Panning for Gold: Assessing Chinese Maritime Strategy from Primary Sources

What are the drivers behind China’s vigorous pursuit of sea power? What are the interests Beijing seeks to advance by building a powerful blue- water navy and the world’s largest coast guard? What are the principles that guide its use of sea power in pursuit of its national interest? How are China’s state objectives, and approaches to pursuing them, evolving over time

China Maritime Report No. 24: Incubators of Sea Power: Vessel Training Centers and the Modernization of the PLAN Surface Fleet

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is building modern surface combatants faster than any other navy in the world. Before these new ships can be deployed, however, their crews must learn how to effectively operate them across the range of missions for which they were designed. In the PLAN, this “basic training” largely occurs at specialized organizations called Vessel Training Centers (VTCs). Since their creation in 1980, VTCs have played a key role in generating combat power for the fleet. But as China’s naval ambitions have grown, the VTCs have been forced to adapt. Since the early 2000s, and especially since 2012, they have faced tremendous pressure to keep pace with the rapid expansion and modernization of the PLAN surface fleet and its growing mission set, improve the standards and quality of vessel training, and uphold the integrity of training evaluations. This report argues that the PLAN’s VTCs have generally risen to the challenge, ensuring that new and recently-repaired ships can quickly reach operational units in a fairly high state of readiness.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-maritime-reports/1023/thumbnail.jp

Echelon Defense: The Role of Sea Power in Chinese Maritime Dispute Strategy

On April 10, 2012, two Chinese law-enforcement cutters on joint patrol in the South China Sea received orders to proceed immediately to Scarborough Shoal, a disputed cluster of rocks 140 nautical miles west of Subic Bay, the Philippines. Earlier that day, a Chinese fisherman aboard one of several boats moored in the lagoon had transmitted an alarming message to authorities in his home port in Hainan: “Philippine Navy ship number 15 heading this way.” Ship number 15 was BRP Gregorio del Pilar, an elderly former U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) cutter now serving as a frigate in the Philippine navy. Not long after the first message arrived in Hainan, sailors operating from the ship entered the lagoon and approached the Chinese boats. At this point, the fisherman sent a final message: “They’re boarding.”https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-red-books/1014/thumbnail.jp

China Maritime Report No. 2: The Arming of China’s Maritime Frontier

China’s expansion in maritime East Asia has relied heavily on non-naval elements of sea power, above all white-hulled constabulary forces. This reflects a strategic decision. Coast guard vessels operating on the basis of routine administration and backed up by a powerful military can achieve many of China’s objectives without risking an armed clash, sullying China’s reputation, or provoking military intervention from outside powers. Among China’s many maritime agencies, two organizations particularly fit this bill: China Marine Surveillance (CMS) and China Fisheries Law Enforcement (FLE). With fleets comprising unarmed or lightly armed cutters crewed by civilian administrators, CMS and FLE could vigorously pursue China’s maritime claims while largely avoiding the costs and dangers associated with classic “gunboat diplomacy.”https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-maritime-reports/1001/thumbnail.jp

Beyond the Wall: Chinese Far Seas Operation

This volume is the product of a groundbreaking dialogue on sea-lane security held between People\u27s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy and U.S. Navy scholars at the Naval War College in August 2013, with additional material from a related conference, China\u27s Far Seas Operations, hosted by the China Maritime Studies Institute in May 2012. At that time the political climate in China was uncertain, in the shadow of the Bo Xilai crisis and of the impending transition of power between the Hu and Xi regimes; accordingly the PLA Navy, though invited to participate in the Far Seas conference, ultimately declined to do so. This was not entirely surprising. Attempts by various agencies of the U.S. Navy up to that time to engage in discussions to advance maritime cooperation between China and the United States had been met with lukewarm responses at best. But at a maritime security dialogue in Dalian in September 2012 Senior Capt. Zhang Junshe of the PLA Navy Research Institute, a key contributor to this volume and to the success of the academic cooperation between our two institutes, approached Peter Dutton to tell him that everything had changed.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-red-books/1012/thumbnail.jp

China Maritime Report No. 3: China’s Distant-Ocean Survey Activities: Implications for U.S. National Security

Today, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is investing in marine scientific research on a massive scale. This investment supports an oceanographic research agenda that is increasingly global in scope. One key indicator of this trend is the expanding operations of China’s oceanographic research fleet. On any given day, 5-10 Chinese “scientific research vessels” (科学考查船) may be found operating beyond Chinese jurisdictional waters, in strategically-important areas of the Indo-Pacific. Overshadowed by the dramatic growth in China’s naval footprint, their presence largely goes unnoticed. Yet the activities of these ships and the scientists and engineers they embark have major implications for U.S. national security. This report explores some of these implications. It seeks to answer basic questions about the out-of-area—or “distant-ocean” (远洋)—operations of China’s oceanographic research fleet. Who is organizing and conducting these operations? Where are they taking place? What do they entail? What are the national drivers animating investment in these activities?https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-maritime-reports/1002/thumbnail.jp

China\u27s Evolving Surface Fleet

The missile fast-attack craft and amphibious fleets of the People\u27s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy (PLAN) have undergone significant modernization over the past fifteen years. The capabilities of both categories of vessels have improved even if their actual numbers have not increased dramatically. Examined from the perspective of PLA doctrine and training, the missions of these forces represent the PLAN\u27s past, present, and future.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-red-books/1013/thumbnail.jp

China Near Seas Combat Capabilities

The capstone U.S. Defense Department study on the future operational environment declares, China\u27s rise represents the most significant single event on the international horizon since the collapse of the Cold War. Understanding and assessing changes in China\u27s traditionally defensive naval strategy, doctrine, and force structure are of obvious importance to the U.S. Navy (USN) and other Pacific navies concerned with the possible security implications of that rise. This chapter examines the development of the Chinese navy\u27s Houbei (Type 022) fast-attack-craft force and its roles and missions in China\u27s near seas and discusses implications for the U.S. Navy and other navies in the region.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-red-books/1010/thumbnail.jp

Electronic and nuclear contributions to time-resolved optical and X-ray absorption spectra of hematite and insights into photoelectrochemical performance

Ultrafast time-resolved studies of photocatalytic thin films can provide a wealth of information crucial for understanding and thereby improving the performance of these materials by directly probing electronic structure, reaction intermediates, and charge carrier dynamics. The interpretation of transient spectra, however, can be complicated by thermally induced structural distortions, which appear within the first few picoseconds following excitation due to carrier–phonon scattering. Here we present a comparison of ex situ steady-state thermal difference spectra and transient absorption spectra spanning from NIR to hard X-ray energies of hematite thin films grown by atomic layer deposition. We find that beyond the first 100 picoseconds, the transient spectra measured for all excitation wavelengths and probe energies are almost entirely due to thermal effects as the lattice expands in response to the ultrafast temperature jump and then cools to room temperature on the microsecond timescale. At earlier times, a broad excited state absorption band that is assigned to free carriers appears at 675 nm, and the lifetime and shape of this feature also appear to be mostly independent of excitation wavelength. The combined spectroscopic data, which are modeled with density functional theory and full multiple scattering calculations, support an assignment of the optical absorption spectrum of hematite that involves two LMCT bands that nearly span the visible spectrum. Our results also suggest a framework for shifting the ligand-to-metal charge transfer absorption bands of ferric oxide films from the near-UV further into the visible part of the solar spectrum to improve solar conversion efficiency