THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 158

ducting operations outside China's twelve-mile territorial limit in the South China Sea. The
Chinese ships blocked passage and pretended to ram the Impeccable , forcing the Impec-
cable to respond with fire hoses. These are not the actions of a great power, serene in its po-
sition of dominance and recognizing a brotherhood of the sea with other world navies, but
of a rising and still immature power, obsessed with the territorial humiliations it suffered in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
China is developing asymmetric and anti-access niche capabilities, designed to deny the
U.S. Navy easy entry to the East China Sea and other coastal waters. Analysts are divided
over the significance of this. Robert S. Ross of Boston College believes that “until China
develops situational awareness capability and can degrade U.S. counter-surveillance tech-
nologies, it possesses only a limited credible access-denial operations.” Andrew F. Kre-
pinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments believes that whatever
technical difficulties China may momentarily be encountering, it is on the way to “Finland-
izing” East Asia. 46 Thus, while it has modernized its destroyer fleet, and has plans for an
aircraft carrier or two, China is not buying naval platforms across the board. Rather, Ch-
ina has been building four new classes of nuclear- and conventional-powered attack and
ballistic missile submarines. According to Seth Cropsey, former deputy undersecretary of
the Navy, China could field a submarine force larger than the U.S. Navy's within the fore-
seeable future. The Chinese navy, he goes on, plans to use over-the-horizon radars, satel-
lites, seabed sonar networks, and cyberwarfare in the service of antiship ballistic missiles
with maneuverable reentry vehicles, which, along with its burgeoning submarine fleet, will
be part of its effort to rebuff U.S. naval access to large portions of the Western Pacific.
This is not to mention China's improving mine warfare capability, the aquisition of Russian
Su-27 and Su-30 fourth-generation jet fighters, and 1,500 Russian surface-to-air missiles
deployed along China's coast. Moreover, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems
underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile
range—all the while developing an offensive strategy designed to be capable of striking
that supreme icon of American wealth and power: the aircraft carrier. China will field a
fifth-generation fighter between 2018 and 2020, even as the United States slows or stops
production of the F-22. 47 The strategic geography of the Western Pacific is changing thanks
to Chinese arms purchases.
China likely has no intention of ever attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier. China is not re-
motely capable of directly challenging the U.S. militarily. The aim here is dissuasion: to
amass so much offensive and defensive capability along its seaboard that the U.S. Navy
will in the future think twice and three times about getting between the First Island Chain
and the Chinese coast. That, of course, is the essence of power: to affect your adversary's
behavior. Thus is Greater China realized in a maritime sense. The Chinese, by their naval,
air, and missile acquisitions, are evincing a clear territoriality. The U.S.-China relationship,