National Interest – James Holmes says that leaving the port of Darwin in Chinese hands would bestow on Beijing a golden opportunity to make mischief for Australia and its allies.

China Maritime Studies Institute – Xi Jinping has played a direct and active role in China’s naval buildup. He is China’s first great navalist statesman, the world’s greatest navalist leader today, and among the world’s greatest navalist statesmen in modern history.

Notwithstanding major advances in ships, submarines, aircraft, and other hardware, Chinese military leaders believe that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) continues to lag behind in human factors.

Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the PLAN has dismissed (or is rumored to have dismissed) eleven flag officers. Beyond combating outright dysfunction, these removals are intended to prevent potential disloyalty and factionalism, centralize power, and further modernization and warfighting goals.

These high-profile dismissals have had no apparent impact on PLAN operational capabilities, which continue to improve at a remarkable rate. From the Taiwan Strait to the “distant oceans” (远洋), the service is present daily and visible internationally, particularly its surface fleet, indicating reliability, trust, and growing responsibilities and capabilities.

Since 2008, the PLAN’s surface fleet has almost doubled. Despite being projected to exceed 400 ships by the end of 2025, China’s Navy continues to successfully crew, operate, and train with them.

China’s Navy draws on a massive, sufficiently-capable talent pool and education system. Provincial-level compulsory conscription quotas avoid individual compellence thanks to high levels of volunteerism.

Given the demands of increasingly frequent and intense training and missions—often with the austere privations of submarines or remote installations—mental health support is increasingly prioritized. Nevertheless, it remains a weakness for China’s Navy, which views U.S. care as the gold standard yet has treated counseling as a “political” issue.

China’s Naval Command College in Nanjing—the Naval War College’s closest equivalent—educates its students differently from its counterpart in Newport by focusing on naval operations and warfighting for top-priority scenarios.

The PLAN enjoys unique human capital advantages: educational partnerships as early as elementary school; personal data compiled centrally, available and utilizable without privacy restriction; eldercare benefits; and warfighting-focused naval education.

PLAN sources perceive weaknesses in lack of talent for new-domain operations and advanced S&T given rising demand in these burgeoning areas; recruitment and training pipeline supply-demand imbalance and talent-skills mismatches; officers’ overly narrow early-career experience and subsequent aging out of cutting-edge relevance; and youths’ declining commitment to the Communist system.

Despite being an improvement on its Soviet progenitor, China’s Political Commissar system could represent a critical weakness, causing real-time decision-making bottlenecks or distraction, particularly in crisis or conflict.

Global Times – China’s domestically built 10,000-ton-class hospital ship, the Auspicious Ark, conducted a multi-element, full-process medical rescue drill in a certain area of the Yellow Sea recently, the official Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) media reported on Monday. An expert told the Global Times that this indicates the new ship has been commissioned into the navy of the PLA Northern Theater Command, completing the strategic deployment of hospital ships across the PLA’s Eastern, Southern and Northern theater commands.

War on the Rocks – Has Beijing found a new “assassin’s mace” to keep the U.S. military out of a fight over Taiwan?

China Maritime Studies Institute – A quick summary of this conference held earlier this month.

China Maritime Studies Institute – The sky is high, the lake is vast, and ghosts are lurking.

BBC – At just 37 hectares, the Philippines-controlled island of Pagasa – or “hope” – is barely big enough to live on. There is almost nothing there.

The 300 or so inhabitants live in a cluster of small, wooden houses. They fish in the clear, turquoise waters, and grow what vegetables they can in the sandy ground.

But they are not alone in these disputed waters: just off shore, to the west, lies an armada of ships.

These are all Chinese, from the navy, the coastguard or the so-called maritime militia – large fishing vessels repurposed to maintain Chinese dominance of this sea. As our plane approached the island we counted at least 20.

CTV News –  China has long sought to intimidate Taiwan with its massive navy, air force and the world’s largest standing army, but it’s mere dinghies that are now causing the most consternation.

War on the Rocks – Although American naval forces would likely come into play to counter a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, America’s most likely immediate response option is strategic airlift of vital supplies. The successful Berlin Airlift in the earliest phase of the Cold War offers both potential objectives and serious challenges of carrying out such a mission.

Naval News – China continues to innovate in the underwater arena. A fresh image reveals one of its latest creations, an extra-large underwater drone (XLUUV). The drone is likely armed with torpedoes, mines or missiles, setting it apart from Western types.

China Maritime Studies Institute – As China continues to rise as a global sea power, its maritime strategy continues to evolve. Among these critical evolutions is one of the People’s Liberation Army’s naval special operations forces’ most elite units: the Sea Dragons. A small yet highly specialized unit, the Sea Dragons entered the global spotlight and international consciousness with the 2018 film Operation Red Sea, raising several questions for Chinese naval experts. What does Chinese military strategy and doctrine require of special forces, and specifically naval SOF, to be able to accomplish the mission, particularly along the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea? What are their capabilities and limitations? What real-world experience do they have and how might they be employed in the future? This volume attempts to answer those questions and many more regarding one of China’s more enigmatic units and its role in future peacetime and low-intensity conflicts.

1945 – The People’s Republic of China (PRC) just fielded the world’s largest space support ship by far. 

The Atlantic Council – This paper examines the potential for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to exploit its growing network of overseas ports and bases to challenge control of the seas in a conventional war with the United States. Security concerns with Chinese ownership of overseas ports fall into three main categories. First, China collects vast amounts of intelligence via its port network. Second, it could use that intelligence and its control of key ports and piers to disrupt US shipments during wartime. Finally, China could leverage these ports to pre-position weapons, ammunition, and equipment to resupply its warships and armed merchants or rapidly establish anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) nodes near major maritime choke points. In short, China could exploit this network to challenge the sea control essential to US success in an armed conflict.

Center for Maritime Security – A report published this March by the African Center for Strategic Studies revealed China’s large and growing influence in Africa’s port industry. According to the report, state-backed Chinese firms have ownership stakes in a third of African ports, with the largest portion of those ports being in West Africa. Even more alarmingly for the United States, many of these ports have already been used to house People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships, conduct military exercises, and, in one case, host a Chinese naval base. A large Chinese presence in West African ports poses a security threat to the United States because it increases the PLAN’s presence in the Atlantic, which is in the United States’ direct security periphery and is less defensible than the Pacific.  

BBC – The Chinese coastguard has seized a tiny sandbank in the South China Sea, state media has reported, in an escalation of a regional dispute with the Philippines.

China Maritime Studies Institute – Collecting and reporting maritime intelligence is a core mission of China’s maritime militia. Militia forces help fill in “blind spots” (补盲) for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and enhance its situational awareness. They are widely dispersed in the waters of greatest strategic and operational importance to Beijing, available in large numbers, extremely familiar with the operating environment, and, the PLA believes, less provocative than other military instruments.

China Maritime Studies Institute – “Damage control” (sunhai kongzhi, or just sunguan) refers to measures and actions taken by a warship for the prevention, control, and elimination of damage in order to maintain or recover its vitality (shengmingli). If a warship suffers an accident, this could result in major casualties among the crew and cause damage to the ship’s equipment; it might also impact the ship’s vitality. The crew’s normal level of damage control training determines the success or failure of damage control. In order to fully leverage the active role of crew members in damage control and fully leverage the effectiveness of damage control, a scientific and rational damage control plan must be prepared. The damage control plan resolves questions related to the deployment and responsibilities of personnel during the damage control process, according to certain principals and requirements.

China Daily – The involvement of aircraft carrier groups in military deterrence operations around Taiwan can completely cut off the escape routes for “Taiwan independence” separatist forces and the channels for external forces attempting to aid them, a scholar from the People’s Liberation Army said on Wednesday.

China Maritime Studies Institute – Nearly 80 years have passed since the end of World War Two, and during this time the U.S. Navy has always ranked as the number one navy in the world, mainly thanks to support from America’s enormous national power. But for the past ten years or so, with the great decline of America’s economy, the U.S. Navy has had to face more and more problems. For example, the service lives of ships have grown longer and longer. There has been a serious lack of repairs and maintenance work. The speed of shipbuilding has noticeably slowed. And [the U.S. Navy’s] newest class of aircraft carrier was not operational for five years after it was launched. These problems indicate that the U.S. Navy is in a state of exhaustion and will find it difficult to handle all manner of potential confrontations and war in the 21st century.

USNI News – The Chinese aircraft carrier CNS Shandong made its first deployment to the Western Pacific for 2025 and was a major unit in Tuesday’s military drill targeted at intimidating Taiwan Tuesday, according to Beijing officials.

Center for Maritime Strategy – China’s naval modernization is no accident—it is the result of a deliberate, Mahanian strategy that converts economic might into maritime dominance. Beijing’s methodical approach to securing trade routes, building a modern fleet, and extending its strategic reach stands in stark contrast to America’s fragmented and reactive posture. The stakes are clear: if the United States fails to reclaim its focus on sea power, it risks ceding its historic role as the guardian of the global maritime order. In the new era of great-power competition, the command of the seas is not merely a military objective; it is the foundation of national power and global stability. The United States must remember that, as Mahan taught, great nations must not only float with the tide of history—they must command the waves.

Global Times – In response to four questions raised by journalists on the recent exercises by Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy warships in international waters near Australia and New Zealand, including the two countries’ claims that China did not notify them in time, a Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson on Thursday reiterated that the PLA Navy flotilla’s activities completely conform to international law. He responded by asking if Australia would send notifications in advance when it conducts military operations near China.

War on the Rocks – For much of the last quarter of a century, the Sino-U.S. rivalry was largely confined to East Asia. Recently, however, there is an increasing amount of competition between Washington and Beijing in the South Pacific. However, I find that America and China are playing different games. China’s game is centered more on elite capture, the establishment of diplomatic relations, and various infrastructure projects. The United States has been focused on the development of human capital and working with these small island nations through Australia and New Zealand.

CSIS – China has emerged as the undisputed leader of the global shipbuilding industry. Over 300 shipyards dot China’s seaboard, churning out more than half of the world’s commercial vessels each year. These shipyards build the merchant ships that power global trade, but many are also charged with building China’s rapidly expanding navy.  

Foreign companies have poured billions of dollars of revenue and transferred key technologies into these dual-use shipyards, accelerating China’s naval modernization. In underwriting the growth of China’s military and economic power, they risk marginalizing U.S. and allied competitiveness in a key industry and undermining peace and security in the Indo-Pacific. 

China Maritime Studies Institute – Considering these landing barges in the context of other developments related to amphibious operations suggests the PLA may have significantly advanced its timetable to have sufficient capabilities to conduct a large-scale cross-strait operation against Taiwan in accordance with Xi Jinping’s 2027 centennial military building goal.