 Well, thank you very much, John, for that kind introduction. And thank you all for braving the cold and coming today. We've certainly had the winter this year that keeps on giving. And I say that as a lifelong New Englander myself. Today, I'd like to share with you some of what I consider to be the highlights from this nearly 200 page study. I love it if people would be interested in reading it, but I understand that you're busy. And in fact, some of these ideas that we're being confronted with as China develops in the maritime dimension are so powerful that I think they can be distilled fairly succinctly. So I'll work to do that as well as to give you some quotations and flavor from the text. So you have a sense of some of the contents here. Before I move further, I have to make my usual disclaimer. These are all my personal views. And of course, they don't represent the policies or estimates of the U.S. Navy or any other element of the U.S. government. I also would be remiss if I didn't give a tremendous thanks to the Naval War College Press and specifically, Paul Boyer, who is right in the audience here. His tireless work and those of his colleagues and the team and the press and the graphics department was truly essential to seeing this volume through its long production process, its many end notes replete with Chinese language characters to a degree even unusual for our studies. So, Paul and to also your colleagues, I can't thank you enough for this. Let me begin with a few quotations that I believe truly show how much these five years and counting of Chinese anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden have changed China's Navy and changed China and its position in the world. It's really opened up a whole new outlook for China. It changed China's strategic mindset, added new expectations for protecting overseas citizens, and given China a new opportunity to assume international responsibilities even as the expectations for it to do so continue to grow. So, here's a quotation from a fellow named Zhu Chengzhi, who is the head of the international department at China's Ministry of Transportation, which has worked closely with its Navy to coordinate these operations. He says, Americans have the following critical opinion. For many years, China's overseas economic interests have been protected by others. Now China is a responsible great power, so it should protect its own ships. This is indeed a tremendous change, an excellent example of what a service-oriented government should do. And of course, there's been a corresponding transformation in PLA Navy thinking as well, the China's People's Liberation Army Navy. As one article in China Youth Daily put it, the PLA Navy's escort mission is one of a strategic, comprehensive, and international armed service. Now many sailors fully understand the concept of being at home at sea and a guest on land. And this mission of escorting merchant ships, both Chinese and foreign, has caused China's military thinking to change fundamentally from simply maintaining an army for 1,000 days to use it for an hour to maintaining an army for 1,000 days to use it for 1,000 days. So truly a sea change in thinking here. That alone was enough to make my co-author Austin Strange, who's currently a graduate student at George Yang University in China, formerly a research fellow with us here at CMSI, want to look into this subject in great detail. We wanted to understand better why China had embarked on these unprecedented escort missions in the Gulf of Aden, beginning on December 26th, 2008. We wanted to understand how China was able to make such a rapid transformation in its preparation for distant ocean operations, and its resolution of a number of complex challenges that any navy faces when doing something of a similar distance and a similar scale in a short period of time. To do this, we examined a wide range of Chinese language open sources, more than 2,000 in fact. We tried to look as much as possible at demonstrably authoritative Chinese sources. So for example, from China's official navy newspaper, People's Navy, from its navy magazine, a modern navy, we also looked into some underutilized sources that provide a great detail about aspects of Chinese naval operations, but are rarely consulted by foreign scholars, including the Journal of Navy Medicine and even the rather specialized Chinese Journal of Nautical Medicine and Hyperbaric Medicine. And it took a lot of effort to piece these data sources together, but I think the result was a level of detail and fidelity that's rarely been seen in Chinese language sources if I may say so myself. As I like to say, the Chinese really are more transparent in the Chinese language. They're publishing a lot, and while you always have to weigh the pedigree, the quality, and the relative context of the source, there is a lot that can be learned and there is quite a bit of confidence you can have in the findings from those sources. So let's look a little bit at the beginning here of why China had to embark on this mission. Why couldn't China's somewhat risk averse leadership have continued to adhere to business as usual when the US Navy provides security free of charge in cooperation with allies and partners around the world across the world's sea lanes? Why did China have to do this? Well, there are a number of reasons. As you know from your reading, from going into Walmart, from following the news, China's trade relationship with the rest of the world is tremendous. It's one of the great phenomena of our time. And within the more than 600 major foreign ports upon which Chinese container ships call, within this amazingly large infrastructure of maintained by Chinese flag ships, Chinese built ships, Chinese seafarers bringing Chinese goods to market, bringing foreign raw materials and energy into Chinese ports to continue this energy intensive manufacturing process. There are certain waterways that are disproportionately important to the transit of these goods. And the one going through the Gulf of Aden is one of the most important. It's a critical route to Europe from China to Europe. It is a critical, it is linked to some of the critical sea lanes bringing energy from the Middle East back to China. And so one of the more interesting Chinese media articles we looked at went so far as to call this the Golden Waterway. And that's not just one reporter getting carried away. There really is a sense that this is a vital conduit for China's economic security for its trade relationships. And the problem that was becoming clear by the middle, mid to late part of 2008 was that this Golden Waterway was facing significant security challenges from the rise of Somali piracy. Several Chinese ships were pirated. There were many more attempts at Chinese ship, of Somali pirates to pirate Chinese ships and a variety of stopgap measures that the Ministry of Transport and other Chinese agencies attempted to promote failed. These stopgap measures included trying to raise awareness of problems, trying to encourage certain very basic makeshift safety procedures, some of which may even sound a bit outlandish now, advocating the construction of even basic improvised explosive devices to warn off the pirates, Molotov cocktails, things like that. This did not work. And meanwhile Chinese shipping companies were running into some fairly significant problems. First of all, with regard to the Hong Kong Siemens Union, which whose members are responsible for crewing many ships involved in the China trade, the union negotiated some fairly strong protections to include double wages for each day that the ship would send in an area deemed to be hazardous. The option for crew members to elect not to transit through a hazardous area with pirate-infested area with their ship, and the shipping company would be responsible for paying for their transport, obviously an unworkable proposition on a large scale. Then there was the issue of running out of obvious shipping alternatives. You can circumnavigate Africa, but that adds a little over six days going around the Cape of Good Hope. Based on the very tight shipping schedules, the advanced contracts that the Chinese shipping companies could not break, their razor-thin profit margins, and the intense competition, this was something that they could not afford to do. And so they started making their problems known to the Chinese government, even as there was a groundswell of concern and support for China's interests from Chinese citizens, including the so-called netizens, Chinese citizens who go online and make their opinion felt, sometimes anonymously, but for which the trends are very clear and aggregate, especially to a Chinese government that monitors this very closely, not only for policy reasons, but through some very advanced technical means. So the Chinese government was hearing on all sides that it had to do something. This then motivated what for China was an unusually rapid and effective interagency process in which the PLA Navy, some of whose experts had apparently been working on these issues for several years in terms of basic proposals, cooperated with the Ministry of Transport, which was very aware of the issues and had many of the responsibilities working with China's shipbuilding industry, but was clearly getting overwhelmed in terms of its capacity to address the situation. In a matter of months, procedures were coordinated, plans were made, maritime legal aspects and boundaries were figured out, and by December 26th, 2008, just a little over five years ago now, the first PLA Navy task force of two warships and a replenishment ship left for their first tour of duty in the Gulf of Aden. Fast forward a little over five years later, the 16th task force is now out in the Gulf of Aden, thousands of commercial vessels, both Chinese flagged and foreign flagged have been escorted, a number, roughly several dozen ships have been saved from attempts to pirate them by pirates, usually by a Chinese Navy intervention that warned and sort of shooed away the would-be pirates, and it's worthy of note that fully half of those ships that were thus rescued were foreign flagged, so this is a very internationally focused effort. Now, while China has made a big move in this direction, it's still a qualified move in many ways. It occurs almost exclusively in international waters in keeping with some Chinese sensibilities about not wanting to engage in what Beijing regards rather restrictively as interference in other countries' affairs. China's rules of engagement, and while difficult to know in totality, appear to be cautious for the most part. China does not, unlike some other navies, China does not attempt to capture, detain and try Somali pirates. There are also questions which I'll get to later on about the costs of these missions. Well, I think so far China has reaped tremendous benefits fully justifying from its perspective the costs that it's paid in terms of financial costs, wear and tear on naval platforms, logistics supplies, there is a question, of course, of for how long this can continue. Five years is already a long time. Will other areas such as the Gulf of Guinea, which now has a greater incidence of piracy, although it tends to be a different type, will these rise to the fore? Will this attract Chinese attention and perhaps cause a shift in emphasis from the Gulf of Aden? Already, although it's not technically an anti-piracy operation because it occurs in riverine waters, not the open seas, China is part of a multinational mission in the Mekong River, a law enforcement mission after some Chinese sailors were killed apparently by some criminals associated with a major golden triangle drug lord. So watch this space, what this really is is the beginning of a new era in Chinese maritime development and China's interaction with the outside world but there's a lot more to come and it will be interesting to see where this goes. The bottom line up front here is that as the title of our study indicates there really is no substitute for experience. To become proficient in naval operations to have influence out in the world in this way, to understand how it works, to do it well, you have to go out there and start to do it. And you can't know even with the amazing amount that the Chinese digest from foreign sources, it truly is amazing and I joke with, my colleagues and I joke amongst ourselves that it's really not fully a joke. You can follow almost everything, the US Navy, the US military and its allies and partners are doing just by reading Chinese sources. You don't need a word of English these days, it's covered in such excruciating detail down to in-depth analysis of what do these different logos mean, what is the significance of this crazy cat logo and things like that. So very interesting to see that but for all that you can't fully download experience off the internet. And so China's Navy went to the Gulf of Aden not fully knowing what exactly what would be required, having to refine their approach as they went and the experience that they've gained is really the most valuable thing here. Many firsts, many things for the PLA Navy to accomplish that it had simply never done before. In terms of organizational value, real-time interagency coordination was really the greatest fruit that the PLA Navy and China's government more broadly has reaped so far here. Every government system or almost every government system with some level of functionality tends to be optimized in certain ways and by correspondingly de-optimized in others. The U.S. government, for example, is arguably exceptional to the extent that a large bureaucracy can be at real-time interagency coordination decision-making operations. By contrast, many argue that the U.S. government is not even intended to be adept at long-range multi-year planning. In fact, some of our very founding ideologies, arguably, believe that too much of that disrupts the other parts of our system that are important. China, by contrast, has some comparative ability in formulating some longer-range priorities, perhaps over five, 10, 15 years, and coordinating major programs to support those priorities. Now, this shouldn't be exaggerated. There is no credible Chinese 100-year plan or long, long-term way of thinking. It's just too hard for any country or any bureaucracy, whatever the cultural background to plan for that. But reasonable people can debate how well this long-range planning works in practice. I think it's worked fairly well for the amazing naval development we've seen from China since the mid-to-late 1990s, as one example. What I think is difficult to dispute, much more difficult to dispute than that, is the fact that up till now, China's real-time interagency coordination and whole-of-government operations has not been very effective. The very system that, the same system that optimizes party control through infinite party committee meetings at all the different bureaucratic levels through this parallel structure of state and party needing constant coordination, guidance from the party, implementation on the state side is really a recipe for poor real-time coordination. Now, this may be starting to change to some extent. There have been a lot of efforts to make things better and the most dramatic recently was the establishment in late last year of a national security commission. This appears to be a very serious effort under China's new and very dynamic and relatively powerful leader, Xi Jinping. But against that backdrop, this lead up to the Gulf of Aden missions really stands out for this rapid effect of interagency coordination. And I would imagine that some valuable lessons are being learned from this that might be applied in other areas of China's bureaucracy for other types of future contingencies, perhaps naval operations, perhaps some form of interagency combined arms, even more joint disaster relief we'll have to see. This is also a coming of age for the PLA Navy. Really an opportunity for the PLA Navy to find its place in the sun. It's been overshadowed in the past by an overwhelmingly powerful ground force which is now gradually shrinking, still preeminent, but no longer dominant in the way that it once was. So still some challenges for the Navy, but major opportunities going out to the Gulf of Aden, being seen serving China's purposes out there and helping the PLA Navy to find a way to do things in a new way. One of the ways in which this gives the PLA Navy new opportunities is the fact that way out at sea, it simply can't be under the thumb of the ground forces. And the unexpected, unpredictable nature of some of the encounters with the pirates necessitate a flatter command structure, a more fluid approach to things, albeit apparently within some strong limits. These long range operations also serve as a valuable test bed for Chinese satellites and communications technology. And I'll give more details on that in a minute. In keeping with getting a new place in the sun, the PLA Navy is really carving out a niche role in Chinese diplomacy. And this really offers a cornucopia of opportunities, both for the PLA Navy to get credit and also for it to learn and harvest some really valuable lessons from other, from other navies. For example, in the interaction with other navies in the Gulf of Aden through cooperation, particularly through a coordination mechanism called a shade, shared awareness and deconfliction, the PLA Navy learns and communicates and learns from other navies through radio communications, through the Mercury Information Technology communications platform. I don't mean to make too much of this, but there's a chance to learn realistically from other navies, very professional navies and how they operate down to, for example, some of the very NATO code words being used. The PLA Navy is getting the whole flavor of how other navies have really improved some processes over time. The PLA Navy also, meanwhile, is in the midst of a great, not necessarily a huge expansion of platform numbers, but definitely a huge expansion of experience and intensity of operations. For example, from 2002 to 2012, half of the PLA joint exercises overall with other countries that is were conducted by the PLA Navy. To prepare for these things, the PLA Navy has to have to conduct en route training to be at the very top of its game. Sailors have had to improve their English language skills and of course, each task force comes with a variety of translators who are completely competent as is required for at least a basic professional communication. This is creating benefits back home while it's very hard to know what the PLA Navy budget even is. This is still not something that we can know reliably at the unclassified level. In early March, China will likely announce its FY, its new 2014 projected military budget. It's already the official budget which doesn't include all military spending but then no nation's budget includes all military budget, contains all military spending, is already the second largest in the world at over 110 billion dollars. It's been rising in recent years at a rate of roughly 10% in nominal terms. Of course, when you factor in inflation, the rise is not that as large but it's still the envy of virtually every other military in the world. So there's more money coming into China's military and Chinese sources seem to suggest and it's logical to suppose that the PLA Navy is getting an increasing portion of that growing pie. The PLA Navy has good reasons such as success in these missions and the need to fund these missions to argue for more budget share. Now, as I mentioned before, there's no substitute for experience and one of the things that China's Navy has had to improve and practice, improve and master are mission essential tasks as we call them. Some pretty basic things but they're not as basic if you haven't done them before. So as you'll see in our study and as I'll share with you in coming slides, some of these things that the PLA Navy has had to master are really old hat for the US Navy and other leading professional navies in the world. But the PLA Navy has had to start somewhere, it's moving up that learning curve very quickly and it has enough resources and determination to keep getting better. So none of this should be dismissed. And what I think is also important in this regard is we can see particularly through China's Navy newspaper and magazines and other types of analyses a very honest Chinese Navy approach to grapple with these issues and to face its shortcomings and to work through them on a very detailed and determined basis. This is really the way to get better and we really see that in spades. Whether it's talking about how to preserve vegetables better for longer voyages which has been a challenge for China's Navy, especially the submarine force, keeping morale up at China's Navy on these missions has gone so far as to provide a European coffee, better exercise equipment, better options for calling home from the ship on the weekends, dealing with the minor physical ailments that can accompany long duration at sea beyond the psychological which is one of the challenges. Operational value, thinking on your feet. One of the other greatest things about this mission for the PLA Navy is being forced to encounter unexpected situations and to have to not operate by the exquisitely scripted rote instructions that China's military has vastly preferred in the past. Keep it predictable. Don't make a mistake. Get all the details right. Make sure that the colors are reversed for China but make sure that the red team can beat the blue team. Now it really is changing although there's some way to go. This is really the most intense operational experience that the PLA Navy presently has available and it's engaged in some things that at least by its own standards were pretty exciting and required a lot of thinking on the spot. In July 2012, for example, when we provide probably three quarters of a page of details in the study here, a number of Chinese sailors had been freed from a long captivity by pirates. They were deposited on a beach in Somalia. Unfortunately, though, when they were, the pickup operation wasn't as easy as originally thought. First high waves meant that the Dainese couldn't get as close as they wanted to to pick them up on the coast. So then they sent a helicopter but there wasn't an obvious landing spot. Nightfall was approaching. They were worried that that could result in the recapture of these sailors. So they dispatched special forces who helped prepare a landing area and who coordinated the division of these sailors into five or six batches and they did a quick X-fill back to the ship and it all worked out. Again, for us, that would be extremely basic. But for China's Navy, these are new things that had to be thought through and there was no script that could have been written by that, for that. And again, a steep learning curve, whether it's improving the precision and the rapidity of different types of formations to escort the merchant vessels through different routes in the Gulf of Aden. China's been learning fast here. Exercises have been becoming more realistic. Industry best practices have been advocated such as improved security cabins on merchant ships. But again, China's government now knows that it can't just ask Chinese flagships to take care of themselves. It's providing naval capability to do that. And as John mentioned in his introduction, the PLA Navy really is gaining more confidence and feeling stronger on the international scene through these activities. To the point, actually, of several years ago, ordering newer, larger and brighter flags for the ships. So it's a way of China announcing that it's out there, it's following international professional Navy standards and it's something to be for domestic citizens to be proud of and foreigners to respect. And this all fits with projecting a positive image. Some Chinese sources go so far as to use terminology similar to the US concept of China being a responsible stakeholder, someone, a country with strong vested interests in the system, committed to developing and improving and cooperating to enhance the function of the system, secure the global commons, much as the US Navy has promoted and the US maritime services are promoted through global maritime partnerships. Some of the other Chinese sources have mixed feelings about the stakeholder concept. They feel, some of them go so far as to feel that it's a conspiracy to try to push China to do too much too soon and get overburdened. But what the sources generally agree on is that everyone should appreciate what China is doing. China is making responsible contributions even if those are on its own terms in important ways. Finally, to wrap up the main findings here, China has, through this successful performance, it's really up the ante both at home and abroad here. Expectations have risen both among its populace who now expect Chinese citizens, their compatriots in trouble overseas to be helped, perhaps rescued. And the outside world increasingly expects an ever more affluent and capable China to do more to contribute. Not just build up the capabilities to pressure neighbors close by, well, as some would say, free riding off US allied and partner provision of security out in the international system. In this regard, there's a lot of debate in China right now of how best to protect citizens overseas. It's really a work in progress despite this progress and the methods to do so remain under debate. And one of the methods, of course, is a discussion of private security operations. Now, that may be more of an issue on land, preparing, protecting Chinese commercial interests in Africa, for instance. And in this regard, I note that the former Blackwater CEO has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal as being set up in Hong Kong and ready to do logistics business for Chinese concerns in Africa. So watch that space. Will there be a maritime component to this private security adoption as well? We'll have to see. But now let's take an in-depth look at logistics for a minute. At sea replenishment, well, it's a basic skill for the US Navy by now after years of practice. It can be challenging and have real consequences if you don't get it right. And one of the real problems that China initially faced in its Gulf of Aden deployments was limited freshwater supply. The initial ships that were sent out to the Gulf of Aden didn't have adequate equipment, adequate tanks, adequate desalination equipment to produce the amount of freshwater and the quality of freshwater that would be ideal for such a mission. This larger logistics problem was compounded by the fact that for the first task force, three months, apparently because of concern of security and local opposition in Indian Ocean ports, the two warships in that first task force did not call on port for supplies. They got all their supplies through the accompanying replenishment ship, the providing all those supplies. When I told this initially to some experienced US Navy experts, they thought the open sources must be incorrect. They didn't believe that this was possible. Who would put themselves through such a problematic process as that? But yet that's actually what happened. Now they learned quickly, they improved things quickly and when it came to a water purification, they actually brought in a company that had expertise in the area to develop better systems and they solved the problem. But for a while it was a real problem. You see numerous Chinese sources talking about the lengths that they went to save water, to include the sailors shaving their heads so that they wouldn't need as much water in the shower. So this was really a case of learning the hard way and it was an issue that you can't just download. You have to learn about on the go. Now when it comes to training and operations, I don't want to exaggerate some of the terms that are highlighted here. But I think it's interesting that some serious Chinese sources talk about deployments to the Gulf of Aden as being the Chinese Navy's closest equivalent to combat experience that it can get these days. Now many of us who are very familiar with Navy operations, especially how the US Navy would do them, will say, look, these things are very different and in fact by specializing in one area you impose limitations on yourself to get better at the other area. Now I understand the validity of that critique but let me try to give a little more background to explain why some of the Chinese sources feel this way. First of all, keep in mind that China is a country that has not fought a major war since its invasion of Vietnam in 1979. And even that was in some ways a very limited operation. For example, there was not a meaningful naval or air component to that operation and that was quite a while ago. Slightly more recently, China's Navy had a very small skirmish with the Vietnamese Navy over disputed islands in 1988. That's limited and that's a long time ago. So here is a Navy that at this point and something we should all be glad for can't get, well, isn't getting combat operations experience anywhere else. Also keep in mind in many ways China's Navy has had to start from a low baseline. And I have to say, maybe I've even been sort of acculturated into this a little bit but having read many Chinese sources over the years including serious military sources I can say that there's a general view or a widely held view that when you're starting from a low baseline trying to build up and learn a lot of new things from China's perspective getting exposed to a lot of different experiences and new capabilities can be helpful in generating sort of an aggregate improvement in knowledge that can then catalyze improvement upward in sophistication. So I'm bringing these ideas out there to show what the PLA Navy thinks it's getting out of this. Now I mentioned the unscripted exercises and arguably this is just about the most important thing here. I'd like to read you a quote from People's Navy China's military newspaper describing just how serious they are about making these exercises unscripted. Now it's always hard to say how did that actually work in practice? How realistically would we see it if we could evaluate every aspect of this exercise? But what's clear is they're making a huge effort and it's a lot better than it was before. So one August 2011 training session of the ninth escort task force in that session to ensure that progress had no script. During the drill, commanders sent no advanced orders to crewmen. When the alarm sounded, crews reportedly were unaware whether they were participating in a drill or there was an actual pirate attack. Measuring the actual power of a naval force to use their metaphors here often lies in the theatrical troops brilliant, lies not in the theatrical troops brilliant performance of the existing script but rather how they sing and dance to a few impromptu soundtracks without prior rehearsal. And this exercise emphasized anticipating sudden outbreaks. It composed test questions based on emergency response. It gave no advanced notification for any situational scenarios. It did not allow for pre-rehearsal and in doing so it really tested the task forces rapid reaction and emergency response ability. So they're determined to get better at this huge area of weakness and the Gulf of Aden forces that in a way that no amount of prioritization back at home probably could have. Now an interesting question is to what extent can they apply knowledge and progress gained in distant areas, distant seas like the Gulf of Aden which they call Far Seas to the Near Seas, the disputed Yellow East China Sea and South China Seas where the majority of Chinese high intensity military combat operations capabilities are being directed. It's often hard to find sources that will talk about that directly although some speak of vessels having practiced out in the Gulf of Aden returning to apply some of that back home say in the North Sea Fleet and in the Yellow Sea. But what's very clear from looking at the newspapers is we can see that they've rotated huge numbers of people, top level officers through the Gulf of Aden to include some of their best and brightest. So it appears that it's a valuable training ground and a valuable credential that a lot of the top up and coming officers now have to get or at least what really helps them for future promotion. If you look at specific individuals you can see them track through this and often not just on one but on two tours. So this is clearly where there is a connection between what China does in terms of relatively low intensity cooperative efforts out in the Gulf of Aden and what may help its Navy overall including for more high intensity non-cooperative activities close to home. So overall I would argue it's a very positive contribution in the Gulf of Aden but make no mistake, it does improve China's naval capabilities in ways that are not necessarily all intended for positive some international cooperation. Engineering is another thing that China's Navy has had to learn about on the fly. Again, China's Navy can take advantage of what is the world's largest shipbuilding industry by some metrics especially in civilian tonnage and this increasingly advanced and capable shipbuilding industry has huge advantages when you're trying to build an increasingly modern Navy and replace older, less capable platforms with newer, more sophisticated ones. Well it's really good that they have that capability and the budget to make these fairly rapid improvements because in the course of the mission to the Gulf of Aden they've discovered some major ship design limitations not just with regard to living, crew spaces even with things as mundane yet important as galley configuration and grease disposal and things like that but arguably more immediately vital issues such as maintenance space. They also talk about the need for improved electronic repair manuals. Now they are certainly quite capable in this area they can generally repair their ships they can keep them going. They even have repaired engines on foreign merchant ships when they've broken down but they've had to come a long way in a short time look back to 2002 for instance the PLA Navy's first global circumnavigation had sent a small task force around the world and apparently in the Mediterranean one of the warships in the task force broke down they couldn't fix it and these were imported German MTU diesel engines they had to fly in German MTU engineers to have that fixed so while they still need to improve some of the configurations of the warships they've come a long way since 2002 so again constant process detailed self criticism determination for improvement fairly rapid application of new lessons it's quite a valuable feedback loop. Now I mentioned earlier C4 ISR, command and control, communications, communications technology now the quote at the top is from Asia times so it's not a Chinese source but I believe this is a credible assessment the current, China's current chief of naval operations the commander of the PLA Navy Admiral Wu Xiangli who's been in his position for a number of years and whose re-approval in that position was really a vote of confidence from President Xi Jinping is determined to preside over the rapid modernization of the PLA Navy and I think he's been given Xi Jinping China's permanent leaders support to do so this is a very, very sharp, very vigorous constantly communicating working hard leader who is imposing very strict demands on his Navy so I find it highly realistic that even before the mission started he would require cutting edge communications technology for the task forces out in the Gulf of Aden and there are a lot of technical details in our study which may or may not interest you depending on your focus but I can sum it up to say that China has a pretty robust system of satellites, networks and organizational coordination to track Chinese flagships around the world in real time see where they're going see if they're in trouble have them report if they're in distress and coordinate operations to help and potentially even rescue them if that is what they need this is being supported by just about the world's fastest rate of satellite launches China is developing one of the world's largest network of satellites to include surveillance and communication satellites and even some new types of platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles that might play some interesting technological rules in the future for example by 2020 China is on track to have its own full-fledged equivalent of the US global positioning system and it will be only one of three countries to have that the other countries of course being the US Russia with what by then will probably be a less capable system on China's and Europe as a whole through the Galileo system but this is a lot of progress in a short time. As I come close to wrapping up one of the real questions is how far will China go in the far seas? How will it support its operations there? Many people who are expert on US Navy logistics assume that the more China does out in this space the more it's going to have to develop a robust network of bases to support the logistics efficiently for this. Coming from China's perspective though I don't think that's very likely to happen anytime soon. China has such a strong ideological limitation against any sort of activity that it would see as interfering in other sovereignty. Now of course there's a huge gray area here and of course the further that China develops in the international system the more it will be operating in that gray area and sort of playing a complex game of twister of claiming that what is an activity that does involve other countries' interests more in fact does not interfere with anyone else's sovereignty. So this is a work in progress. What's interesting is there's a debate in China about what to do about it. And the first quote here quotes one of the personnel from the PLA Navy discussing a port call from the context it looks like it was a port call in Djibouti and the PLA Navy apparently thought they could berth there for three days but because a Japanese ship came they could only stay there for one day. And this of course was not something that would make the PLA Navy very happy or feel that they could rely on that type of approach. In China's shipbuilding industry literature there's also been discussion of an interesting concept and Islamic crescent of Chinese transport. This idea states that China has strong energy interests and geopolitical interests in the vital but sometimes unstable greater Middle East and Indian Ocean region. One of the authors goes so far as to state that there's a huge logistical challenge. These very nations that China needs to engage with and have a presence near and by necessity if nothing else send its ships close to lack both adequate supplies of cheap water that China's Navy can purchase and adequate supplies of pork which is really a PLA Navy staple for feeding large crews affordably. One of the proposals for addressing this problem is to establish some sort of far oceans footholds. There are many different terms like this and what it largely boils down to at this point is the idea that China definitely won't establish a full fledged US style overseas base anytime soon but it can better coordinate a set of access points maybe not involving any sort of stockpiles of weapons related equipment but at least better food, water, other types of logistical support arrangements. Arguably Port Solala and Oman is already a de facto place or access point for the PLA Navy. As far as I can tell from our research each of the 16 task forces has stopped there. When a sailor suddenly had appendicitis and they couldn't manage to treat him properly on the ship they airlifted him to the hospital in Oman. So that may be the start, what will happen next? There's been some rumor of a base in Seychelles and in Djibouti, I'm sure both of these countries would be open to offering China some sort of access. We'll have to watch that space to see what happens. As I conclude here, I do want to conclude by first restating some remaining uncertainties. It's unclear how long this mission is going to continue. China has apparently agreed with the United Nations that it will continue the mission at least through November 2014. After that we will have to see. Interestingly in 2011 there were some statements by General Chen Bingdu then the chief of the PLA general staff that appeared to suggest that China was having difficulty affording its current sea-centric, non-overseas base reliant approach to fighting piracy. The general went so far as to say for counter piracy campaigns to be effective we should probably move beyond the ocean and crush their bases on land. He added that those pirates operating on the sea are simply low-ranking ones and the true masterminds are on the ground. All the ransoms and treasures they obtained were all later handed over to their chiefs of organizations. Countries must work together in fighting against pirates. Now what this means in practice is difficult to say. I've had the pleasure of meeting with General Chen Bingdu in Beijing and having dinner with him. I can say that he's a very forthright direct speaker so he may have been giving his personal views that doesn't automatically mean that China will shift its approach. I think everyone realizes the tragedy of a Somali piracy at this point is the real problem lies in a failed state and terrible human suffering on land but the prospects of being able to afford and coordinate an international approach sufficient to actually fix that are so daunting at this point as to I think be unrealistic in most people's minds. So whatever Chen Bingdu may say I don't think China will change its approach. Frankly I don't think other countries will do that much. So wrapping it up here I think what we're seeing here is a new approach to China's foreign policy. It's not a complete departure from the previous very cautious, very reactive, very from a Chinese perspective defensive somewhat prickly approach. Now we're seeing more flexible decision making based on more pragmatic calculations concerning expanding national security interests a multi-dimensional calculus in which multiple factors and interests are weighed. It's not easy to overcome the continuing impetus not to do something too dramatic overseas but at the edges there is change. This is what I call in another co-authored article with Austin Strange in Asia policy ripples of change in Chinese foreign policy. We're seeing ripples, change is happening. So the bottom line here is well in a lot of ways our relationship with China will continue to be complicated particularly concerning security concerns close to China in the contested near seas yellow east and south China seas there will be tensions, problems, the need for continued military preparation for deterrence on the US side far from China out in the distant seas out in the Gulf of Aden maybe out in the Gulf of Guinea or other areas in the future there's much more room for positive cooperation we're already seeing that in the Gulf of Aden we've seen two joint Sino-American anti-piracy exercises in the Gulf of Aden. This is perhaps a bright spot it's definitely a bright spot it is perhaps a test bed for future Sino-American security relations development even as we face some real challenges. So just a few policy suggestions here I think we should try to do more with China in the far seas in terms of cooperation against non-traditional security actors even as we reiterate strongly and we make it clear that the use of force or even the threat of the use of force cannot be used to change the status quo and threaten the peace of the near seas and frankly there's a positive story and a positive implication for China in this regard I think the way for China to gain the great power status that it so dearly covets after recent history of weakness and humiliation is to contribute more to the international system I think that China can and should be recognized as a great power in the international system in proportion to not the demands it makes of the international system but the contributions that it makes to the international system and I think a popular American movie says this better than any Dimarsh I call this the Spider-Man doctrine with great power comes great responsibility So thank you all very much I'm now happy to have questions and discussions for as long as you'd like Thank you for coming today Yes sir I have a couple of personal problems relating to some of this a couple of years ago we had the law of the sea conference here I've defended a Dr. Wu who was one of the Chinese representatives finally that came here He invited me to come back to Renmin University and speak I said I wouldn't do that He even offered to pay which was nice and the whole thing fell apart because they wanted to know what I was going to speak on it was cooperation in the open seas and suddenly I can never hear from Dr. Wu anymore like computer got demolished with misspelled words and everything and I sort of know where it came from and I haven't been able to contact him since that's a personal thing on a historical note what didn't China fail in the 1700s because it ventured out into the oceans and they decided historically they wouldn't do that anymore of course they are now it's a different world but I was wondering historically whether there were people in China who still feel we should take care of ourselves don't bother with everybody else it doesn't work Well there's a wide range of perspectives and debate in China I'm very sorry that you had that experience what I can say is China's approach to sea power is really under meaningful debate for the first time in its history in our series we have here we have studies in Chinese maritime development through the naval institute press we have a volume called China Goes to Sea and we looked at China's attempted transformation to become more of a maritime power in comparative historical perspective one of the things that became clear from that was that up until now there really never has been a meaningful debate about becoming a sea power there was never a sustained and meaningful effort to do so you alluded to the closest attempt that was previously made 600 years ago in the early 1400s at the beginning of the Ming dynasty the eunuch admiral Zheng He was authorized by the Yongle Emperor to lead a series of expeditions out into the Indian Ocean as far away as Mombasa, Mogadishu and even to Mecca historians still debate whether Zheng He made it to Mecca and had been born a Muslim no doubt he would have wanted to go there this first attempt at maritime transformation did not survive the death of the Yongle Emperor essentially the Yongle Emperor had been engaged in unsustainable spending both at sea and on land the Confucian eunuch bureaucracy became jealous of what they felt was a threat to their prerogatives in terms of leading the bureaucracy and what followed were a series of imperial edicts that attempted to better control the Chinese populace by restricting the amount of maritime trade and activity that they could engage in now this of course was porous it was not absolute in practice in fact as relates to today's topic one of the things that the Emperor imperial system did not understand was that if you outlaw sea based trade you only increase piracy and then in the ensuing period of weakness starting roughly in 1840 when China was constantly invaded from the sea when China was essentially carved up by foreigners coming from the sea there was great appreciation finally for the importance of maritime matters but China for over 100 years was in little position to do anything about that through the duration of the Cold War in part because of the legacy of the Chinese Civil War the Korean War helping to bring the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and the Western Pacific again China had in the Soviet Union as well after the Sino-American Rep. Rochement China had no option to be a powerful maritime power even really on its maritime periphery so now is the first chance to do so and yes there's a big question of how much of a priority that this should get however I think what's important to realize is the context when I give another lecture I put up a slide of a water droplet the picture you get when you drop a pebble into the water you've got a droplet and then these ripples that go out and that's actually a perfect representation of China's security prioritization in geographic terms at the top party leadership is still prioritized above all else next comes the parallel party and state structure all down through and across China that runs the country and makes it work effectively then there's the core ethnic Han homeland then you have the ethnic minority borderlands then the borders and then finally the contested maritime periphery on the near seas China has only generally pursued each of these layers each successive layer after it was satisfied with its ability to address the one just inside it so the fact that China's getting out to intensive capabilities vis-a-vis the near seas and some reach out into the far seas is part of that larger picture and it's not at odds with it yes these missions cost money yes it's a new thing but keep in mind by any measure this is by the country that already has the world's second largest economy it has the second largest defense budget both of those are growing at a rate that no other great power approaches at this point trying to take advantage of things such as one of the world's most cost-effective shipbuilding industries apparently by some metrics so yes there's debate about the issue you raise about well doesn't some domestic opinion say why are we spending all that money out in the Gulf of Aden when the interior of China remains third world in some of its conditions I think that's much more of an issue of Chinese foreign aid and that's a reason that China's given for why the amount that it contributes to the UN budget is a fraction for example of what the US gives or even what Japan gives and there's a reason given by China why it can't do more out in the international system so this is definitely under debate what's significant is that there actually is finally a debate thank you very much is China response to piracy more violent than ours and if so is it more effective well I thank you for raising this issue because it's an intriguing question and it's one that I didn't have time to address in the rest of the slides the short answer is overall it is much more careful cautious and constrained than almost any other navy operating out there and there are some navies that arguably are much less restrained and careful than the US Navy for example the Indian Navy according to media reports actually sank a ship that was thought to be a pirate vessel and later was apparently determined not to be a pirate vessel you don't see China doing anything like that on a large scale China generally tries to deter the pirates we see in China's naval newspaper accounts of many of the interactions it can start with by loudspeaker literally this is a direct quote from the Chinese saying broadcasting in English and in Arabic warning warning warning this is the Chinese Navy this is the Chinese Navy go away obviously that doesn't always work when you have these desperate impoverished pirates whose livelihood for the next however many months may hinge on whether or not they pull off a raid the next steps include perhaps sending out a helicopter or they often have a helicopter out front that will detect these things if they get a radio distress call from one of the ships that's being attacked by suspicious skiffs the helicopters sometimes can send flares and other types of warnings if the pirates keep approaching there is a well established procedure of machine gun fire into the water in front of the pirates some of the Chinese accounts portray a very tense standoff where the pirates keep getting closer and closer even if the machine gun fire starts however it's hard to say what that means in practice and having translated way too many florid people's Navy articles I think there's a lot of good material in there but they do like to put it in this heroic genre that probably builds it up like a good suspense novel so I'm not sure the pirates always get that close to you can always see the whites of their eyes or something like that what China's Navy has not done according to any of their sources has actually directly exchanged a fire with the pirates pursued them tried to capture them they have had special forces who trained for all kinds of things board a vessel to rescue the crew but they never talk about interaction with the pirates themselves which leaves open maybe the pirates flee as the special forces are focusing on rescuing the crew apparently there's an agreement with some other countries about what to do with pirates but China hasn't actually put this into practice because again their legal system is so cautious I've spoken with some of their top legal experts who made who drafted some of these rules and at least in how they write and how they argue are the strict constructionist of what minimalist of what international law allows I mean to the point where it's frankly it can be quite trying on your patients if you want to get something active accomplished that said there is an important caveat that we bring up in the study here it's possible that in some very specific areas out at sea where no one is watching it could be a little bit more complex than that again I can't prove this it's conjecture based on the fact that navies as a whole tend to need more flexibility when they're out at sea to respond to real time conditions and solve problems now either you delegate that to them through established organizational procedures in a very a very transparent system such as the way the US does it or perhaps in the Chinese system there might in theory at least be some degree of desire to keep a completely non-interventionist simple cautious constrained rules of engagement policy officially but then have some gray areas and exceptions and some latitude for interpretation actually out at sea and that would be quite interesting to look into over time I should hasten to say again I don't have a smoking gun to prove that that's the case in practice and I'm sure you won't get an official Chinese statement saying that oh yes this is all that we do to springboard after often your comments just now is that in fact or is that possibly an indication that the Chinese experiences in anti-partisan operations regarding laws of the sea may then extend into the South China Sea the East China Sea regarding territorial disputes which are also covered under well here's the thing on the one hand China makes every effort to stay legally consistent as of now it has this extremely restrictive and in some ways also an inconsistent minority interpretation of the UN Convention on the law of the sea there are roughly more than 165 nations and entities who have ratified of those fewer than 26 agree with China's interpretation that for example a coastal state can regulate military restrict military operations in its exclusive economic zone the economically focused water space between 12 nautical miles from its shore or baselines 200 nautical miles what you see China doing in the Gulf of Aden operations is going out of its way to get permission slips if you will to justify all the operations so it's for UN resolution support this the Somali government to the extent to which an entity that controls a few blocks in Mogadishu can authorize has very explicitly given China permission in fact it said please do as much as possible we need this security the interesting issue is this not so much between the Gulf of Aden and the Near Seas but between the Near Seas and the other places that China is increasingly going so for example it's already been well documented by the US government in open testimony that China has operated intelligence naval vessels I believe intelligence gathering vessels in US exclusive economic zones specifically around Guam and Hawaii meanwhile China is interested in having much more influence and access in the Arctic now for the US I don't think that's legally a problem for our Canadian friends who have a somewhat different perspective on which operations are acceptable in which waters up there that's a much more complex question so what we'll have to see over time is as China becomes more of a maritime power in the Far Seas and wants to do more military operations including in other countries claimed exclusive economic zones how does that complicate its efforts to claim restrictions in its own exclusive economic zone and that's a book that's still being written all right I think that's for we'll end today I'd like to invite you all back next week on the fourth and the sixth we have two different e-bills lectures thank you all for coming today we'll see you then thank you all very much stay warm