China's Naval Modernization and Its Impact on the South China Seas

The story of China’s rapid economic growth and development is one of the most documented subjects in the last twenty years. This rapid transformation has piqued the interest of economist and political scientist wanting to understand how the models used to explain the rapid rise of countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and other emerging economies fit into the transformation of China. Yet, because of the sheer size of China’s economy, the impact of its rapid growth has been felt not only regionally but also globally. Indeed, without China’s continued economic growth during and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis arguably regional economies would be much worse off as China was able to provide some shelter from the drop in demand in Europe and the United States. In many ways, the coincidence of events made the year 2008 the ‘coming out’ party for China as it steps into a more prominent role in global economic affairs.As China’s economic role increases its own confidence in engaging in global affairs also rises. Like most, if not all, major powers in the past, China’s attention has slowly but surely turned to its national security and in particular in its military. In the past two decades alone, China’s military has experienced continued increases in its budget. With more readily available funds, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has embarked on massive upgrade and modernization of its forces and equipment. Today, it is the second top defense spender next to the United States. Naturally, this phenomenon has not been lost on security and defense observers. So much has been written about the PLA’s modernization and in particular PLA Navy’s (PLAN) desire to be a blue-water navy that the United States is rebalancing its forces to Asia. Indeed a virtual cottage industry has spawned as officials, scholars, and other experts scramble to understand what the implications of the PLA Navy’s modernization to the global and regional security environment. In this paper, I will examine and discuss what are some of the implications of PLAN’s modernization to the security environment in the South China Seas. To do so, in the next section I briefly survey the rationale for China’s naval modernization. Following that brief survey I will highlight some of the modernization efforts of the PLA Navy and in particular provide statistics of the past, current, and projected force structure. I will then examine some of the implications to the Southeast Asian region and the South China Seas