked in flight by the radar of the Israeli missile ships, as well as by the electronic warfare systems, which picked up the missile homing seeker transmissions and identified their operational logic. The electronic warfare systems identified that the missiles found a target and locked on it. 

In 2020, an interview with a retired Egyptian Navy admiral revealed more information about the incident. The admiral, who was the area commander at that time, noted that the fishing boat was observed in the radars of the Egyptian missile boats, and the decision to fire the missiles immediately was taken with the assumption that the fishing boat was an Israeli intelligence ship. 

During the Israeli investigation of the incident, one of the hypotheses was that the electronic warfare system of the Israeli missile boat may have diverted the Styx missiles that sank Orit. This hypothesis was eventually rejected and the confession of the admiral confirmed that the fishing boat was the intended target.

The seekers’ locking on Orit as a legitimate target led the missiles to navigate toward it and to detonate their warheads near the Orit (with the warheads weighing five hundred kilograms each).

The analysis of the Israeli electronic warfare systems’ recorded signals, together with the radar detection of the Styx missiles during their flight, later led the research and development teams of the Israeli Navy and the defense industry to understand that the Styx missile seekers captured Orit as a legitimate target, despite its small size and low radar cross-section (RCS). These insights led to a change in overall perceptions of anti-ship missile defense and enabled updating the electronic warfare systems in the Israeli Navy.

These changes, made before the Yom Kippur War and after the Orit sinking incident, enabled the Navy in 1973 to operate within the range of the Egyptian and Syrian warships’ Styx missiles. More than 50 missiles were fired without effect at Israeli Navy ships during the war. The Israeli Navy launched its Gabriel missiles, sank 44 Egyptian and Syrian ships, and returned back home safely without any casualties and losses.

The naval superiority achieved in the Yom Kippur War allowed Israel to control the sea trade and commerce routes and to secure the supply of weapons and ammunition shipped from the United States to Israel. These sea shipments created a logistical backbone to Israel and allowed the IDF to continue fighting in its various frontiers until military superiority was achieved.

The deaths of Segal Ackerman and Captain Adam Yassar, whose exact place of death was never determined, changed the face of the naval battles in the Yom Kippur War and in the next decades.

In their deaths, they commanded us life. May their memory be blessed.

Eyal Pinko served in the Israeli Navy for 23 years in operational, technological, and intelligence duties. He served for almost five more years as the head of the division at the prime minister’s office. He holds Israel’s Security Award, Prime Minister’s Decoration of Excellence, DDR&D Decoration of Excellence, and IDF Commander in Chief Decoration of Excellence. Eyal was a senior consultant at the Israeli National Cyber Directorate. He holds a bachelor’s degree with honor in Electronics Engineering and master’s degrees with honor in International Relationships, Management, and Organizational Development. Eyal holds a Ph.D. degree from Bar-Ilan University (Defense and Security Studies).

Featured Image: A starboard beam view of an Israeli Sa’ar 3-Class fast attack craft, with visitors aboard. Three Gabriel surface-to-surface missile launch boxes are near the stern. (Photo from U.S. National Archives)

Ocean Governance

Looking Past Gulf of Guinea Piracy: Chinese Twins, “Ghanaian” Fishing, and Domain Awareness

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By Dr. Ian Ralby

The recapture of the pirated Chinese fishing vessel Hai Lu Feng 11 on 16 May 2020 stands as one of the most successful recent examples of both maritime security cooperation and naval operations in the Gulf of Guinea. Pirates took the vessel and its crew of 11 on 14 May off of Côte d’Ivoire and sailed across the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Ghana, Togo, and Benin before being interdicted 14 nautical miles off the coast of Nigeria. The information sharing across the region and the operations by the navies of Benin and Nigeria led to the successful release of the vessel and the hostages. The case will soon be the first true piracy case tried under Nigeria’s new Suppression of Piracy and Other Maritime Offenses Act. 

Any deterrent effect from these successes, however, was not evident a month later when on 24 June 2020 the F/V Panofi Frontier, a Ghanaian-flagged vessel, was pirated off Benin with six crew members—one Ghanaian and five South Korean—taken hostage. The South Korean government, along with the vessel’s owner—a South Korean company—and the Ghanaian government, were involved in securing the release of the hostages, all of whom were freed by the end of July. 

Much could be said about these two piracy incidents and what has happened since, but examining what each vessel was doing before it was attacked provides a new and important angle of insight into the region’s maritime space, all of which point to a need to rethink maritime domain awareness in the region. Civilian vessels not only avoid monitoring by turning off tracking devices, they engage in a variety of illegal practices to obscure their identity.

Sharing identities with other vessels, and engaging in corporate schemes to allow foreign companies to operate as domestic entities blur the already murky picture of maritime operations in the region. Regional governments need to take a new approach to maritime domain awareness, not only to better address illegality of all sorts, but to respond to emergency situations like pirate attacks. That approach has to include a mix of tools and techniques, including leveraging technology, conducting analysis, improving legal awareness and reforming laws, establishing processes and procedures for effective response, and, ultimately, building trust through an honest confrontation with what is really happening in the waters of West and Central Africa. 

Insights from the Hai Lu Feng 11

Algorithmic analysis by Windward, a predictive maritime intelligence platform, of all the vessels transmitting Automated Information System (AIS) in the EEZs of the coastal states of the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) indicates that between 1 September 2019 and 1 September 2020, a total of 527 vessels engaged in fishing operations. The Hai Lu Feng 11 is equipped with an AIS transponder, and was fishing on 14 May when it was pirated. Surprisingly, however, it does not appear on the list of 527 transmitting vessels. 

The Hai Lu Feng 11 was pirated outside the territorial sea of Côte d’Ivoire, but oddly, the following image captures the entirety of the traceable movements of the vessel over the eleven-month period after it arrived in Côte d’Ivoire for the first time on 30 October 2019: 

The detectable movements of the F/V Hai Lu Feng 11 from 30 October 2019 to 30 September 2020. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)

Therefore, while the Hai Lu Feng 11 was the victim of piracy, it had also not followed the requirements of the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention to maintain its AIS turned on. Why was the Hai Lu Feng 11 operating dark other than when it was in the lagoon area around the port of Abidjan? How can the region improve its maritime domain awareness if both victims and perpetrators operate in the dark? And what else might be going unnoticed off the coast of Atlantic Africa? While a comprehensive answer to those questions would likely consume several volumes, a few interesting patterns arise in analyzing AIS data that may help give some answers.

Double Trouble

A substantial number of the vessels that fished in the ECOWAS region between September 2019 and September 2020 were sharing something they should not have. Twenty-seven vessels shared thirteen vessel names. In one case, three different fishing vessels, all flagged in the Gambia, and all using the same Mobile Maritime Service Identity (MMSI) number, used the name The Gambia 4. The full list is as follows:

Name Flag
1 Dak940 Senegal
2 Dak940 Senegal
3 Fu Hai Yu 5555 China
4 Fu Hai Yu 5555 China
5 Fu Yuan Yu 381 China
6 Fu Yuan Yu 381 China
7 Guo Ji China
8 Guo Ji China
9 Han Sen 5 The Gambia
10 Han Sen 5 The Gambia
11 Long Tai 1 China
12 Long Tai 1 Ghana
13 Long Xing 622 China
14 Long Xing 622 China
15 Lu Qing Yuan Yu 051 China
16 Lu Qing Yuan Yu 051 China
17 Lu Yuan Kai Yuan Yu 877 China
18 Lu Yuan Kai Yuan Yu 877 China
19 The Gambia 4 The Gambia
20 The Gambia 4 The Gambia
21 The Gambia 4 The Gambia
22 Wang 6 The Gambia
23 Wang 6 The Gambia
24 Yi Fen 26 China
25 Yi Fen 26 China
26 Yi Feng 30 China
27 Yi Feng 30 China

Chart by the author using Windward data to indicate the vessels with identical names fishing in the ECOWAS region between 1 September 2019 and 1 September 2020. 

While it would be bad enough that these vessels were sharing names, often under the same flag, they also sometimes shared International Maritime Organization (IMO) numbers and MMSI numbers, each of which is legally required to be distinct. Even vessels that did not share names may have shared these other identifiers. Excluding the vessels that had unknown IMO numbers, the following vessels shared IMO numbers: 

Name Flag
1 Long Tai 1 China
2 Long Tai 1 Ghana
3 Lu Qing Yuan Yu 057 China
4 Lu Qing Yuan Yu 051 China

Chart by the author using Windward data to indicate the vessels with identical IMO numbers fishing in the ECOWAS region between 1 September 2019 and 1 September 2020. 

What is most interesting here is not that the two Long Tai 1 vessels overlap from the first list, but that another vessel also used the same name as the Lu Qing Yuan Yu 051, even while this one was sharing an IMO number with the Lu Qing Yuan Yu 057. In other words the two Lu Qing Yuan Yu 051 vessels and the Lu Qing Yuan Yu 057 were in a strange triangle, each sharing something of the other. 

When it comes to MMSI numbers another challenge arises—a number of the vessels that shared MMSIs with other vessels do not have clear names. Beyond the vessels in these last two charts, there are a few others that only share MMSI numbers, but the picture is messy and confusing to say the least. Given that the aim of all these identifiers is to have unique profiles for each vessel, this is a problem regardless of the other activities in which the vessels engage. The region cannot effectively govern its maritime space without addressing this issue, as there is no way to gain clarity amid the resulting confusion. 

This creates serious concerns for security and governance as well. If several vessels have the same name, perhaps only one may get a license. So, for example, if The Gambia 4 has a license to fish, there is no reason law enforcement would stop The Gambia 4 from fishing. But three vessels may be fishing under that same name and thus that same license, meaning that they are getting three for the price of one and could be tripling their quota in turn. Equally, the implications for interdicting vessels suspected of other crimes, like trafficking, are quite challenging if there are no clear indicators of which vessel is which. This is a law enforcement nightmare, as the welter of matching names, IMO numbers, and MMSI numbers makes it hard to conclusively identify a vessel without there being some doubt.

Mirror Meetings 

The presence of so many vessels with overlapping identities in the region is made more complicated by the fact that they also have a tendency to meet with each other or with vessels of nearly identical names. For example, in the period between September 2019 and September 2020 the following vessels met: 

  • Hai Lu Feng 9 and Hai Lu Feng in Côte d’Ivoire
  • Long Tai 1 (China) and Long Tai 1 (Ghana) in Ghana 
  • Hai Lu Feng 1 (China) and Hai Lu Feng 5 (Ghana) in Ghana 
  • Hao Yuan Yu 866 and Hao Yuan Yu 860 in Liberia 
  • Fu Hai Yu 333 and Fu Hai Yu 555 in Sierra Leone 

These are just some of the meetings between mirrored or virtually mirrored vessels in that time period. The concern is that this can create challenges for and confusion among law enforcement and those monitoring the maritime space. For example, the Long Tai 1 from China could – hypothetically – enter Ghana’s EEZ with some sort of illicit good like drugs, meet with the Long Tai 1 from Ghana, and exchange the drugs for fish. The Ghanaian vessel could then fish some more and return unchecked, with a cargo of drugs as well as fish, while the Chinese Long Tai 1 could transship at sea, without anyone suspecting either “Long Tai 1” of anything. This dynamic requires new approaches to maritime domain awareness to ensure that coastal states can effectively monitor and then interdict illicit maritime activity. 

Here, too, we see that the Hai Lu Feng name is not without murkiness. While it was the Hai Lu Feng 11 flying a Chinese flag, there are a variety of Hai Lu Feng vessels in the region. The vessels carrying that name include 1 (China – fishing), 2 (China – high speed craft), 2 (China – fishing), 4 (China – cargo), 5 (China – fishing), 5 (Ghana – fishing), 6 (China – tanker), 6 (China – unknown class), 6 (Ghana – fishing), 7 (China – fishing), 8 (China – fishing), 9 (China – fishing), 09 (China – fishing), 10 (China – fishing), 11 (China – fishing), 12 (China – fishing). Complicating matters further, the vessels are frequently renumbered such that the 5 becomes 6, 4 becomes 2, etc. The inclusion of the Ghana flag in the mix is noteworthy. As with the Long Tai 1, the ability of two vessels of the same name, but different flags, to meet and create confusion for anyone trying to understand vessel movements undercuts maritime domain awareness. 

Dark Activity

Given that the Hai Lu Feng 11 was dark both when it was attacked and, evidently, during any fishing activities it conducted in the region, it is perhaps not surprising that other vessels fishing in the region have an unusually high propensity to spend time dark as well. Out of the previously mentioned 527 vessels, 396 of them—or 75%—spent time with AIS actively turned off while at sea during the period from 1 September 2019 to 1 September 2020. By contrast, the Pacific coast of South America in the same time period saw 870 vessels fish, with 437—less than half—having periods of dark activity. 

This is not merely signal loss, and so it raises the question: why? Dark activity, while likely a violation of the SOLAS Convention’s requirement that AIS stay turned on, is not per se illegal. It is, however, a strong indicator of suspicious activity. And when it comes to fishing vessels, there are three main concerns: 1) engaging in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing; 2) transshipping catch in furtherance of IUU fishing; or 3) engagement in fisheries crime. Analyzing the dark activity of these 396 vessels may be a useful exercise, but for the purpose of this analysis, the key to note is that there is a lot of activity in the region that the vessels do not want seen. Some of that may be for safety reasons – to avoid detection by pirates looking to attack vessels that cannot make a speedy retreat on account of fishing activities. Maritime domain awareness requires multiple data sources to gain a more complete picture, as AIS alone will not be sufficient. 

Vessel Monitoring and the Pirate Attack 

While the Hai Lu Feng 11 was dark when it was attacked, it was monitored on the Ivorian vessel monitoring system (VMS) used to keep track of fishing vessels in the country’s waters. However, the Fisheries Department of the Ministry of Animal and Fisheries Resources, not the Ivorian Navy, controls the VMS, so when the vessel was attacked, there was a delay before Fisheries clarified the anomaly to the Navy. The lack of a common operating picture at the national and regional levels remains a challenge, and while it could be overcome with efficient interagency communication, whole-of-government approaches to maritime governance are always challenging. In the case of the Hai Lu Feng 11, rapid notification by Chinese officials to the various states along the coast helped make the regional approach effective. This is an important takeaway for how to bypass other maritime domain awareness deficiencies, particularly at the multinational level. 

Insights from the Panofi Frontier

While the case of the Hai Lu Feng 11 was itself not terribly revealing, the absence of a history encouraged a deep dive into the more general nature of fishing vessel activity in the region. The Panofi Frontier, by contrast, reveals a movement pattern that has not received much attention in the region. Prior to being attacked, and again since, it has been engaged in a pattern of activity that moves not only laterally between different regional states, but across the Atlantic to the outer edge of the Brazilian EEZ. What is interesting, however, is that it is not alone. The whole fleet of “Panofi” vessels make similar journeys. Those vessels are all Ghana flagged and owned by a Ghanaian company. That company, Panofi Co., Ltd. in Tema, Ghana, is in turn owned by Silla Company of South Korea. In looking at the vessels’ paths, the similarity is unmistakable, particularly as most Ghana-flagged fishing vessels stay in Ghana or along the West African coast. For example: 

Track of the F/V Panofi Frontier (Ghana) between November 2019 and November 2020. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)
Track of the F/V Panofi Master (Ghana) between November 2019 and November 2020. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)
Track of the F/V Panofi Discoverer (Ghana) between November 2019 and November 2020. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)

The vessel tracks for the Panofi Path Finder, the Panofi Commander, the Panofi Fore Runner, and the Panofi Volunteer all look similar as well. While it makes sense that these vessels, all owned by the same company in Ghana and with the same beneficial owner in South Korea, might engage in a similar path, they are not the only ones. In fact, the Ghanaian Long Tai 1 discussed above follows a similar path: 

Track of the F/V Long Tai 1 (Ghana) between November 2019 and November 2020. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)

But so does the Chinese Long Tai 1: 

Track of the F/V Long Tai 1 (China) between November 2019 and November 2020. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)

Interestingly, other vessels owned and flagged in Ghana, but with Asian beneficial owners, also engage in similar patterns of activity; examples include the Atlantic Queen, the Agnes 1, and the Africa Star. At the same time, however, other flags from other parts of the world may also be used by companies related to these vessels. The Atlantic Glory and Atlantic Prince, for example, are both Belize flagged, but engage in similar routes. Both the Liberty Grace and the Liberty Queen are flagged in Liberia and owned by Asian-owned Liberian companies, yet they still conduct similar routes out of Ghana across to the edge of the Brazilian EEZ. For example: 

Track of the F/V Liberty Grace (Liberia) between November 2019 and November 2020. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)

Similarly, the Everrich 1 is flagged in Côte d’Ivoire, but operates out of Senegal, and also spends time in areas by the Brazilian EEZ, as well as parts of the Eastern Caribbean. The Gambian-flagged Sage also seems to use Senegal and Ghana as its landing points, only recently having started developing a presence in the region. And a number of vessels, based in Senegal, flying the Senegal flag, and having beneficial owners in Asia – including the Maximus, and the Diamalaye – all exhibit the same pattern.

By contrast to all of these Asian-owned vessels, most local vessels – even the biggest ones – rarely venture beyond the EEZ of African coastal states:

Track of a locally owned, operated and flagged Ghanaian fishing vessel over the course of a year. (Image from Windward Predictive Maritime Intelligence, wnwd.com. Click to expand.)

While none of the Asian-owned vessels is obviously – based on this information alone – engaged in illicit activity, it is important to know that these routes and patterns exist. It may simply be that the Asian companies are taking advantage of local basing and flagging to be able to fish in more abundant waters of the Atlantic high seas. Regional governments should be aware of this, however, as it may still impact the sustainability of the region’s fishery. Of interest to law enforcement however, and setting aside the prevalence of IUU fishing in Atlantic Africa, these vessels’ tracks raise concerns about opportunities for engagement in fisheries crime.

A recent spike in drug interdictions from South America indicates a growing transatlantic drug route from South America. Some of that is containerized, but fishing vessels are increasingly being used to move drugs worldwide. The regularity of the routes of these foreign-owned fishing vessels between West Africa and the Brazilian EEZ provide potential cover and opportunity for moving narcotics or other illicit goods into the Gulf of Guinea. At a minimum, therefore, the states of West Africa should be vigilant in monitoring these routes to ensure that the fishing vessels do not engage in fisheries crime, assisting cartels with trafficking drugs. 

Lessons for Maritime Domain Awareness 

Maritime domain awareness in Atlantic Africa is vital not only to helping stop piracy, but also to helping address other crimes and activities that degrade the environment and undermine the rule of law. This examination of just two vessels that were attacked by pirates in May and June 2020 revealed a wealth of insight into the movement and action of vessels in the region. As helpful as that is, this insight is limited. This maritime domain awareness now needs to be connected to maritime domain actors. If the people who have visibility on incidents are not looking into these patterns and questions on a regular basis, there is no hope of the region being able to take meaningful and timely action when an emergency, like a pirate attack, occurs. Atlantic Africa, therefore, needs to focus on developing five things simultaneously:

  1. Technology – Having access to the most comprehensive and advanced MDA platforms, like Windward, that focus on the full spectrum of illicit activity, not just one issue like transshipment or even just fishing. 
  2. Analysis – The data from the technology platform is just data until it is interpreted by someone who understands it, and the human analytical capacity of the Maritime Operations Centers and Multinational Maritime Coordination Centers needs greater attention. 
  3. Law – Something that is undesirable is not necessarily illegal. Something that is illegal is not necessarily actionable. Watchkeepers and operators need greater understanding not just of what is happening, but of what portion of it can be stopped legally. Arresting a vessel without the legal authority or jurisdiction to do so can actually embolden criminals. 
  4. Processes – There needs to be a consistent, well-practiced approach to responding to all the different forms of crime. Part of that means that the shippers and fishers in the region need to know who to call to get an effective response. Regardless of how that process looks, it needs to work. 
  5. Trust – Technology is only part of the answer. Processes are only part of the answer. People on the water – fishermen, shippers, port operators and even recreational sailors – all need to know not only who to contact; they need to be able to trust that they will get a meaningful response and, at a minimum, not become the target of punitive or illicit action. All maritime actors – navies, coast guards, police forces, fishers, the maritime industry, NGOs and beyond – need to build the trust-based relationships that give them the confidence to share information and request assistance. 

Leveraging these two piracy incidents for insights shines a spotlight on a variety of needs and approaches to meeting them. Given how many other attacks have occurred in 2020 alone, further analysis of this variety could only prove beneficial. 

Dr. Ian Ralby is a recognized expert in maritime law and security and serves as CEO of I.R. Consilium. He has worked on maritime security issues around the world, and has spent considerable time focused on and was previously based in the Caribbean. He spent four years as Adjunct Professor of Maritime Law and Security at the United States Department of Defense’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, and three years as a Maritime Crime Expert for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. I.R. Consilium is a family firm that specializes in maritime and resource security and focuses on problem-solving around the world.

Featured image: F/V Hai Lu Feng 11 at sea at the time of its re-capture by local authorities. (Image courtesy of Maritime Security Regional Coordination Centre for Western Africa (CRESMAO) and the Interregional Coordination Centre (ICC), https://icc-gog.org/.)

Indo-Asia-Pacific

China’s Maritime Militia and Fishing Fleets: A Primer for Operational Staffs and Tactical Leaders, Pt. 1

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This article originally featured in the Military Review and is republished with permission. It will be republished in two parts. Read it in its original form here.

By Shuxian Luo and Jonathan G. Panter

Articles about gray-zone operations—states’ use of nontraditional forces and methods to pursue security objectives without triggering armed conflict—are unavoidable in military professional literature.1 This is particularly true for commentary about Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).2 These states’ embrace of gray-zone operations is unsurprising since such operations are an attractive means for relatively disadvantaged powers to challenge a stronger rival like the United States. Among the most important of China’s gray-zone forces and actors is its maritime militia. In addition, China’s overtly civilian distant-water fishing (DWF) fleets, which are affiliated to varying degrees with Chinese government agencies, have been subject to growing international scrutiny.

Vessels in both groups help China rewrite the rules of freedom of navigation, buttress its maritime claims, secure vital resources, and extend its economic reach across the globe. In the coming years, U.S. Department of Defense civilians and military personnel throughout the joint force will encounter these nontraditional maritime forces engaged in a variety of operations across several geographic combatant commands. Failure to recognize the purpose, capabilities, or limitations of these vessels will impede U.S. forces’ ability to accomplish assigned missions, defend themselves, and avoid unintentional escalation.

China’s maritime actors have drawn growing attention from both scholars and defense professionals. However, the political context provided by academic research may not reach practitioners who rely on shorter, descriptive articles about Chinese capabilities.3 Bridging this gap can support more informed assessments of Chinese vessels’ possible intentions, assisting military staffs and leaders in developing rules of engagement, tactical procedures, and reporting criteria.

The article proceeds in three parts. It begins by analyzing the domestic sources of Chinese grand strategy that influence the PRC’s maritime policies and activities. The next section describes China’s maritime militia and fishing fleets, their strategic purposes, and their strengths and limitations. The final section addresses the challenges these actors pose to U.S. forces, with particular emphasis on the links between force protection and unintended escalation.

China’s Grand Strategy: Misperceptions and Reality

“Grand strategy” is the highest rung of a state’s foreign policy; it is a unifying theme linking a state’s various efforts to secure its own survival and welfare in the international system. As defined by political scientist Richard Betts, it is “a practical plan to use military, economic, and diplomatic means to achieve national interests (or political ends) over time, with the least feasible cost in blood and treasure.”4 The key phrase is “over time,” because what distinguishes “grand strategy” from “strategy” is some consistent thread between a state’s individual policies.

However, as Betts observes, the concept of grand strategy is too often applied retroactively to decisions that were merely ad hoc responses to a problem. Moreover, “[t]he term ‘grand’ conjures up unrealistic images of sweeping and far-seeing purpose, ingenuity, direction, and adroitness.”5 These critiques neatly capture many recurring tropes about China’s grand strategy, including “hide and bide,” “a game of Go,” and invocations of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (especially “defeating the enemy without fighting”).6 The first refers to China’s late paramount leader (from 1978 until 1989) Deng Xiaoping’s philosophy that China should “hide its strength and bide its time”; the second holds that Western strategists see the world as a chess game (seeking decisive battle), but Chinese strategists see it like the board game “Wei Qi” (encircling the enemy over the long term); and the third suggests that Chinese strategists rely on deception and delay more than their Western counterparts (who, ostensibly, are avid readers of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War).7

These maxims sensationalize Chinese strategic thought as permanent, infinitely patient, devious, and opaque to the Western mind. To be sure, they contain some truth, but the pop version of Chinese grand strategy perpetuates two false assumptions (see the table below). The first is that China is a unitary actor rather than a state with many domestic audiences (interest groups with varying degrees of power). The second is that Chinese policy priorities are fixed over time, despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) shifting legitimating narratives for its internal audiences. The implication is serious: If China is incapable of change, what is the point of any U.S. policy but containment or confrontation?8

The PRC’s long-term plans are more nuanced. China has a grand strategy, but one that is rooted in its governance structure and the CCP’s narratives of legitimacy. U.S. defense professionals dealing with gray-zone forces should understand how China’s maritime disputes affect the CCP’s internal calculus about the stability of its governance. Knowing what domestic audiences and CCP narratives are impacted by, say, an at-sea encounter between U.S. warships and Chinese fishing boats, can inform analyses of the risks and benefits of such interactions.

While it remains subject to debate whether Beijing pursues a full-fledged revisionist goal of displacing the United States in the Indo-Pacific region and challenging U.S. dominance internationally, a broader and consistent theme has emerged in China’s official documents and leadership speeches: that of Chinese national “rejuvenation,” or a restoration of its past position of prestige in world affairs.9 In a recent article, political scientist Avery Goldstein argues that rejuvenation has been a consistent grand strategy of the PRC alongside a second strategy: survival of the state with the CCP as its sole ruler. During the Cold War, as the PRC faced existential threats from outside, survival dominated rejuvenation. It remains the regime’s “topmost vital, or ‘core’ interest” today, but China’s greater safety leaves room for it to pursue rejuvenation.10 Since 1992, Goldstein argues, rejuvenation has undergone three phases: “hide and bide” under Deng; “peaceful rise” (reassuring other countries of China’s benign intentions) in the 1990s; and the “China dream” (increased assertiveness) under Xi Xinping. Upon taking power in 2012, Xi considered “hide and bide” and “peaceful rise” anachronistic, preferring an “activist approach” in which the PRC would utilize its power to “more resolutely resist challenges to core interests.”11

Both grand strategies—rejuvenation and regime survival—depend on safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and maintaining economic development.12 First, the CCP’s domestic legitimacy since its founding has rested heavily on the party’s demonstrative capabilities in defending the country from foreign interference. Its main competitor in the 1930s and 1940s, the Kuomintang, received both U.S. and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics support in World War II. During the ensuing Chinese Civil War, therefore, the CCP sought domestic support by claiming that it was the only side unsullied by foreign influence.13

Table. Misperceptions about China’s Grand Strategy (Table by Jonathan G. Panter) [Click to Expand]
After the CCP triumphed over the Kuomintang in 1949, its claim to be the sole party that could defend China from the machinations of foreign powers remained an enduring part of its foreign policy and domestic legitimacy. This precipitated an intervention in the Korean War in 1950 and a war with India in 1962. Concerns about territorial integrity and sovereignty at times even outweighed ideological alignment. In the 1960s, the PRC supported North Vietnam to counteract both U.S. and Soviet presence in Southeast Asia and used force to contest Soviet encroachments along the PRC’s disputed border.14 In 1974 and 1988, China fought Vietnam to seize land features in the contested Paracels and Spratlys, and to secure a stronger position in the South China Sea.15

A second major component of the CCP’s legitimacy was its economic program of collectivization and central planning. But after the humanitarian disasters and internal turmoil resulting from the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the CCP in the late 1970s began to downplay communism and Maoism. Under the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping and his allies, the CCP emphasized economic growth as the source of the party’s legitimacy and initiated radical economic, but not political, liberalization. But this economic opening, though conceived as a source of legitimacy, also threatened the regime’s support by introducing socioeconomic inequality, changing values, and corruption.16 The 1989 Tian’anmen prodemocracy protests and the demise of the socialist bloc in the early 1990s compounded the problem.

Against this backdrop, the CCP launched a propaganda campaign to shore up the party’s legitimacy and discredit Western-style liberalization, reinforcing the memory of the “century of humiliation” (1839–1949) when foreign powers invaded China, imposed extraterritoriality in treaty ports, restricted indigenous economic regulation, and extracted war indemnities.17 The years of backwardness and suffering at the hands of foreign powers engendered a persistent Chinese yearning for the country’s restoration as a strong, prosperous, and respected power.18 At the same time, new parochial interests and actors emerged outside the traditional Chinese foreign policy establishment during the reform era, forcing the CCP to cope with competition among bureaucrats, business elites, and local governments alongside an explosion in news outlets and internet users.19 Many of these new actors constrain state action on foreign policy issues, including those on territorial integrity and sovereignty that resonate deeply with the Chinese nationalist sentiments.20

In this way, economic growth has reinforced the CCP’s original claims to its right to rule: the “protection” of Chinese territorial independence and sovereignty. The pursuit of marine resources in the three million square kilometers of “maritime national territory” that incorporates the Chinese exclusive economic zone and continental shelf is thus framed in both economic and sovereign terms.21 First, the marine resources in these areas contribute both to China’s domestic food needs and its export economy. China is by far the world’s largest producer of “captured” (nonfarmed) fish, comprising 15 percent of world total, and the largest exporter of captured product. Of the 3.1 million fishing vessels in Asia, China operates 864,000 of them.22 Second, China’s growing reliance on sea lines of communication for trade in energy and other goods has increased Beijing’s resolve to protect strategic waterways within and beyond China’s maritime boundary.23

The growing need to safeguard maritime territories and jurisdictional waters in China’s near seas has incentivized the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—which has, since the 1990s, focused on preparing for a Taiwan scenario—to share the burden of new missions with nonmilitary state actors. In its defense white paper from the year 2000, China for the first time described its frontier defense as a “joint military-civilian land and sea border management system, headed by the military and with a sharing of responsibilities between the military and the civilian authorities.”24 Since then, China has incrementally moved away from a relatively navy-centric approach toward a multiagent, division-of-labor method for safeguarding its maritime sovereignty and interests. Since 2005, China has preferred to employ the PLA Navy (PLAN) in background roles, relying instead on maritime law enforcement agencies and the maritime militia as its frontline responses to maritime disputes and contingencies.25

South China Sea Claims (Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) [Click to Expand]
Although the United States takes no position on the ownership of the contested maritime territories, PRC maritime sovereignty and jurisdiction claims challenge U.S. interests in the region in several ways. First, China seeks the right to regulate and restrict the activities of foreign military vessels and aircraft operating within its exclusive economic zone, which is at odds with norms on freedom of navigation and has been the central source of friction between U.S. and Chinese ships and aircraft in the South China Sea.26 Second, it attempts to erode U.S. alliance relationships, especially those with Japan and the Philippines, with whom China has unsettled maritime territorial and boundary disputes.27 Finally, the PRC continues to expand power projection and anti-access/area denial capabilities to cover a growing portion of the western Pacific.28

Soldiers attend a flag conferral ceremony 21 July 2013 during the official launch of Sansha City’s maritime militia. (Photo by Zhou Xiaogang, Xinhua News Agency)

While employing maritime law enforcement and fishing ships in lieu of naval assets may enable China to avoid crossing the threshold of military conflict outright when asserting its maritime claims, it can still complicate crisis management for both the United States and China in the event of a maritime incident. Past major crises between two countries in the contemporary era illustrate the potential dangers. One of the most serious incidents occurred in 1999 when the U.S. Air Force accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists. Despite a lack of evidence that the bombing was intentional, the incident triggered violent anti-American mass protests in China.29 The affair highlights the sensitivity of any incident, mistaken or otherwise, resulting in Chinese civilian casualties.

The Hainan Island incident in 2001, in which a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. reconnaissance plane during an attempted interception, highlights a different potential source of crisis escalation: distortion of information within the Chinese political system between local and central authorities. According to former senior U.S. civilian and military officials, the local naval aviation authorities in Hainan may have falsely reported to high-level Chinese leadership that the U.S. plane intentionally crashed into the Chinese fighter (which was technically impossible).30 Crisis management in an incident involving Chinese fishing boats, whether or not registered as maritime militia, entails both types of danger.

China’s Maritime Militia and Fishing Fleets

The PRC defines its militia as “an armed mass organization composed of civilians retaining their regular jobs,” a component of China’s armed forces, and an “auxiliary and reserve force” of the PLA.31 Once conceived as a major component in the concept of “People’s War,” the militia in contemporary Chinese military planning is now tasked with assisting the PLA “by performing security and logistics functions in war.”32 The maritime militia, a separate organization from both the PLAN and China Coast Guard (CCG), consists of citizens working in the marine economy who receive training from the PLA and CCG to perform tasks including but not limited to border patrol, surveillance and reconnaissance, maritime transportation, search and rescue, and auxiliary tasks in support of naval operations in wartime (see figure 1).33

Figure 1. Growth of China’s Maritime Forces since 2000 (Figure from Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power, December 2020, by the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Marines, and the U.S. Navy) [Click to Expand]
The National Defense Mobilization Commission (NDMC) system, comprised of a national-level NDMC overseen jointly by the Chinese State Council and the PLA’s Central Military Commission and local NDMCs at provincial, municipal, and county levels with a similar dual civilian-military command structure at each level, has traditionally been tasked to manage administration and mobilization of the militia. Following the PLA’s 2016 reorganization, a National Defense Mobilization Department (NDMD) has been established under the Central Military Commission to oversee the provincial-level military districts and take charge of the PLA’s territorial administrative responsibilities including mobilization work. The head of the NDMD is appointed as the secretary general of the national NDMC, in which China’s premier and defense minister serve as the director and deputy director, respectively.34 In addition to the NDMC line, the State Commission of Border and Coastal Defense system—also subject to a dual civilian-military leadership—has its own command structures running from the national to local levels, and it shares responsibility for militia administration, mobilization, and border defense. There is a significant crossover between the lines of authority.35

The militia has played a major role in asserting Chinese maritime claims in the South China Sea. This includes high-profile coercive incidents such as the 2009 harassment of USNS Impeccable, the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff, and the 2014 HD-981 clash.36 Xi’s 2013 trip to Hainan—the island province with administrative authority over the South China Sea that has organized local fishing fleets into active maritime militia units—unleashed a nationwide push (see figure 2) to build the militia into a genuine third arm of China’s “PLA-law enforcement-militia joint defense” maritime sovereignty defense strategy.37 Since it is comprised of both civilians and soldiers, according to the Chinese rationale, the militia can be deployed to strengthen control of China’s “maritime territory” while avoiding the political and diplomatic ramifications that might otherwise be associated with military involvement.38

Read Part Two here.

Shuxian Luo is a PhD candidate in international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines China’s crisis behavior and decision-making processes, maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, and U.S. relations with Asia. She holds a BA in English from Peking University, an MA in China studies from SAIS, and an MA in political science from Columbia University.

Jonathan G. Panter is a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University. His research examines the origin of naval command-and-control practices. He previously served as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy, deploying twice in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. He holds a BA in government from Cornell University and an MPhil and MA in political science from Columbia University.

The authors thank Ian Sundstrom and Anand Jantzen for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

  1. Lyle J. Morris et al., Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone: Response Options for Coercive Aggression Below the Threshold of Major War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019), 7–12, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2942.html; Alessio Patalano, “When Strategy Is ‘Hybrid’ and Not ‘Grey’: Reviewing Chinese Military and Constabulary Coercion at Sea,” Pacific Review 31, no. 6 (2018): 811–39. Patalano argues that use of the term “gray-zone” operations to describe China’s activities is misleading because it suggests they are unlikely to escalate to war. He argues that these constabulary activities form part of a larger hybrid strategy that does, in fact, raise the risk of armed conflict. Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside, “Blurred Lines: Gray-Zone Conflict and Hybrid War—Two Failures of American Strategic Thinking,” Naval War College Review 73, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 13–48. Stoker and Whiteside provide a critical perspective on the term “gray zone” that argues it is poorly defined, distorts history, and raises the risk of conflict escalation.
  2. In 2020, the term “gray zone” appeared in nearly every issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings and in every issue of Military Review. See, for example, Charles M. Kelly, “Information on the Twenty-First Century Battlefield: Proposing the Army’s Seventh Warfighting Function,” Military Review 100, no. 1 (January-February 2020): 62–68.
  3. For a concise description of the maritime militia, see Conor M. Kennedy and Andrew S. Erickson, China Maritime Report No. 1: China’s Third Sea Force, The People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia: Tethered to the PLA (Newport, RI: U.S. Naval War College, China Maritime Studies Institute, 2017), accessed 16 November 2020, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-maritime-reports/1. For a visual recognition guide, see Office of Naval Intelligence, “China People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), Coast Guard, and Government Maritime Forces: 2019-2020 Recognition and Identification Guide,” October 2019, accessed 23 November 2020, https://www.oni.navy.mil/Portals/12/Intel%20agencies/China_Media/2020_China_Recce_Poster_UNCLAS.jpg.
  4. Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 8.
  5. Ibid., 7.
  6. On “Go,” see Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 2–3, 22–32; Keith Johnson, “What Kind of Game is China Playing,” Wall Street Journal (website), 11 June 2011, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304259304576374013537436924. On “hide and bide” and Sun Tzu’s counsel about winning without fighting, see articles in the September-October 2020 issue of Military Review.
  7. These two authors are not as opposed to one another on this point as a simplistic reading would suggest. Sun Tzu maintains that strategic defense can win wars. Carl von Clausewitz argues that a purely defensive war is impossible, but tactical defense has advantages over attack. But both agree on the source of defensive advantage: the waiting defender can strengthen their position, and the maneuvering attacker expends energy and resources.
  8. For an example of how this sort of theorizing can influence policy decisions at the highest levels, see Alan Rappeport, “A China Hawk Gains Prominence as Trump Confronts Xi on Trade,” New York Times (website), 3 November 2018, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/politics/trump-china-trade-xi-michael-pillsbury.html.
  9. Oriana Skylar Mastro, “The Stealth Superpower: How China Hid Its Global Ambitions,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 1 (January-February 2019): 31–39; Michael D. Swaine, “Creating an Unstable Asia: the U.S. Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2 March 2018, accessed 16 November 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/03/02/creating-unstable-asia-u.s.-free-and-open-indo-pacific-strategy-pub-75720. Mastro argues that China seeks to take the United States’ place as the regional political, economic, and military hegemon in East Asia and to challenge the United States internationally without replacing it as the “leader of a global order.” By contrast, Swaine questions the depiction of China as an “implacable adversary” that seeks to challenge the United States regionally and internationally and argues that treating China this way is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  10. Avery Goldstein, “China’s Grand Strategy under Xi Jinping,” International Security 45, no. 1 (Summer 2020): 164–201.
  11. Ibid., 172­–79.
  12. Michael D. Swaine, “China’s Assertive Behavior—Part One: On ’Core Interests,’” China Leadership Monitor, no. 34 (Winter 2011); Andrew Scobell et al., China’s Grand Strategy: Trends, Trajectories, and Long-Term Competition (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020), 11–14, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2798.html.
  13. John Garver, Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 25–26.
  14. Thomas J. Christensen, Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 184–88; M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 201–9.
  15. Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation, 267–99.
  16. Jinghan Zeng, The Chinese Communist Party’s Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 47; see also Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 624–46, 692–96.
  17. Jessica Chen Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9; for a deeper description of the “Century of Humiliation,” see Spence, The Search for Modern China, chaps. 7–11.
  18. Garver, Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China, 4–9, 16–18; Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2013).
  19. Linda Jakobson and Dean Knox, “New Foreign Policy Actors in China” (policy paper, Stockholm: SIPRI, 2010), 24–33, 43–46.
  20. Suisheng Zhao, “Nationalism’s Double Edge,” Wilson Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 76–82.
  21. M. Taylor Fravel and Alexander Liebman, “Beyond the Moat: The PLAN’s [People’s Liberation Army Navy] Evolving Interests and Potential Influence,” in The Chinese Navy: Expanding Capabilities, Evolving Roles, ed. Phillip C. Saunders et al. (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2011), 57–59; Daniel M. Hartnett and Frederic Vellucci, “Toward a Maritime Security Strategy: An Analysis of Chinese Views Since the Early 1990s,” in Saunders et al., The Chinese Navy: Expanding Capabilities, Evolving Roles, 98–99.
  22. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020: Sustainability in Action (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2020), 10–11, 41–42, https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9229en. In addition, as of the last available estimate in 2017, the western Pacific accounted for the second largest number of landings (catches), and the fastest annual growth of landings.
  23. Ian Storey, “China’s ‘Malacca Dilemma,’” China Brief 6, no. 8 (12 April 2006) accessed 16 November 2020, https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-malacca-dilemma/; David Lai and Roy Kamphausen, introduction to Assessing the People’s Liberation Army in the Hu Jintao Era, ed. Roy Kamphausen, David Lai, and Travis Tanner (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2014), 2–3; Li Nan, “The Evolution of China’s Naval Strategy and Capabilities: From ‘Near Coast’ and ‘Near Seas’ to ‘Far Seas,’” Asian Security 5, no. 2 (2009): 144–69.
  24. “China’s National Defense in 2000” (Beijing: Information Office of the State Council of PRC, October 2000), accessed 18 November 2020, http://www.china-un.ch/eng/bjzl/t176952.htm. This statement was corroborated by a report released in 2013 by the National Institute for Security Studies (NIDS) under Japan’s Defense Ministry, which noted the shift of maritime law enforcement responsibilities from the PLAN to maritime law enforcement agencies began in 2001.
  25. Alexander Chieh-cheng Huang, “The PLA and Near Seas Maritime Sovereignty Disputes,” in The People’s Liberation Army and Contingency Planning in China, ed. Andrew Scobell et al. (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2015), 291. China now commands the largest maritime law enforcement force in the world; for additional information, see Andrew S. Erickson, Joshua Hickey, and Henry Holst, “Surging Second Sea Force: China’s Maritime Law Enforcement Forces, Capabilities, and Future in the Gray Zone and Beyond,” U.S. Naval War College Review 72, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 1–25.
  26. Ronald O’Rourke, Maritime Territorial and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) Disputes Involving China: Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report R42784 (Washington, DC: CRS Report (R42784), 24 May 2018), 8–12.
  27. Andrew D. Taffer, “Threat and Opportunity: Chinese Wedging in the Senkaku/Diaoyu Dispute,” Asian Security (2019).
  28. Mastro, “The Stealth Superpower,” 36–37; for a more detailed assessment of China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, see Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, “Future Warfare in the West Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of Commons in East Asia,” International Security 41, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 7–48. Biddle and Oelrich argue that Chinese A2/AD capabilities are more constrained than prevailing analyses acknowledge because the technologies underpinning successful A2/AD face physical limits when applied at great distance and over noncomplex backgrounds such as the ocean; for an assessment of Chinese sea control capabilities, see Ryan D. Martinson, “Counter-Intervention in Chinese Naval Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2020).
  29. Kurt M. Campbell and Richard Weitz, “The Chinese Embassy Bombing: Evidence of Crisis Management?,” in Managing Sino-American Crises, ed. Michael D. Swaine, Zhang Tuosheng, and Danielle F. S. Cohen (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 327.
  30. Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 235; Dennis C. Blair and David B. Bonfili, “The April 2001 EP-3 Incident: The U.S. Point of View,” in Swaine, Zhang, and Cohen, Managing Sino-American Crises, 380–81.
  31. “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo minbing gongzuo tiaoli” [Decree of the PRC on militia work], Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China, December 1990, accessed 20 November 2020, http://www.mod.gov.cn/regulatory/2016-02/12/content_4618055.htm.
  32. Dennis J. Blasko, The Chinese Army Today: Tradition and Transformation for the 21st Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 29.
  33. Bernard Cole, The Great Wall at Sea: China’s Navy in the Twenty-First Century (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010), 79.
  34. Blasko, The Chinese Army Today, 40–41; Morgan Clemens and Michael We ber, “Rights Protection versus Warfighting: Organizing the Maritime Militia for Peace and War,” in China’s Maritime Gray Zone Operations, ed. Andrew S. Erickson and Ryan D. Martinson (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019), 199–200; “Jungai hou de guofang dongyuanbu” [The National Defense Mobilization Department after the PLA reorganization], China Daily (website), 25 November 2016, accessed 18 November 2020, https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/2016jungai/2016-11/25/content_27481907.htm.
  35. Andrew S. Erickson and Conor M. Kennedy, “China’s Maritime Militia” (Arlington, VA: CNA Corporation, 7 March 2016), 10, accessed 18 November 2020, https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/chinas-maritime-militia.pdf; Kennedy and Erickson, China Maritime Report No. 1, 7n2.
  36. U.S. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020: Annual Report to Congress (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 21 August 2020), 71, accessed 16 November 2020, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.
  37. “Hainansheng tanmen haishang minbinglian jianshe chengji tuchu” [Hainan Tanmen made outstanding accomplishment in maritime militia company construction], National Defense, no. 7 (2013).
  38. He Zhixiang, “Tan haishang minbing jianshe ‘si naru’” [On the four integrations in maritime militia construction], National Defense, no. 4 (2013): 36–37.

Featured Image: Chinese fishing boats (AFP file photo)