Chinese maritime concepts

Abstract

The ancient Chinese always had a complex psychic relation to the vast ocean: longing, but disdaining. On the one hand, they thought there were elfish hills, immortals, and fairy trees abroad; on the other hand, they viewed overseas residents as strange. Before the fifteenth century, the Chinese people were capable of conducting maritime operations positively and entering into contacting peaceful and friendly contacts with foreign countries, the establishment of Ming Dynasty suppression of the coastal areas and the closed-door policy became its basic national policy. After the failure of the first Opium War, some coastal military officials and intellectual elites took the lead in “seeing the world”; they were cognizant of the superior might of western firepower and claimed that the Chinese should “learn from the ‘barbarians’ advanced skills to resist their aggression”. However, even those provincial magnates who actively advocated coastal defense such as Li Hongzhang and Shen Baozhen also failed to really comprehend the oceans' great economic and military value and separated themselves from the set pattern of the old land-based coastal defense. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century, with the introduction of A. T. Mahan's Sea Power Theory, that the Chinese people gained a comparatively profound cognition of the importance of protecting national maritime interests. The democratic revolutionist Sun Yat-sen insisted that man should strive for survival and development by means of the oceans. However, at the beginning of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, faced with the economic blockade and political pressure by western powers, the Chinese government still took land development and “coastal security” as the center and neglected the effective management of the maritime territory. Since “reform and opening-up”, the second generation of central collective leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) with Deng Xiaoping at its core, proposed the coastal strategic concept of “offshore defense” and the principle of “laying sovereignty and jointly exploring” for handling maritime disputes, and the third generation of central collective leaders of CPC with Jiang Zemin, at its core, emphasized a better understanding of the oceans from the height of strategy. Nowadays, under the influence of the increasing emphasis on the oceans all over the world, the voice of the Chinese government and Chinese people to establish a strong naval power has become increasingly stronger, but its action is still impeded by many aspects.