China... from the Sea: The Importance of Chinese Naval History

摘要

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, China has become a source of increased focus for military strategists and policy-makers throughout the West and most especially in the United States. With the largest army in the world and obvious aspirations to, at the very least, regional power they mark one of the most significant potential threats to American military supremacy. Studies of China's martial past have been included in the professional reading of many officers in the United States Armed forces. However, there is still one common misperception with regard to China's military history. China, despite what many have written, has an important naval heritage. This heritage may not have been central to the study of Chinese history in the past; however it is important for study in the future. The Chinese government itself has included examples from this history as inspiration for their modern policy and strategy. With this fact in mind it is of vital importance that historians and strategists understand China's naval past. China has long been regarded as a country of little naval history. The highly regarded Sinologist John King Fairbank commented that naval matters were 'foreign to Chinese ways.' For the past century most military historians have reasoned that since China's primary threats came from the nomadic steppe peoples of Central Asia, there was no reason to develop sea power. In 1948 the historian F.B. Elridge wrote that 'essentially a land people, the Chinese cannot be considered as having possessed sea-power.' Such statements turn out to be simply false, once the history of China is studied in search of examples of naval and maritime history. According to Peter Lorge, in his article 'Water Forces and Naval Operations' from the book A Military History of China, 'Naval warfare and operations were crucial to the creation and unification of the Chinese Empire for over two thousand years.'.