Mao’s Army Goes to Sea; The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy. By Toshi Yoshihara. Georgetown University Press, Washington DC, 2022.
Reviewed by Tim Coyle PhD
In 1943, during the evacuation of Crete, Admiral Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet, famously remarked, ‘It takes three years to build a ship, 300 years to build a reputation – we’ll stay’. He was referring to the heavy loss of ships in standing by the beleagued British and Commonwealth troops in Crete. Six years later it took the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 18 months to create a navy, albeit ersatz and ramshackle, out of nothing and take it straight to war in the most difficult of military operations – amphibious assault.
Mao’s Army Goes to Sea is an examination of how the Chinese navy was formed, trained and sent to war in 1949 and 1950 against the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). The author, Toshi Yoshihara, is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment and teaches a graduate course on seapower in the Indo-Pacific in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown Unviersity. The book provides a detailed narrative of the early history of the Chinese navy (PLAN) and advances the ethos and traditions of these campaign experiencies into the present and future to assess the strengths and weaknesses of PLAN strategy, organisation and the human aspect of combat effectiveness. In this work, Yoshihara masterfully presents the PLAN’s historical record, from Chinese language academic sources, of the formation and early PLAN island campaigns, to which he adds an unbiased and perceptive analysis of the modern PLAN to a western readership.
Today’s PLAN, arguably approaching equality with the US Navy, has transfixed strategic thinkers and maritime planners for the last 20 years. However, few in the west, now so obsessed with Chinese sea power, have had scholarly access to early PLAN history to study and analyse the nascent Chinese maritime strategic thinking of 1949-50 and how it sits today in influencing its modern self. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea provides this background, allowing contemporary western scholars and decision-makers to more fully analyse the PLAN’s fundamental values.
The Chinese ‘People’s War at Sea’ began in 1949 through commandering civilian fishing boats and cargo carriers and organised into amphibious assault units against Chinese offshore islands held by the KMT. Having reached the Chinese coastal cities, after defeating the KMT on mainland China, the PLA faced the sea. Honed and skilled in land warfare, the previously unstoppable PLA halted at the coast. There was no maritime expertise in the vast PLA and Mao Zedong realised he had to raise a force to assault the near islands and Taiwan to gain complete Communist hegemony over the homeland.
Mao’s Army Goes to Sea begins with a discussion on An Overlooked History. Western writing on the early PLAN is minimal and few scholars, until Yoshihara, have bothered to study it. Yoshihara maintains this was a mistake because the PLAN’s early campaigns showed its determination to learn from its own errors and to study amphibious operations conducted by advanced western forces. Two navies existed in the early days: the East China Navy formed in April 1949, commanded by General Zhang Aiping, and the PLAN (the ‘People’s Navy’), under General Xiao Jinguang, formed in early 1950.
Both Zhang and Xiao were accomplished land commanders and baulked at the enormous challenge of forming and training a maritime amphibious force from scratch. However, steeped in the uncompromising purity of Marxism-Leninism under the brilliant and ruthless Mao Zedong, and seared by the arduous deprivations of the civil war, Zhang and Xiao turned to the task with singular driven determination.
The greatest impediment to forming a navy, however modest, was the lack of technical maritime expertise in ship handing, engineering and logistics. Both Zhang and Xiao realised this expertise resided in KMT Republic of China Navy (ROCN) personnel, trained, as most of them were, on US ships and systems. They targeted captured ROCN officers for incorporation into China’s navies. How this was done provides intriguing reading, with Zhang suppressing disdain for corrupt capitalists by easing ex-ROCN members into training billets. This caused no little resentment among the ideologically pure proletariat, however Zhang managed sensitivities to the extent that several former ROCN officers later achieved high PLAN ranks.
The book examines the Xiamen, Jinmen, Zhoushan, Hainan and Wanshan island campaigns. The narratives comprises intense detail of the fighting and manouver; lessons from the disastrous Jinmen were studied and rectified at Hainan – an early example of PLAN determination to learn from errors.
The book culminates in the final two chapters: An Assessment of the PLA’s Seaward Turn and Discerning Institutional Continuities. Here Yoshihara lays out his analysis of how PLAN self-criticism and introspective attention to detail in developing maritime power has been applied to contemporary thought in developing a ‘blue water’capability, incorporating organic air power at sea, and in preparing for the ulimate amphibious operation – sought since 1950 – the ‘liberation’ of Taiwan.
While Mao’s Army Goes to Sea is focussed on the ‘naval’ aspect of Chinese maritme capability, western observers should be well aware that the ‘People’s War at Sea’ emanated from conscripted militia forces, evidenced today by the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia and the China Coast Guard – the world’s biggest. Additionally, the Chinese merchant marine and industry are at the government’s disposal, not least of which are civilian vehicle ferries recently noted participating in amphibious exercises as supplementary military transports.
The island campaign narratives are supported by easy-to read maps; however, the lack of images does leave a presentational gap in the book.
Mao’s Army Goes to Sea is an important work. It stands with other studies by this, and other authors, in objectively assessing China’s formidable maritime capabilities in surface, subsurface and air (thanks to the PLAN’s formidable air arm – set up intially because they didn’t trust the air force!). The book’s value is explaining how the present Chinese maritime capability came to be. Underestimation of this capability through misplaced western concepts of superiority, based on wishful thinking or a perceived Chinese lack of operational experience, is a serious error.
We await the release of the Australian Government’s Strategic Review in March 2023 and would expect Australia’s strategic direction will be more focussed on the near region when formulating a whole-of government posture to meet China, rather than adhering to the words of the former Defence Minister that ‘…it was inconceivable Australia would not follow the US to send troops to support an American military intervention in Taiwan against China’.
Anyone even remotely concerned with Chinese sea power – whether in deployed Defence assets, in supporting industry or wider government instrumentalities should read and digest Mao’s Army Goes to Sea.
