Main Findings
- Xi Jinping has played a direct and active role in China’s naval buildup. He is China’s first great navalist statesman, the world’s greatest navalist leader today, and among the world’s greatest navalist statesmen in modern history.
- Notwithstanding major advances in ships, submarines, aircraft, and other hardware, Chinese military leaders believe that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) continues to lag behind in human factors.
- Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the PLAN has dismissed (or is rumored to have dismissed) eleven flag officers. Beyond combating outright dysfunction, these removals are intended to prevent potential disloyalty and factionalism, centralize power, and further modernization and warfighting goals.
- These high-profile dismissals have had no apparent impact on PLAN operational capabilities, which continue to improve at a remarkable rate. From the Taiwan Strait to the “distant oceans” (远洋), the service is present daily and visible internationally, particularly its surface fleet, indicating reliability, trust, and growing responsibilities and capabilities.
- Since 2008, the PLAN’s surface fleet has almost doubled. Despite being projected to exceed 400 ships by the end of 2025, China’s Navy continues to successfully crew, operate, and train with them.
- China’s Navy draws on a massive, sufficiently-capable talent pool and education system. Provincial-level compulsory conscription quotas avoid individual compellence thanks to high levels of volunteerism.
- Given the demands of increasingly frequent and intense training and missions—often with the austere privations of submarines or remote installations—mental health support is increasingly prioritized. Nevertheless, it remains a weakness for China’s Navy, which views U.S. care as the gold standard yet has treated counseling as a “political” issue.
- China’s Naval Command College in Nanjing—the Naval War College’s closest equivalent—educates its students differently from its counterpart in Newport by focusing on naval operations and warfighting for top-priority scenarios.
- The PLAN enjoys unique human capital advantages: educational partnerships as early as elementary school; personal data compiled centrally, available and utilizable without privacy restriction; eldercare benefits; and warfighting-focused naval education.
- PLAN sources perceive weaknesses in lack of talent for new-domain operations and advanced S&T given rising demand in these burgeoning areas; recruitment and training pipeline supply-demand imbalance and talent-skills mismatches; officers’ overly narrow early-career experience and subsequent aging out of cutting-edge relevance; and youths’ declining commitment to the Communist system.
- Despite being an improvement on its Soviet progenitor, China’s Political Commissar system could represent a critical weakness, causing real-time decision-making bottlenecks or distraction, particularly in crisis or conflict.
CMSI China Maritime Reports
