The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

August 2009 meeting of the MMCA and received the
U.S. response he no doubt anticipated, based on past
experience. 64
PLA perception that defending China from sea attack
is difficult should not be overlooked. As The Science
of Military Strategy states:
Although China is a country with large territorial
waters, our sea area is closed or half-closed. It is surrounded
by the longest chain of islands in the world,
including the Aleutian Islands, the Islands of Japan and
Islands of the Philippines. And it is connected with the
outside world through the Korean Strait, water channels
of the Ryuku, Taiwan Strait, Bashi Channel, Strait
of Malacca and Sunda Straits. 65
China’s strategic analysts view this island chain as
blocking PLA Navy access to the open ocean, and
the United States as the most probable naval power
to invoke this blocking strategy. The deployment of
more than 50 percent of U.S. Naval aircraft carriers,
submarines, and destroyers to the Pacific Ocean area
would be viewed by Chinese analysts as supporting
this assumption.
Yet another important PLA apprehension is the
consequence of advances in U.S. ballistic missile defenses
for China’s strategic deterrent 66 The apprehension
expressed, for example by Professor Wang
Zhongchun of the PLA-NDU and just about all other
Chinese analysts, is that when the BMD system has
been fully developed, the United States will have both
a strategic offense and strategic defense capability that
will undermine China’s strategic deterrent, based as
it is upon a small number of nuclear weapons. This,
of course, is read by China as requiring mobile landbased
and submarine-based weapons to ensure the
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