Ch. 7: Crouching Tiger Serialization

The Ghost of Admiral Liu Huaqing Haunting Asia

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Question: China seeks to drive US military forces out of Asia.

1.     False

2.     True

In many ways, this question brings us back to our discussion in the beginning of this book with Professor John Mearsheimer.  Recall that he insists that over time that because of the dynamics of Great Power Politics, China must inevitably seek to be the regional hegemon in Asia as a matter of both self-defense and survival. 

If Mearsheimer is right, the answer to the above question must inevitably be #2.  That is, China can never be the hegemon of Asia as long as the United States remains the dominant power in the region. 

The question, of course, about this particular question is whether there is any real evidence beyond the speculation of a mere political scientist to support the provocative assertion that China seeks to drive the US military out of Asia.  Perhaps the best place to start looking for such evidence is in the actions, thoughts, and writings of one of the great military folk heroes of China – Admiral Liu Huaqing. 

Vietnam best knows Admiral Liu as the commander who ordered the slaughter of Vietnamese sailors and soldiers during China’s taking of the Paracel Islands in 1974.   In a similarly dark vein, Chinese dissidents first think of Admiral Liu as the commander of the troops responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.   These dark prince clouds on his record notwithstanding, Admiral Liu will likely be best remembered as the father of the modern Chinese navy who once famously quipped that he would “die with his eyes wide open” if China did not have its own aircraft carrier before he passed away.^[i]

For a figure as important as Liu, he is surprisingly obscure outside of China.  However, during the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping was famously converting China into a mercantilist global trader, it was Liu, as Deng’s right hand man, commanding China’s navy. 

At this propitious time of Deng’s economic revolution, China was still primarily a continental power with little perceived need for the global projection of naval power.  However, even as Deng was busily opening China to global trade, Admiral Liu was having a “parallel vision.”^[ii]  In this vision, Liu could see very clearly that it would eventually fall upon his own navy to protect the global trading routes Deng was busily building; and Liu began working in earnest to forge a navy to rise to that globalized China occasion.

In this sense, Liu was very much what Professors James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara of the US Naval War College have called a “Mahanian” figure.  In the 19th century, it was Alfred Thayer Mahan – second president of the college and himself the forefather of the modern American Navy – who pioneered the concept of global naval force projection as being critical to the economic prosperity of a nation.

In Mahan’s world, it was only through the command of the seas that such prosperity could be assured.  Such command, in turn, depended on two key parameters: (1) the industrial capacity of a nation to produce sufficient merchant ships and naval fleets to access vital trading routes, and (2) a system of forward bases that could service both merchant and military vessels.