Prospects for China's Maritime Strategy in the Indian Ocean

There is much exaggerated speculation about China's military strategy in the Indian Ocean, including the so-called string of pearls, and military intentions for the Belt and Road Initiative. Before analyzing China's Indian Ocean strategy over the next ten to fifteen years, it is first useful to focus on some general development trends of sea power rather than speculation about China's intentions.

The Dominance of Sea Denial

Today, we are living in a period of sea-denial dominance. Because maritime hegemony is so expensive to gain and sustain in the 21st century, no powers, including the United States and China, can have the capacity and bear the cost. Compared with sea control, sea denial is a much more realistic and cheaper goal. Definitions of sea control and sea denial vary according to different perspectives, and the two concepts are usually intertwined. Nonetheless, from a strategic perspective, we may define sea control as assuring one's own use of the sea and denying its use to the rivals in wartime. Sea denial, by contrast, can be defined as preventing adversaries from using the sea. Sea control means the desire to gain maritime dominance, whereas sea denial entails a balance of power. The 2020 version of the U.S. Navy's Naval Doctrine Publication 1 defines sea denial as an "offensive, cost-imposing approach that can be applied when it is impossible or unnecessary to establish sea control."¹

Achieving sea control has always been more difficult than sea denial because the former is highly dependent on a country's capacity to project air and naval power, while the latter does not require massive power projection and intense joint operations. Moreover, today's task of sea control includes joint operations in all domains—land, sea, air, space, and cyber—and the vulnerability of any domain may mean that the strategy fails. What makes sea denial different now from the past is the rapid improvement in sensor, guidance, and communication technology in recent decades and new ways of implementing strategies that such technology creates.² Therefore, states are increasingly able to threaten an opponent's ships at long range from relatively safer and cheaper land-based aircraft and missile batteries—a range of capabilities termed anti-access/area-denial by U.S. military planners.³

Thus, with heightened interdependence of great powers and multiple paths of military technology, maritime predominance is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, and perhaps will even be impossible in the future. However, for great powers, it is progressively simpler to ensure the other side's fleet cannot sail unhindered if needed. In this regard, most waters of the world are in the contested "no man's sea."⁴ Usually, great powers enjoy an advantage in their near seas and must accept others' advantages elsewhere. The United States may be the only exception based on its status as a superpower and its alliance system. However, even the United States is finding it harder to maintain its edge, especially in the western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Arctic.

China's Interests in the Indian Ocean

China is a power with a relatively unfavorable marine geography, and it has no formal military ally around the Indian Ocean. No matter how China rises, it would be difficult for the country to wield dominant sea power in the Indian Ocean region as long as the United States and India make no major strategic mistakes nor suffer a sharp decline in national power. In the Indian Ocean, China is confronted with a similar anti-access dilemma and the disadvantage of distance that the United States faces in East Asian waters. Therefore, China can only operate in the ocean as a relatively weak sea power, or perhaps by using a "fleet in being" strategy, which means maintaining an effective but inferior military presence so as to deter and check the stronger sea power from obtaining absolute command of the sea and violating its own vital interests.⁵

At present and for the foreseeable future, China's most important interest in the Indian Ocean is to...