ABSTRACT
In China today, there has been a resurgence of interest in maritime history. Naval strategists are looking to their own maritime history—and especially to the 16th–20th-century examples—in an attempt to find appropriate indigenous precedents for reform on which to base their actions. Arguably the PLAN’s greatest limitation is its inability to break with the past. A comparison between China’s 19th-century Imperial Navy and today’s PLAN suggests that the 21st-century Chinese navy faces a potentially crippling capabilities mismatch between its Chinese-built ships outfitted with foreign-made electronics, a limited supply of crucial armaments, and the inability to maintain or adequately repair its hi-tech warships and submarines purchased, and then often reverse-engineered, from abroad. When these factors are added to what appears to be the PLAN’s main responsibility for guarding against internal mutiny within its regional naval forces even while promoting coastal defense against its immediate neighbors—policies that have historically gone hand in hand with highly centralized and relatively ineffective regional fleets—then the ultimate success of a PRC plan to reclaim Asian hegemony is called into doubt. Furthermore, if not planned and orchestrated carefully, the outcome of any future Chinese naval conflict with another great power could be as equally disastrous as any of China’s worst 19th- or 20th-century failures.
