The United States Naval Institute’s (USNI) web page reports that China has for the first time appointed an admiral as its defense minister. Adm. Dong Jun, who previously served as commander and deputy commander of the PLA Navy (PLAN), replaces Gen. Li Shangfu, who has been missing since August and may have been arrested for “corruption.” The USNI report notes that it is likely that Dong will also sit on China’s Central Military Commission (CMC), which is chaired by President Xi Jinping. If personnel translates into policy, this move may be yet another sign and portent that China plans to take Taiwan by force if necessary.
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Dong’s resume is impressive. As Ying-Yu Lin, a research fellow at the Association of Strategic Foresight and adjunct professor at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, noted two years ago when Dong was named commander of the PLAN, Dong became a rear admiral in 2012, served as deputy commander and chief of staff of the East Sea Fleet, and later served as deputy commander of the Southern Theater Command, where he cooperated with China’s new commander of the PLA air force. “Such a combination,” Ying-Yu Lin wrote, “should be helpful to the PLA’s efforts to develop joint operations between the air force and navy,” which may spell trouble for Taiwan. Dong, writes Ying-Yu, has been promoted, along with other members of what are known in China as the “Southeast Corps” and the “Taiwan Strait Gang.”
Dong’s appointment should be seen in the context of China’s increasing assertiveness in military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, China’s anti-access/area denial capabilities, and Xi’s recent statements that China will reunify Taiwan peaceably or by force. Presumably, as defense minister, Dong will prioritize improving China’s naval power, especially in the waters of the western Pacific. Presumably, Xi selected Dong because China’s naval power will play the key role if a decision is made to forcibly seize Taiwan.
But Xi’s selection of Dong as defense minister has larger geopolitical implications. It may mean that what James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara warned about in 2008, and what Holmes reiterated only a few years ago, has come true: Chinese naval strategy has “turned” to Alfred Thayer Mahan. Holmes notes that in April 2021, he delivered a paper in Beijing on “sea-lane security” which brought forth from Chinese panelists “the most bellicose-sounding of Mahan’s precepts.” Holmes compares China’s attachment to Mahan to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s similar attachment to Mahan (he reportedly ordered all German warships to have on hand a copy of Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History) in the years leading up to World War I, which helped fuel the naval arms race that contributed to the outbreak of that disastrous war.
China’s turn to Mahan must also be seen in the context of its broader Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has both land power and sea power components across the vast Eurasian-African landmass, China’s growing strategic partnerships with Russia and Iran, the relative decline in numbers of U.S. warships vis-a-vis China, and America’s dysfunctional foreign policy under the Biden administration — a foreign policy that has produced disaster in Afghanistan, uncertainty in Eastern Europe among the carnage of the Ukraine war, dissembling in the Middle East where it “supports” yet attempts to restrain our longtime ally Israel in its war in Gaza, indifference to a dying Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere, and a crisis on the U.S. southern border.
We may be approaching an international situation reminiscent of what Winston Churchill called the “gathering storm” in the first volume of his history of World War II. But perhaps the more accurate analogy is the international situation leading up to World War I, which Churchill also wrote about in the first volume of The World Crisis. Churchill, who served as First Lord of the Admiralty at the outset of that war, recounted how “German ambitions grew with German prosperity,” and how “[n]ot content with the hegemony of Europe … she began increasingly to turn her thoughts to the sea.” “The determination of the greatest military Power on the Continent,” Churchill explained, “to become at the same time at least the second naval Power was an event of first magnitude in world affairs.” Despite the fact that Germany and Britain were commercial partners (like China and the U.S. are today), German naval ambitions combined with conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East led to what Churchill characterized as “a world of monstrous shadows moving in convulsive combinations through vistas of fathomless catastrophe.”
China’s turn to the sea, which is evident by Dong’s appointment as minister of defense, should remind U.S. policymakers that what Churchill said about British naval supremacy in 1914 applies equally to the United States today: “[T]he whole fortunes of our race and Empire, the whole treasure accumulated during so many centuries of sacrifice and achievement, would perish and be swept utterly away if our naval supremacy were to be impaired.”
