Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

by Humphrey Hawksley

“China has only two purposes in the Indian Ocean,” explained Zhou Bo of the Academy of Military Science of the People’s Liberation Army. “Economic gains and the security of sea lines of communication. The first objective is achieved through commercial interactions with littoral states. For the second purpose, the Chinese Navy has, since the end of 2008, joined international military efforts in combating piracy in the waters off the coast of Somalia. [China is] a country standing tall in the center of the world, strong yet benign, and friendly to all.”21 There is credibility to this argument. China has been working closely with the European Union, NATO, and the United States on antipiracy operations. It has twenty-five hundred troops in six African UN peacekeeping missions and, in recent years, the Chinese Air Force and Navy have been deployed to rescue civilians, from Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015. There are an estimated five million Chinese citizens living and working outside the country for some thirty thousand Chinese businesses, with more than a hundred million traveling abroad every year.