Toshi Yoshihara, Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy, Georgetown University Press, 2023. 176 pages, $34.95.

By Brandon Tran

This review discusses the content and implications of Toshi Yoshihara’s book, Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy, starting with the author’s background and followed by chapter breakdowns. This review also evaluates the implications of Yoshihara’s research, considering how the historical circumstances behind the creation of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy (hereafter PLA Navy, or PLAN) informs its present-day actions vis-à-vis Taiwan.

As detailed by Yoshihara, the complexity and difficulty of conducting combined arm/joint multi-domain amphibious assaults dispels the idea of a set, determined timeline in the near future for when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) takes action against Taiwan. The failure of Communist forces to take Jinmen in the Chinese Civil War of 1949 and other outlying islands held by Nationalist forces also refutes the notion that a rapid Chinese seizure of Taiwan is a foregone conclusion. What these findings portend is that Taiwan, with its allies and partners, do have time to take action and overcome the pacing threat. Whether this window of opportunity is only a few years, or more than a decade is not certain, and so preparations must be executed in earnest.

Toshi Yoshihara was a Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College,* with a long history of studying seapower and naval strategy in the Indo-Pacific region. He is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Studies (CSBA). In Mao’s Army Goes to Sea:, Yoshihara expands on his previous research, exploring the decisions made by the PLA to establish a navy and conduct operations to drive out Nationalist forces towards the end of the Chinese Civil War. Utilizing Chinese language sources, Yoshihara illustrates how navy-building, sea combat, and contested amphibious assaults have had a lasting influence on the PLA Navy. This work situates China’s recent maritime developments in the proper historical context and provides insight into how the PLAN may operate in the future. 

 Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy is composed of nine chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. Yoshihara has included maps to illustrate the areas of contention and the progress of the campaigns. The author’s intended audience includes all who have a vested interest in defense studies, East Asian history, and Indo-Pacific affairs. His writing is clear and straightforward, free of the excessive technical details that would preclude those unfamiliar with naval warfare and China studies from grasping his key points.

The introduction takes the reader through a brief overview of the conditions that characterized the People’s Liberation Army as it drove the Nationalist forces from the Chinese mainland in campaigns from 1949-1950, along with the leaders that were instrumental in laying the foundations for the PLA Navy. The introduction also outlines Yoshihara’s salient points, that is, the events surrounding this time period inform the current state of the PLA and the PLA’s specific evolution is a direct result of the outcome of Mao’s littoral campaigns. Subsequent chapters recall the actions taken by the PLA to construct a navy practically from scratch, a chronological account of the littoral campaigns, and lessons learned in the aftermath of the campaigns. Yoshihara concludes with areas for future research and places where study of Chinese history intersects with current US assessments of the PLA.

In Chapter 2, Yoshihara describes the sources and methodology he used for this historical study. Drawing upon open-source Chinese language sources from the PLA, he presents a new perspective on Chinese military affairs. Chapter 2 also includes a literature review, where Yoshihara contends that Western scholarship on the PLA Navy is incomplete, outdated, and consisting of erroneous assumptions. He notes that previous scholarship neglects the 1949-1950 offshore islands campaigns that he covers, and that the literature draws excessively from a few English language sources. What hindered scholarship on the PLA Navy is the assumption that the PLA only began considering naval problems in the 1980s, and unquestioningly took on Soviet naval doctrine. By his study of the offshore islands campaigns, Yoshihara refutes this notion, and instead illuminates the fact that the PLA is self-aware and consistently reviewing its performance. His work then serves to illustrate how the PLA sees itself and explains what actions it has taken in response to its own perceptions.

Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 detail the institutional formation of the PLA Navy and its earliest battles. After ousting the Nationalists from mainland China, Mao’s officers now had the task of creating a completely new armed service. These officers had to undertake a paradigm shift, as the PLA up to this point has been a ground-focused fighting force, with many of its personnel having never even seen the ocean. In constructing the PLA Navy, the communist party officials found that the skills, attitudes, and expertise that had served them well on land, must be reevaluated for nautical operations. PLA Navy planners found themselves having to rely on Nationalist defectors for expertise, needing to compromise the ideological purity of the revolution in order to achieve practical results on the battlefield. The PLAN’s formation is a story of pragmatism and compromise, and as time passed, the navy bears the marks of its hybrid influences. 

Chapters 5 and 6 detailed the progression and outcomes of the major littoral campaigns. Emboldened by their riverine victories, the PLA Ground Force and PLA Navy embarked on operations to take offshore islands from the Nationalists. Starting with Xiamen, the Communist forces swiftly took the island garrison, and made preparations to besiege Jinmen. The Xiamen campaign revealed underlying issues that the PLA had still not reconciled when planning for amphibious assaults, but the speedy nature of the battle prevented any reflection. As a result, the PLA was dealt a significant and conclusive defeat at Jinmen and suffered heavy casualties in the subsequent campaign to take Zhoushan. In the aftermath of these setbacks, Mao exercised increased control over the PLA and ardently advised his commanders to recall the oversights that surrounded Jinmen and Zhoushan. With these lessons in mind, the PLA embarked on its first large-scale amphibious operation and its first joint army-navy operation, capturing Hainan and Wanshan respectively, and dealing heavy blows to the Nationalists.

Chapter 7 synthesizes the major themes that were found in the preceding chapters with an institutional assessment of the PLA Navy and Chapter 8 considers how lessons from the past manifest themselves in the PLAN’s present behavior. Yoshihara asserts that the PLAN was not an afterthought, but rather carefully organized with compromises and support from many sources in order to confront the very particular set of challenges that faced the PLA with regards to decisively defeating the Nationalists. With such a nuanced origin, Yoshihara notes that much can be gleaned about the PLA just based on how they tell the story of the PLA Navy and Chinese seapower. The tactics, strategies, and doctrine employed by the PLA at the time inform present-day PLAN’s operations, such as the application of People’s War in naval operations resulting in a consistent emphasis on winning the psychological fight. Also, the PLA’s requisition of civilian maritime vessels has morphed into the employment of the Maritime Militia and the concept of Military-Civil Fusion. Balancing the need for competence with party loyalty has remained a consistent struggle for PRC leaders.

Yoshihara leaves us with avenues for future research and concluding thoughts on assessments of the PLA. He encourages the study of PLA offshore campaigns that take place during the Taiwan Strait Crises, Taiwan’s reporting of the 1949-1950 campaigns, and how the PLA assesses amphibious assaults by other militaries. Yoshihara makes it clear that when talking about China’s maritime goals, the point of emphasis should not be on strictly naval operations and assets, but rather a broad look at how China projects its seapower through both conventional and irregular means. His goal with this book and the accompanying study is to dispel disparaging misconceptions surrounding PLA history and capabilities, and in doing so, promotes further research and discourse on the topic to enable proper appraisals of PLA seapower. Failure to understand this crucial part of the PLA’s identity will consistently lead to distorted assumptions and underestimations of the PLA, all to detrimental effect.

Implications

Toshi Yoshihara’s book illustrated historical key weaknesses that the PLA is keenly aware of, and this self-awareness informs their present-day actions. To address shortcomings, Xi Jinping seeks to promote commanders with operational experience and draws from other branches of the PLA in order to bring China’s military towards its concept of Intelligentized Warfare. Under this ideal, the PLA will be able to seamlessly execute multi-domain operations with varying intensity in war and peace. The PLA still struggles to integrate its branches into a coordinated fighting machine, given decades of an entrenched “Big Army” mindset where Army officials dominated top command posts. Indeed, while the reorganization of the PLA into brigade formations and theater commands have enabled smoother function, an overwhelming number of theater commanders and political commissars hail from the PLA Ground Force, much like the composition of the Central Military Commission. In fact, there is currently only one Air Force and one Navy officer serving as a theater commander and commissar respectively. The appointment of Dong Jun then, should come as no surprise given this information.

Of the six members of the 2022 CMC, four of these officials are PLA Ground Force officers, one is a Navy officer who was originally a Ground Force officer, and one is a Rocket Force officer, with no Air Force representation in the CMC. While not yet a part of the CMC, the appointment of the PLAN commander Dong Jun as Minister of Defense replaces a staff Ground Force officer on the CMC with a Navy officer possessing operational command experience. Dong Jun’s successor as commander of the PLAN, Hu Zhongming, has decades of experience on submarines, a strategically important component of China’s maritime strategy. Taken together, the leadership transitions at the highest echelons of the PLA illustrate the strategic posture that Xi Jinping wants his military to have: aggressive commanders that can make Xi’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific come to fruition.

What has prevented the PLA from effectively enacting the already tedious military reform is the nature of the PRC’s government. Xi Jinping has had to balance prioritizing loyalty of his officers with expertise in his bids to expand his power against other Chinese Communist Party members, and so competent officials may be passed up in favor of those that Xi does not consider a threat to himself. Indeed, even if Xi was not in power, PLA reforms would still consistently consider both political and military factors. As the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party, the PLA cannot be separated from it, and party loyalty will always feature prominently, sometimes even to the detriment of readiness. As Yoshihara has described, the PRC has had a land-based focus since its inception, and so a significant number of Xi’s close allies hail from the PLA Ground Force. In some cases, these officers have ties to his family and hometown since the early days of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Given these circumstances, PLA and CCP officials do not believe that the PRC is currently able to effectively contend with the United States, even admitting as such. Acknowledging historical experience, Chinese military planners recognize that the objective of taking Taiwan is quite challenging and requires a level of readiness and proficiency that the PLA current doesn’t have. Having failed to capture Jinmen at the close of the Chinese Civil War, the PRC unsuccessfully attempted to seize the island by force during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. The close proximity to the PRC and the small size of the island suggests that it would be considerably easier to capture Jinmen than Taiwan, and the PLA still proved incapable. With warfare becoming more complex and more states becoming involved in the Taiwan Strait dispute, the matter of organizing and executing a successful invasion has become more difficult than before. As well, the recent corruption purges of the technical services of the PLA make it hard for the PRC to diversify away from the Ground Force and become proficient in joint operations. Taking all of this into consideration, the U.S. and its partners must take advantage of this window of opportunity to reestablish their military capabilities in order to overcome the pacing threat. 

Conclusion

Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy provides a nuanced retelling of the history of the PLA Navy’s earliest days and the lessons derived from its engagements with the Nationalist army. This book will greatly benefit readers who seek to understand the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the military considerations and circumstances surrounding any potential conflict with Taiwan. For those interested in China studies or security studies, Yoshihara’s book provides a comprehensive review of PLA operations, utilizing Chinese documents that reported on the events he detailed.

A recurring theme in the book is that in the PLA’s operations, being able to field a joint, multi-domain force that is able to synergize effectively is of paramount importance in any undertaking. During the Cold War, the great powers raced to achieve nuclear supremacy. Today, the great powers are engaged in a race to achieve a truly joint force, with seamless interoperability as its defining characteristic. With this in mind and given the current geopolitical climate, this book is a critical read for those with a military background regardless of the service, be it Navy, Army, Air Force, or Space Force. There are no foregone conclusions when it comes to China, and the armed services must learn from history and each other to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead. 

CDT Brandon Tran is an international affairs and Chinese double major at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has interned with the Center for Naval Analyses, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Army War College. At all of these places, he worked on China and Asia-Pacific defense issues and has written extensively on warfighting and Indo-Pacific security. He has been published in The Diplomat, Air University’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, the Modern War Institute, and more. Brandon hopes to commission as a military intelligence officer.

The views expressed are solely personal and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of West Point, the US Army, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.

*This article originally described Yoshihara as a current professor at the Naval War College, but was corrected to include his current position at CSBA.

Featured Image: Type 903A  supply ship Kekexilihu (Hull 903) attached to a combat support ship flotilla under the Chinese PLA Navy provides liquid supply to Type 055 Destroyer Lhasa (Hull 102) via replenishment-at-sea during a multi-subject maritime training exercise. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Xu Taotao)