Concluding Remarks and Summary of Results

Abstract

China’s naval build-up, this study has found, has indeed been remarkable compared with earlier historical periods. It is almost certainly bound to pick up speed and to thus present the Asia Pacific region with new strategic challenges. In order to avoid misconceptions on all sides, many more rational analyses of empirical data are needed, ideally from a wider range of regional backgrounds and viewpoints than have been represented so far in the English-language scholarly discourse. In light of sometimes blatantly contradictory interpretations of the exact same evidence, the issue of methodology is of prime importance. One major aim of this study, therefore, was to present a set of analytical tools that would allow for a transparent evaluation of China’s ongoing naval modernization according to explicit criteria. This study argues that structural/dependency and historical/systemic approaches should be combined with the predominant realist and constructivist approaches in order to capture more characteristics of China’s naval rise, including strategic vulnerability and dependency issues arising from imbalances in the international arms trade, and in order to map China’s naval modernization against that of its regional neighbors and other rising powers in the world.

The sleep of reason produces monsters.

—Francisco de Goya, ca. 1799