ISBN: 9781003497875, Routledge, 2024, 216 pages, $170.00
Reviewed by: Chase L. Plante, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
Maritime Power and China’s Grand Strategy traces the historical development of Chinese grand strategy and discusses its various present-day aspects, especially pertaining to maritime power. Its author, Vice Admiral Anil Kumar Chawla, is a retired officer of the Indian Navy, which shapes the form and direction of the book; its prose is straightforward, direct, and concise, and it assumes that China’s grand strategy is to become the world hegemon, presenting a strategic threat. The book’s central thesis is that maritime power plays into this grand strategy. The utility of the book is less its core thesis and more its analysis of how and why China is using maritime power in its grand strategy.
Chawla begins the book with an overview of Chinese maritime history. He describes how historically China has largely been a continental land empire. However, conquerors of China (including Chinese ones) often developed navies to assist with their conquest and then ended the navies after their accession. Otherwise, China has historically largely avoided direct naval and maritime engagement, a tendency Chawla attributes to Confucian philosophy, which encouraged leaders to focus inward. Effectively, the modern Chinese naval tradition is quite young. The historical Chinese focus on land over sea ultimately proved to be an Achilles’ heel for China from the Opium War onwards. Perhaps unwittingly following in the footsteps of prior Chinese conquerors, Western powers and Japan were able to consistently exploit China’s lack of naval power, contributing to what became known as the “Century of Humiliation.”
The book describes how the trauma of China’s Century of Humiliation has deeply affected Chinese leaders, who have realized China’s maritime vulnerability while also witnessing the naval hegemonies of Britain and the United States. China has thus learned that it needs maritime power to both ensure its national security and to realize its goal of global hegemony. In the wake of this understanding, China has embarked on a quest to build a powerful, globally competitive navy, which plays a key role in its grand strategy.
Indeed, Chawla notes that China’s use of maritime power in its grand strategy bears striking similarities to that of the British Empire, likely learned from historical reflection although adapted to modern contexts. For example, like the British Empire of yore, China has used its influence (notably via the Belt and Road Initiative and debt financing) to acquire considerable power over ports “located in strategic proximity to vital sea lanes and maritime chokepoints in the Indo-Pacific [that] do not appear to be driven by commercial logic” (195).
This is a remarkable observation that opens an important avenue for future research on Chinese strategy. By examining the British Empire’s maritime strategy, such as how it strategically acquired port control, scholars may gain insight into China’s current behavior and anticipate its future actions. Historical parallels can help identify patterns in China’s approach to grand strategy.
The book goes on to describe the evolution of Chinese maritime and grand strategy generally from a variety of angles, such as “Defence White Papers,” “informationised warfare,” and the famed Belt and Road Initiative. It discusses how maritime power integrates with China’s grand strategy, such as in the maintenance of overseas military bases, which China has been recently developing as it seeks to take a more central role in world politics. While the book formally focuses on Chinese maritime power, even in chapters ostensibly about maritime elements, it generally serves as a strong overview of Chinese grand strategy.
The book’s methodology utilizes general historical research to trace the Chinese narrative. Its construction of Chinese grand strategy derives from various political and military documents from the Chinese government, including Defence White Papers, Party Congress Reports, and proclamations about the Chinese Dream. Chawla uses specific case studies, including China’s recent rise in the South China Sea and the Belt and Road Initiative, to explore how maritime power has integrated with Chinese grand strategy as well as Chinese governmental investment in its maritime sector, such as rising naval shipbuilding.
While Chawla’s monograph is overall a solid description of how maritime power integrates with Chinese grand strategy, the book does have several weaknesses, some of which seem to reflect his orientation as an Indian military officer. To begin, Chawla summarizes Chinese grand strategy, but he does not critically appraise it. Its strengths and weaknesses remain mysterious to an uninformed reader. There is, perhaps, the implication that because Chinese grand strategy has been effective thus far in achieving China’s rise, it will continue to be. This is uncertain, however, and Chawla does not discuss this. Although Chawla, as a member of the Indian military, appears opposed to China’s rise, he nonetheless assumes that China is capable of achieving its strategic goals.
The book also suffers from numerous presumptions. To begin, Chawla writes in the preface that “China has a master plan to dominate the world” (vi), which he associates with the idea of the “Chinese Dream.” While he describes this dream as global hegemony by 2049, scholars dispute its exact concepts beyond it being a national “rejuvenation.” While scholars have debated China’s global ambitions, Chawla expresses a very singular understanding, and his book does not offer discussion of ambiguity.
Similarly, Chawla seems to take the United States’ decline and departure from global leadership as a foregone conclusion. For example, he cites the policies of American President Donald Trump as evidence of the United States lacking “the political will to retain global leadership” (175). However, Trump is an extremely controversial figure within domestic American politics and thus can hardly be stated to be representative of American political will generally.
Additionally, Chawla generally treats states as unitary actors. China appears in the book as scarily coordinated: it simply creates grand plans and then realizes them over decades with total efficiency. This deserves scrutiny, as it ignores internal divisions within China and Chinese leadership, as well as the flaws and weaknesses in the processes of these plans. While the book’s scope must be manageable, a counter–grand strategy would surely wish to know these divisions and flaws.
This sort of simplistic approach also pervades Chawla’s discussion of the peculiarities of Chinese approaches to international politics. Chawla describes the core of the Chinese style of international relations as deriving from Confucianism. He repeatedly references it as a major explanatory variable. For example, he describes imperial China’s continual relinquishment of its navy after a new conquering accession as resulting from the “inward” focus of Confucian philosophy. While this is culturally simplistic and questionable, it is also curious. The first Chinese imperial dynasty, the Qin, was far more influenced by Chinese Legalism than Confucianism, and Legalism remained an influential political philosophy throughout imperial Chinese history—something he acknowledges but does not fully incorporate. Chawla, in fact, ascribes far more influence to Confucianism than Legalism. Additionally, a traditional structural realist approach can easily provide an explanation for the example of relinquishing the navy: if there are no maritime threats, then it is a waste of resources to maintain a navy. Those resources could be better allocated elsewhere to ensure military success and state survival. China’s alleged historical “inward-looking” attitude could also be explained by factors like geography, rather than the influence of a particular philosophy. Using such an incomplete cultural argument here seems strange.
While I present numerous critiques of Chawla’s work, his book does well what it primarily sets out to do. It successfully describes Chinese grand strategy and maritime strategy, and it successfully describes how they integrate. While it does not provide revolutionary insights, it is a very useful and practical guide for students of China and international relations.grand strategy and maritime strategy, and it successfully describes how they integrate. While it does not provide revolutionary insights, it is a very useful and practical guide for students of China and international relations.
