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China’s ‘String of Pearls’: Naval Rivalry or Entente in the Indian Ocean?
James R. Holmes Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Last week, Chinese engineers broke ground on what press accounts styled “China’s first overseas naval base” in Djibouti. That is a big deal. Djibouti lies in East Africa along the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the waterway that connects the western Indian Ocean with the Red Sea. It also adjoins the patrol grounds for the Gulf of Aden counterpiracy mission, in which China’s navy has taken part since 2009. In short, it occupies strategic real estate.
China, however, will not be the lone occupant of the seaport. Djibouti is also home to other foreign logistics hubs: The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operates a facility there, for instance, as does the U.S. Navy. But does the Chinese installation mark a shift in Beijing’s naval outlook? Is Djibouti indeed an overseas naval base, the first in the “string of pearls” that has occasioned so much commentary over the past decade?
The image of a Chinese string of pearls—a putative network of naval bases or lesser port facilities encircling India from the sea and fettering New Delhi’s ambitions—has become a fixture in India’s strategic lexicon. The concept made its debut in 2005, when an Indian participant coined the phrase during a 2004 Booz Allen study for the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Distinguished Western and Indian commentators subsequently made it a staple of debates about China’s future naval posture in the Indian Ocean and how to respond to it.
Now that a decade has passed, and in light of the developments in Djibouti and elsewhere, it’s worth revisiting what commentators have been saying about the string of pearls more recently. To what extent does the language persist? How do observers interpret it? And does it mold policy in New Delhi and elsewhere in South Asia? These are questions worth pondering, as the answers to them will have implications for the future of great-power naval relations in the region, and perhaps beyond.
A keyword search of relevant news and commentary databases reveals that of the nearly 1,000 mentions of the term since 2005, around 200 appeared in 2015 alone. Brute numbers don’t prove that an idea is on everyone’s lips, but they do suggest that the concept of a string of pearls has lost none of its resonance with regional audiences. Indeed, writers who raise the subject do so matter-of-factly. They take it for granted.
To be sure, the concept is not universally accepted as a description of China’s strategy or intentions. But few discount the possibility of such a Chinese strategy altogether, however much they disagree about whether it will take a malignant or more benign form. Just as Cold War commentators embraced the basic logic of containment while feuding among themselves about how to apply it, so observers of China’s naval emergence, particularly Indian observers, accept the idea of a string of pearls while differing on how to construe and respond to it.
Defining Terms
In terms of strategic logic, the string of pearls refers to Beijing’s efforts to negotiate limited seaport access or full-fledged basing rights with strategically located coastal and island states around the Indian Ocean basin, thereby positioning China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) astride sea lanes through which raw materials and finished goods transit. Such an enterprise may, or may not, prove troublesome for India.
A string of pearls represents a way to bolster China’s strategic position in important waterways under a variety of circumstances, from an utterly “permissive” Indian Ocean theater where few threats manifest themselves, to one on the brink of maritime war. Such a posture, then, could express itself in many ways depending on Beijing’s appraisal of interests, friends and foes, and on naval resources available.
Beijing, in other words, might deploy defensive measures to backstop its interests so long as the strategic setting remains benign. A token naval presence supported by temporary port visits for fuel and supplies may do. Should matters take a turn for the worse, China’s leadership may see the need for more forceful, offensive-minded measures, such as a PLAN squadron sized for battle and permanently homeported at Indian Ocean bases.
Cultivating good ties with governments prepared to offer access to their seaports is only prudent. It meets China’s needs for the present while laying the foundation for something bigger should circumstances warrant. That’s what militaries exist to do: furnish political leaders with options.
China has taken its cue in part from Alfred Thayer Mahan, the pre-eminent sea-power theorist of the late 19th century and the modern U.S. Navy’s intellectual founder.
Chinese strategists, moreover, are theoretically minded. They read, interpret and try to harness classic works about strategy to meet China’s needs. How does a rising great power that vacated the oceans centuries ago learn how to build up sea power? By studying successful models. The U.S. Navy has been arguably the world’s most successful model for a century now, ever since Congress approved a Naval Expansion Act in 1916, designed to field “a navy second to none.”
China, accordingly, has taken its cue in part from Alfred Thayer Mahan, the pre-eminent sea-power theorist of the late 19th century and the modern U.S. Navy’s intellectual founder. Chinese strategists have woven a Mahanian strand into their deliberations, fashioning a strategy best described as an amalgam of Western and Chinese concepts about marine endeavors. Mahan’s approach, in which commerce is king, defines sea power in terms sure to appeal to contemporary China. For Mahan, a people’s propensity to trade is the chief determinant of its maritime fortunes. Commercial access to important theaters constitutes the uppermost purpose of sea power. Political and military access are mere enablers.
In more concrete terms, Mahan declares that sea power rests on three pillars: industrial production at home and markets overseas; merchant and naval fleets; and naval stations scattered along important sea routes to support those fleets. Put in its simplest terms, that amounts to commerce, ships and bases. China possesses the first component in abundance. It has built Asia’s largest indigenous navy, closing the technological gap separating the PLAN from competitors like the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in the process.
What’s missing is Mahan’s third component of sea power: naval stations, or the “pearls” in the so-called string. The debate over the nature and scope of China’s maritime ambitions in the Indian Ocean centers on the size, shape and quality of the pearls. Ships need to refuel and replenish stores every few days while underway. Yet Hainan Island, China’s closest seaport, lies too far away to supply logistical support to Indian Ocean patrols. As a result, Beijing needs some form of access to less distant ports if it is to dispatch squadrons to safeguard commercial shipping there.
Access can take many forms. Agreements providing for occasional port visits, replenishment and upkeep represent the humblest form of access. Indeed, governments routinely admit foreign shipping to their harbors on this basis. Singapore, to name one such welcoming state, has opened its port of Changi not just to the U.S. Navy, which stations a detachment of littoral combat ships there, but to other fleets—including China’s.
Permission from coastal states to construct permanent, potentially fortified strongholds to permanently forward-deployed units, on the other hand, is the most expansive option, as well as the most politically combustible for the host. Letting a foreign power build installations meant for wartime as well as peacetime pursuits heralds an alliance between the host government and the outsiders. Such an arrangement could entangle the host government in disputes that might not suit their interests. Such is the case with Japan and the United States, which long ago cast their lot together as allies. The U.S. Seventh Fleet calls Yokosuka and Sasebo home under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.
Intentions & Implementation
Whether Indian Ocean states would similarly tie their fates to China’s, exposing themselves to potential conflict with India or America, remains to be seen. But before even considering that possibility, two more immediate questions arise: What does Beijing want, and what types of access will it seek?
To date China’s Indian Ocean adventure has been a modest affair from a naval standpoint. In 2008, my longtime co-author Toshi Yoshihara and I assessed the state of China’s maritime ambitions in the Indian Ocean. We concluded that, by bankrolling seaport development in places like Gwadar, in western Pakistan, China was laying the groundwork for a future naval presence, creating options for itself should it someday see the need to exercise them. That same year, in a similar vein, we and another longtime colleague, Andrew Winner, argued that a U.S.-China-India strategic triangle was taking shape in the Indian Ocean. But the impetus toward conflict was weak on all three sides, leaving the prospective competitors with the time and political space to craft some sort of maritime entente.
What does Beijing want, and what types of access will it seek?
Such an entente remains possible. China has continued to lay the groundwork for a more robust Indian Ocean presence since 2008, financing infrastructure developments in seaports such as Gwadar; Colombo, in Sri Lanka; Mahe, in the Seychelles; and of course the latest project, in Djibouti. Such projects provide harbors for merchant and naval shipping to resupply, advancing China’s economic, diplomatic and military purposes in the region. In the process, such outreach helps Beijing amass goodwill with South Asian governments. In effect, Beijing has done favors for regional governments—favors it may be able to call in should it see the need for naval stations at sites Chinese engineers have developed. China now has options.
But in the current strategic environment, Beijing has minimal incentive to assemble a network of full-blown naval bases, which would entail the expense and strategic risk of diverting forces from East Asia. And so long as great-power relations do not take a turn toward competition and conflict, prompting China to bulk up its Indian Ocean forces, lesser port-access arrangements suffice. Nor is there anything especially worrisome about Beijing’s funding infrastructure in South Asia, or about occasional PLAN forays into regional waters. This is what blue-water navies do. If and when some government consents to full-scale PLAN bases, then it may be time to fret about a string of pearls—and adjust strategy to compensate. In the meantime, Beijing has every reason to court friendly governments, hedging against a downturn in relations, just as India and its friends have every reason to remain watchful.
This is largely where things stand today: wary coexistence coexists with hedging against the worst on the part of all potential antagonists. Nevertheless, the past decade has witnessed some heartening developments. Most noteworthy among these is the multinational counterpiracy mission in the Gulf of Aden. Since late 2008, an assortment of naval contingents—ranging from NATO and the European Union to the U.S.-led Combined Maritime Forces command—has patrolled a transit corridor through the gulf to ensure that merchant vessels pass unmolested.
A Pakistani soldier at the newly built Gwadar port, west of Karachi, Pakistan, March 20, 2007 (AP photo by Shakil Adil).
Flotillas from China and India, as well as other individual partners such as Russia, joined the expedition, although they declined to submit to foreign tactical or operational command. By most accounts the operation qualifies as a success. It has driven down Somali piracy, while the disparate contingents have coordinated their efforts smoothly and amicably. It also would seem to justify the need for a more permanent installation in Djibouti.
Is this simply a cover for China’s navy to amass experience at sustaining naval forces in waters remote from Chinese shores—experience it could put to work assembling a string of pearls? Of course. Peacetime operations help equip navies for combat. But neither the counterpiracy campaign nor intermittent PLAN probes into Indian Ocean waters with submarines—craft sure to rattle Indian nerves, considering the rudimentary state of the Indian navy anti-submarine capabilities—warrant alarm. Where Chinese interests go, China’s navy will follow. This is natural. While past behavior is no guarantee, how the PLAN conducts itself in encounters with foreign navies today remains the best predictor of future interactions.
And while China’s coercive use of sea power in the East and South China Seas does merit concern, Beijing appears to play by different, less confrontational rules in the waters west of the Indonesian archipelago. The jury thus remains out on whether India, China and America will piece together a seagoing entente in the Indian Ocean despite quarreling in the South China Sea. Nothing has foreclosed that possibility as of yet. Moreover, if China is pursuing a string of pearls, its efforts have done little to stifle India’s high-seas endeavors.
The View From India
But important as China’s intentions are in determining how things play out in the Indian Ocean, so too are India’s perceptions of those intentions. So what have Indian observers had to say about China’s string of pearls recently? As noted at the outset, the phrase has become common parlance. At the same time, most Indian commentators evince little panic at China’s increasingly visible presence in their backyard. Many of them see China’s martial endeavors as part of a larger grand strategy, involving not just naval and military but economic and diplomatic implements, which may or may not prove inimical to Indian interests.
Indian observers, it seems, also understand that India need not remain a passive bystander to outsiders’ encroachment in their home region. If Beijing is competing for influence in the Indian Ocean, New Delhi boasts resources of its own with which to compete. It need not submit meekly while China draws a string of pearls tight, smothering India’s rightful interests and aspirations.
Where Chinese interests go, China’s navy will follow.
Several strands of analysis stand out vis-à-vis the string of pearls. First of all, the geospatial dimension that gave rise to the metaphor still pervades Indian thinking. Though a full-blown naval base network remains mostly hypothetical, the prospect of Chinese geostrategic containment of India remains real.
Bharat Karnad articulates an extreme view of China’s strategy, depicting it as implacably hostile and largely India-centric. He sees recent trends in Chinese strategy toward the Indian Ocean—for instance, the so-called Maritime Silk Road initiative, which some Indians regard as an effort to rebrand the string of pearls—as Beijing’s way of “enveloping India in a geostrategic mesh.” Karnad also finds India suffering from a geostrategic deficit due to its innermost circle of neighbors being historically perceived as natural adversaries. That, says Karnad, has created a diplomatic and strategic “near abroad” that leaves New Delhi ill-equipped to cope with China’s string-of-pearls strategy.
If Indians take that strategy more or less as a given, their Chinese interlocutors—in 2015 as in 2005—fervently deny that Beijing entertains such aspirations. Last July, Atul Aneja, a reporter for The Hindu daily, observed that Chinese state media condemned as “groundless” Indian fears that Beijing was intent on acquiring a naval base in the Maldives. The Maldives’ denials were just as forceful. As Aneja pointed out, Chinese interlocutors emphasize that the phrase “string of pearls” was coined not by the Chinese, but by an American consultancy. In an August interview with Ajish P. Joy of The Week, China’s ambassador to India, Le Yucheng, likewise maintained that Chinese ventures in South Asia are “not against India and we have no hidden agenda. China does not have the so-called ‘string of pearls’ strategy to contain India.”
At the same time, Chinese analysts such as Fu Xiaoqiang of the China Institutes of Contemporary Relations argue that Indians must “get used to” a higher-profile Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean. According to Fu, Chinese overtures toward Indian Ocean countries “will become more normal with more and more Chinese enterprises going abroad.”
One could reasonably ask, of course—as skeptical Indians do—whether Chinese activities in the Indian Ocean add up to a string of pearls by another name. China, in other words, could distance itself from the string-of-pearls label while pursuing a strategy that amounts to the same thing.
It’s also worth pointing out that the string-of-pearls imagery has filtered into the wider Asian consciousness. Mentions of it are no longer confined to Indian observers, to Chinese disclaimers, or to South Asia specialists in the West. Pundits in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia evoked the metaphor in 2015, as did numerous observers from the Indian Ocean basin countries. Such acceptance provides a common vocabulary that could work in India’s favor should it decide to undertake a full-bore campaign to thwart China’s Indian Ocean strategy. If foreign interlocutors accept the premises behind the string of pearls, they may prove receptive to Indian appeals to resist it.
Chinese missile frigate Zhoushan at the Stonecutters Island base,
Hong Kong, Dec. 19, 2009 (AP photo by Vincent Yu).
Significantly, however, the concept has taken on a more multidimensional character since 2005. Then, it was framed as a military cordon. Today, many observers regard it as a Chinese grand strategy, combining political, economic and cultural dimensions alongside the martial component. Karnad, for instance, sees it in those terms, albeit casting the string of pearls in the worst possible light. Not all Indians consider China’s efforts as uniformly detrimental to their interests, however.
Writing in The Pioneer last June, for instance, Rinku Ghosh postulated that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” will knit the region together for mutual political, economic and cultural benefit. In this upbeat account of things, a Chinese string of pearls, whatever name it may go by, could be a blessing rather than a curse, ushering in an Asia where economic interconnectedness tamps down the propensity for conflict and war. Clearly, no consensus about China’s strategy yet prevails on the subcontinent.
India’s Ripostes
Disagreement about China’s intentions notwithstanding, Indians are increasingly conscious that New Delhi can deploy reciprocal strategies. With regard to power politics, Indian Ocean geography is nowhere near as complex as that of East Asia. Yet New Delhi controls one of the key strategic features: the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie north to south across the Western approaches to the Strait of Malacca. That makes the archipelago an ideal site for monitoring the comings and goings of PLAN task forces.
Suitably armed and backed up by the Indian navy, the islands could also bar Chinese access to the Indian Ocean. If Indian forces closed the narrow passages through the island chains, they could compel Chinese vessels to detour through one of the lesser straits that pierce the Indonesian archipelago, adding distance—and thus time, cost and hazard—to cruises bound for the Indian Ocean.
Small wonder Chinese analysts liken the Andamans and Nicobars to a “metal chain” impairing China’s use of sea routes vital to its economic prosperity. So New Delhi enjoys geostrategic options of its own. And the fact that it occupies the “interior lines” in the Indian Ocean region, placing powerful forces near likely trouble spots, constitutes a critical advantage. China, by contrast, must operate along distended “exterior lines” just to gain access to the region. It is no simple matter for a faraway great-power navy to overpower a fellow great-power navy—even a weaker one—in that navy’s home waters.
But power politics isn’t New Delhi’s only alternative. Wooing South Asian nations goes hand in hand with geostrategic competition. However, India’s complicated relations with its neighbors, combined with China’s active courtship of them through economic and security overtures, mean that its diplomatic prospects are mixed. On the positive side of the ledger, Iran offered India the rights to develop and operate the Iranian port of Chabahar, near the Pakistani port of Gwadar along Iran’s Arabian Sea coast. From a political standpoint, Tehran’s offer allows New Delhi to hint that it too can accumulate the makings of a string of pearls. From a material standpoint, it lets India threaten to station forces along Iranian shorelines—outflanking and one-upping any PLAN presence at Gwadar. Such gambits favor India, the natural hegemon of the Indian Ocean region.
Competitive interaction—the cycle of challenge and reply—thus promises to be the name of the Indo-Chinese great game in maritime Asia. If China pursues economic and naval expansion in the Indian Ocean, India can reply by “acting east,” as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged. In concrete terms, if the PLAN dispatches submarines and surface forces to the Indian Ocean, the Indian navy can take part in exercises and port visits in the Western Pacific—as indeed it has done from time to time under the aegis of the annual Malabar multinational exercises. If PLAN subs mount forays into South Asian waters, Indian navy subs could make their presence known in the South China Sea.
All of this is to be expected when a rising great power mounts an incipient naval presence in a fellow great power’s environs, necessarily eliciting a response. By and large, India has reacted calmly and maturely to apparent Chinese encroachment, and it is mulling its options carefully should the surroundings turn hostile. That bodes well for Indian purposes and power in the Indian Ocean, where competition seems certain, but conflict far from inevitable.
James Holmes is professor of strategy at the Naval War College, Newport, R.I., and co-author of “Indian Naval Strategy in the 21st Century.” The views voiced here are his alone.
China’s ‘String of Pearls’: Naval Rivalry or Entente in the Indian Ocean?
James R. Holmes Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Last week, Chinese engineers broke ground on what press accounts styled “China’s first overseas naval base” in Djibouti. That is a big deal. Djibouti lies in East Africa along the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the waterway that connects the western Indian Ocean with the Red Sea. It also adjoins the patrol grounds for the Gulf of Aden counterpiracy mission, in which China’s navy has taken part since 2009. In short, it occupies strategic real estate.
China, however, will not be the lone occupant of the seaport. Djibouti is also home to other foreign logistics hubs: The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operates a facility there, for instance, as does the U.S. Navy. But does the Chinese installation mark a shift in Beijing’s naval outlook? Is Djibouti indeed an overseas naval base, the first in the “string of pearls” that has occasioned so much commentary over the past decade?
The image of a Chinese string of pearls—a putative network of naval bases or lesser port facilities encircling India from the sea and fettering New Delhi’s ambitions—has become a fixture in India’s strategic lexicon. The concept made its debut in 2005, when an Indian participant coined the phrase during a 2004 Booz Allen study for the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Distinguished Western and Indian commentators subsequently made it a staple of debates about China’s future naval posture in the Indian Ocean and how to respond to it.
Now that a decade has passed, and in light of the developments in Djibouti and elsewhere, it’s worth revisiting what commentators have been saying about the string of pearls more recently. To what extent does the language persist? How do observers interpret it? And does it mold policy in New Delhi and elsewhere in South Asia? These are questions worth pondering, as the answers to them will have implications for the future of great-power naval relations in the region, and perhaps beyond.
A keyword search of relevant news and commentary databases reveals that of the nearly 1,000 mentions of the term since 2005, around 200 appeared in 2015 alone. Brute numbers don’t prove that an idea is on everyone’s lips, but they do suggest that the concept of a string of pearls has lost none of its resonance with regional audiences. Indeed, writers who raise the subject do so matter-of-factly. They take it for granted.
To be sure, the concept is not universally accepted as a description of China’s strategy or intentions. But few discount the possibility of such a Chinese strategy altogether, however much they disagree about whether it will take a malignant or more benign form. Just as Cold War commentators embraced the basic logic of containment while feuding among themselves about how to apply it, so observers of China’s naval emergence, particularly Indian observers, accept the idea of a string of pearls while differing on how to construe and respond to it.
Defining Terms
In terms of strategic logic, the string of pearls refers to Beijing’s efforts to negotiate limited seaport access or full-fledged basing rights with strategically located coastal and island states around the Indian Ocean basin, thereby positioning China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) astride sea lanes through which raw materials and finished goods transit. Such an enterprise may, or may not, prove troublesome for India.
A string of pearls represents a way to bolster China’s strategic position in important waterways under a variety of circumstances, from an utterly “permissive” Indian Ocean theater where few threats manifest themselves, to one on the brink of maritime war. Such a posture, then, could express itself in many ways depending on Beijing’s appraisal of interests, friends and foes, and on naval resources available.
Beijing, in other words, might deploy defensive measures to backstop its interests so long as the strategic setting remains benign. A token naval presence supported by temporary port visits for fuel and supplies may do. Should matters take a turn for the worse, China’s leadership may see the need for more forceful, offensive-minded measures, such as a PLAN squadron sized for battle and permanently homeported at Indian Ocean bases.
Cultivating good ties with governments prepared to offer access to their seaports is only prudent. It meets China’s needs for the present while laying the foundation for something bigger should circumstances warrant. That’s what militaries exist to do: furnish political leaders with options.
China has taken its cue in part from Alfred Thayer Mahan, the pre-eminent sea-power theorist of the late 19th century and the modern U.S. Navy’s intellectual founder.
Chinese strategists, moreover, are theoretically minded. They read, interpret and try to harness classic works about strategy to meet China’s needs. How does a rising great power that vacated the oceans centuries ago learn how to build up sea power? By studying successful models. The U.S. Navy has been arguably the world’s most successful model for a century now, ever since Congress approved a Naval Expansion Act in 1916, designed to field “a navy second to none.”
China, accordingly, has taken its cue in part from Alfred Thayer Mahan, the pre-eminent sea-power theorist of the late 19th century and the modern U.S. Navy’s intellectual founder. Chinese strategists have woven a Mahanian strand into their deliberations, fashioning a strategy best described as an amalgam of Western and Chinese concepts about marine endeavors. Mahan’s approach, in which commerce is king, defines sea power in terms sure to appeal to contemporary China. For Mahan, a people’s propensity to trade is the chief determinant of its maritime fortunes. Commercial access to important theaters constitutes the uppermost purpose of sea power. Political and military access are mere enablers.
In more concrete terms, Mahan declares that sea power rests on three pillars: industrial production at home and markets overseas; merchant and naval fleets; and naval stations scattered along important sea routes to support those fleets. Put in its simplest terms, that amounts to commerce, ships and bases. China possesses the first component in abundance. It has built Asia’s largest indigenous navy, closing the technological gap separating the PLAN from competitors like the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in the process.
What’s missing is Mahan’s third component of sea power: naval stations, or the “pearls” in the so-called string. The debate over the nature and scope of China’s maritime ambitions in the Indian Ocean centers on the size, shape and quality of the pearls. Ships need to refuel and replenish stores every few days while underway. Yet Hainan Island, China’s closest seaport, lies too far away to supply logistical support to Indian Ocean patrols. As a result, Beijing needs some form of access to less distant ports if it is to dispatch squadrons to safeguard commercial shipping there.
Access can take many forms. Agreements providing for occasional port visits, replenishment and upkeep represent the humblest form of access. Indeed, governments routinely admit foreign shipping to their harbors on this basis. Singapore, to name one such welcoming state, has opened its port of Changi not just to the U.S. Navy, which stations a detachment of littoral combat ships there, but to other fleets—including China’s.
Permission from coastal states to construct permanent, potentially fortified strongholds to permanently forward-deployed units, on the other hand, is the most expansive option, as well as the most politically combustible for the host. Letting a foreign power build installations meant for wartime as well as peacetime pursuits heralds an alliance between the host government and the outsiders. Such an arrangement could entangle the host government in disputes that might not suit their interests. Such is the case with Japan and the United States, which long ago cast their lot together as allies. The U.S. Seventh Fleet calls Yokosuka and Sasebo home under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.
Intentions & Implementation
Whether Indian Ocean states would similarly tie their fates to China’s, exposing themselves to potential conflict with India or America, remains to be seen. But before even considering that possibility, two more immediate questions arise: What does Beijing want, and what types of access will it seek?
To date China’s Indian Ocean adventure has been a modest affair from a naval standpoint. In 2008, my longtime co-author Toshi Yoshihara and I assessed the state of China’s maritime ambitions in the Indian Ocean. We concluded that, by bankrolling seaport development in places like Gwadar, in western Pakistan, China was laying the groundwork for a future naval presence, creating options for itself should it someday see the need to exercise them. That same year, in a similar vein, we and another longtime colleague, Andrew Winner, argued that a U.S.-China-India strategic triangle was taking shape in the Indian Ocean. But the impetus toward conflict was weak on all three sides, leaving the prospective competitors with the time and political space to craft some sort of maritime entente.
What does Beijing want, and what types of access will it seek?
Such an entente remains possible. China has continued to lay the groundwork for a more robust Indian Ocean presence since 2008, financing infrastructure developments in seaports such as Gwadar; Colombo, in Sri Lanka; Mahe, in the Seychelles; and of course the latest project, in Djibouti. Such projects provide harbors for merchant and naval shipping to resupply, advancing China’s economic, diplomatic and military purposes in the region. In the process, such outreach helps Beijing amass goodwill with South Asian governments. In effect, Beijing has done favors for regional governments—favors it may be able to call in should it see the need for naval stations at sites Chinese engineers have developed. China now has options.
But in the current strategic environment, Beijing has minimal incentive to assemble a network of full-blown naval bases, which would entail the expense and strategic risk of diverting forces from East Asia. And so long as great-power relations do not take a turn toward competition and conflict, prompting China to bulk up its Indian Ocean forces, lesser port-access arrangements suffice. Nor is there anything especially worrisome about Beijing’s funding infrastructure in South Asia, or about occasional PLAN forays into regional waters. This is what blue-water navies do. If and when some government consents to full-scale PLAN bases, then it may be time to fret about a string of pearls—and adjust strategy to compensate. In the meantime, Beijing has every reason to court friendly governments, hedging against a downturn in relations, just as India and its friends have every reason to remain watchful.
This is largely where things stand today: wary coexistence coexists with hedging against the worst on the part of all potential antagonists. Nevertheless, the past decade has witnessed some heartening developments. Most noteworthy among these is the multinational counterpiracy mission in the Gulf of Aden. Since late 2008, an assortment of naval contingents—ranging from NATO and the European Union to the U.S.-led Combined Maritime Forces command—has patrolled a transit corridor through the gulf to ensure that merchant vessels pass unmolested.
A Pakistani soldier at the newly built Gwadar port, west of Karachi, Pakistan, March 20, 2007 (AP photo by Shakil Adil).
Flotillas from China and India, as well as other individual partners such as Russia, joined the expedition, although they declined to submit to foreign tactical or operational command. By most accounts the operation qualifies as a success. It has driven down Somali piracy, while the disparate contingents have coordinated their efforts smoothly and amicably. It also would seem to justify the need for a more permanent installation in Djibouti.
Is this simply a cover for China’s navy to amass experience at sustaining naval forces in waters remote from Chinese shores—experience it could put to work assembling a string of pearls? Of course. Peacetime operations help equip navies for combat. But neither the counterpiracy campaign nor intermittent PLAN probes into Indian Ocean waters with submarines—craft sure to rattle Indian nerves, considering the rudimentary state of the Indian navy anti-submarine capabilities—warrant alarm. Where Chinese interests go, China’s navy will follow. This is natural. While past behavior is no guarantee, how the PLAN conducts itself in encounters with foreign navies today remains the best predictor of future interactions.
And while China’s coercive use of sea power in the East and South China Seas does merit concern, Beijing appears to play by different, less confrontational rules in the waters west of the Indonesian archipelago. The jury thus remains out on whether India, China and America will piece together a seagoing entente in the Indian Ocean despite quarreling in the South China Sea. Nothing has foreclosed that possibility as of yet. Moreover, if China is pursuing a string of pearls, its efforts have done little to stifle India’s high-seas endeavors.
The View From India
But important as China’s intentions are in determining how things play out in the Indian Ocean, so too are India’s perceptions of those intentions. So what have Indian observers had to say about China’s string of pearls recently? As noted at the outset, the phrase has become common parlance. At the same time, most Indian commentators evince little panic at China’s increasingly visible presence in their backyard. Many of them see China’s martial endeavors as part of a larger grand strategy, involving not just naval and military but economic and diplomatic implements, which may or may not prove inimical to Indian interests.
Indian observers, it seems, also understand that India need not remain a passive bystander to outsiders’ encroachment in their home region. If Beijing is competing for influence in the Indian Ocean, New Delhi boasts resources of its own with which to compete. It need not submit meekly while China draws a string of pearls tight, smothering India’s rightful interests and aspirations.
Where Chinese interests go, China’s navy will follow.
Several strands of analysis stand out vis-à-vis the string of pearls. First of all, the geospatial dimension that gave rise to the metaphor still pervades Indian thinking. Though a full-blown naval base network remains mostly hypothetical, the prospect of Chinese geostrategic containment of India remains real.
Bharat Karnad articulates an extreme view of China’s strategy, depicting it as implacably hostile and largely India-centric. He sees recent trends in Chinese strategy toward the Indian Ocean—for instance, the so-called Maritime Silk Road initiative, which some Indians regard as an effort to rebrand the string of pearls—as Beijing’s way of “enveloping India in a geostrategic mesh.” Karnad also finds India suffering from a geostrategic deficit due to its innermost circle of neighbors being historically perceived as natural adversaries. That, says Karnad, has created a diplomatic and strategic “near abroad” that leaves New Delhi ill-equipped to cope with China’s string-of-pearls strategy.
If Indians take that strategy more or less as a given, their Chinese interlocutors—in 2015 as in 2005—fervently deny that Beijing entertains such aspirations. Last July, Atul Aneja, a reporter for The Hindu daily, observed that Chinese state media condemned as “groundless” Indian fears that Beijing was intent on acquiring a naval base in the Maldives. The Maldives’ denials were just as forceful. As Aneja pointed out, Chinese interlocutors emphasize that the phrase “string of pearls” was coined not by the Chinese, but by an American consultancy. In an August interview with Ajish P. Joy of The Week, China’s ambassador to India, Le Yucheng, likewise maintained that Chinese ventures in South Asia are “not against India and we have no hidden agenda. China does not have the so-called ‘string of pearls’ strategy to contain India.”
At the same time, Chinese analysts such as Fu Xiaoqiang of the China Institutes of Contemporary Relations argue that Indians must “get used to” a higher-profile Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean. According to Fu, Chinese overtures toward Indian Ocean countries “will become more normal with more and more Chinese enterprises going abroad.”
One could reasonably ask, of course—as skeptical Indians do—whether Chinese activities in the Indian Ocean add up to a string of pearls by another name. China, in other words, could distance itself from the string-of-pearls label while pursuing a strategy that amounts to the same thing.
It’s also worth pointing out that the string-of-pearls imagery has filtered into the wider Asian consciousness. Mentions of it are no longer confined to Indian observers, to Chinese disclaimers, or to South Asia specialists in the West. Pundits in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia evoked the metaphor in 2015, as did numerous observers from the Indian Ocean basin countries. Such acceptance provides a common vocabulary that could work in India’s favor should it decide to undertake a full-bore campaign to thwart China’s Indian Ocean strategy. If foreign interlocutors accept the premises behind the string of pearls, they may prove receptive to Indian appeals to resist it.
Chinese missile frigate Zhoushan at the Stonecutters Island base,
Hong Kong, Dec. 19, 2009 (AP photo by Vincent Yu).
Significantly, however, the concept has taken on a more multidimensional character since 2005. Then, it was framed as a military cordon. Today, many observers regard it as a Chinese grand strategy, combining political, economic and cultural dimensions alongside the martial component. Karnad, for instance, sees it in those terms, albeit casting the string of pearls in the worst possible light. Not all Indians consider China’s efforts as uniformly detrimental to their interests, however.
Writing in The Pioneer last June, for instance, Rinku Ghosh postulated that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” will knit the region together for mutual political, economic and cultural benefit. In this upbeat account of things, a Chinese string of pearls, whatever name it may go by, could be a blessing rather than a curse, ushering in an Asia where economic interconnectedness tamps down the propensity for conflict and war. Clearly, no consensus about China’s strategy yet prevails on the subcontinent.
India’s Ripostes
Disagreement about China’s intentions notwithstanding, Indians are increasingly conscious that New Delhi can deploy reciprocal strategies. With regard to power politics, Indian Ocean geography is nowhere near as complex as that of East Asia. Yet New Delhi controls one of the key strategic features: the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie north to south across the Western approaches to the Strait of Malacca. That makes the archipelago an ideal site for monitoring the comings and goings of PLAN task forces.
Suitably armed and backed up by the Indian navy, the islands could also bar Chinese access to the Indian Ocean. If Indian forces closed the narrow passages through the island chains, they could compel Chinese vessels to detour through one of the lesser straits that pierce the Indonesian archipelago, adding distance—and thus time, cost and hazard—to cruises bound for the Indian Ocean.
Small wonder Chinese analysts liken the Andamans and Nicobars to a “metal chain” impairing China’s use of sea routes vital to its economic prosperity. So New Delhi enjoys geostrategic options of its own. And the fact that it occupies the “interior lines” in the Indian Ocean region, placing powerful forces near likely trouble spots, constitutes a critical advantage. China, by contrast, must operate along distended “exterior lines” just to gain access to the region. It is no simple matter for a faraway great-power navy to overpower a fellow great-power navy—even a weaker one—in that navy’s home waters.
But power politics isn’t New Delhi’s only alternative. Wooing South Asian nations goes hand in hand with geostrategic competition. However, India’s complicated relations with its neighbors, combined with China’s active courtship of them through economic and security overtures, mean that its diplomatic prospects are mixed. On the positive side of the ledger, Iran offered India the rights to develop and operate the Iranian port of Chabahar, near the Pakistani port of Gwadar along Iran’s Arabian Sea coast. From a political standpoint, Tehran’s offer allows New Delhi to hint that it too can accumulate the makings of a string of pearls. From a material standpoint, it lets India threaten to station forces along Iranian shorelines—outflanking and one-upping any PLAN presence at Gwadar. Such gambits favor India, the natural hegemon of the Indian Ocean region.
Competitive interaction—the cycle of challenge and reply—thus promises to be the name of the Indo-Chinese great game in maritime Asia. If China pursues economic and naval expansion in the Indian Ocean, India can reply by “acting east,” as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged. In concrete terms, if the PLAN dispatches submarines and surface forces to the Indian Ocean, the Indian navy can take part in exercises and port visits in the Western Pacific—as indeed it has done from time to time under the aegis of the annual Malabar multinational exercises. If PLAN subs mount forays into South Asian waters, Indian navy subs could make their presence known in the South China Sea.
All of this is to be expected when a rising great power mounts an incipient naval presence in a fellow great power’s environs, necessarily eliciting a response. By and large, India has reacted calmly and maturely to apparent Chinese encroachment, and it is mulling its options carefully should the surroundings turn hostile. That bodes well for Indian purposes and power in the Indian Ocean, where competition seems certain, but conflict far from inevitable.
James Holmes is professor of strategy at the Naval War College, Newport, R.I., and co-author of “Indian Naval Strategy in the 21st Century.” The views voiced here are his alone.
China’s ‘String of Pearls’: Naval Rivalry or Entente in the Indian Ocean?
