Chinese Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) officials long recognized the imperative of building naval forces as a check against piracy and foreign threats.[1] Beginning in the 1860s, an appreciation for “self-strengthening” (自强) at sea deepened, yielding an impressive naval order of battle.[2] By 1890, when Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History in the United States, the leaders of the Imperial Chinese Navy (ICN) could already look with satisfaction on a fleet of armored battleships, protected cruisers, and torpedo boats backed by domestic shipyards and naval academies. The North Sea Fleet alone–as People’s Republic of China (PRC) propagandistic films today still note–was not only preponderant in its region, but it was also “even larger than the U.S. Navy.”[3] Unfortunately for the Chinese, this materially awesome power–strong ships with powerful cannon (船坚炮利)–was functionally brittle. Within four years of its apogee, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) destroyed or captured the Chinese North Sea Fleet in its entirety during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895).[4]
Historians have long debated the proximate and ultimate causes of the ICN’s calamitous defeat.[5] The stakes of this question were (and are) high, given its relevance to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty (1912) and what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls “the Century of National Humiliation” (百年国耻, 1839-1949). Beyond tactics or logistics, this essay ties the poor performance of the ICN to deeper levels of strategic causation: to questions of strategic employment, force design, geostrategy, and most fundamentally institutional adaptation. From the First Opium War (1839-1842) to the Sino-Japanese War, Chinese navy builders faced four contradictions that stymied their ambitions. Alongside an external security dilemma with foreign powers that spurred investments in maritime defense, Qing naval strategy confronted four internal strategic dilemmas: between “application” and “root,” continental and maritime frontiers, centralization and regionalism, and finally, symmetrical and asymmetrical technologies. An inability to reconcile those dilemmas undermined Chinese naval power from the start and may well do so again as the PRC’s “New Navy” goes to sea in the 2020s.[6]
Root and Application
Most foundationally, advocates of Chinese naval expansion in the nineteenth century faced the challenge of how to import foreign knowledge and technology without sacrificing the core of Chinese civilization. Given the fantastic power of industrial machines, something clearly had to be learned from the West, but what and how much? Chinese officials pursuing “Wealth and Power” (富强) wrestled with this question for more than a century (and to an extent still do so today).[7] Responding to the shock of defeat in the First Opium War, the scholar official Wei Yuan articulated a formula for China’s self-strengthening that attempted to strike a balance. He argued that the Chinese should “study foreign techniques in order to control the foreigners” (师夷长技以制夷).[8] China would have to adopt the artefacts of the Western world in order to preserve sovereignty, but not necessarily foreign values. Wei and subsequent reformers sensed that it would benefit China very little if in appropriating “foreign techniques” the Chinese mortgaged away their distinctiveness as a civilization. Another official, Feng Guifen, refined Wei’s position in 1861, arguing that reformers should use “Chinese knowledge for the root, and western knowledge for the application” (中学为体西学为用); watchwords of subsequent Chinese policy debates.[9] In recent years, historians have textured this formula by describing a kind of traditional/modern or Chinese/foreign “hybridity” (rather than polarity) running through Chinese attitudes about science, medicine, and technology.[10] But as late as 1898, Zhang Zhidong–a leading military official–was still empathic about the application/root bifurcation, arguing that, “scholars today must master the [Chinese] classics first” so as to preserve Chinese culture and society.[11] Note that a preference for “Chinese knowledge” sustained the Imperial Examination system until 1905.
While rhetorically elegant, the balance between “root and application” was an impediment to Chinese naval development. The Chinese could acquire hardware from foreign shipyards, and even build ships and coastal defenses domestically, but cultivating sufficient human talent to use those weapons was a far greater hurdle. Skill and expertise with industrial technology required more than mastering mechanical appliances. It meant engaging with underlying systems of knowledge and science. Without that expertise, the Chinese would be forever dependent on machines and the foreigners that could build and maintain them.
Leaders who, by the 1880s, appreciated (or at least expressed) the need to learn scientific principles–like Zuo Zongtang and Li Hongzhang–had trouble translating their initiatives into changes in institutional culture.[12] At a minimum, the demands of “root and application” distorted what would today be called “talent management.” Military entrance examinations that sorted talent first through knowledge of classical Chinese texts were ill-suited to the task of modern technical education–even if they helped to preserve the distinctiveness of Chinese civilization. Competition with the Imperial Examination system curtailed the number and quality of applicants to regional military academies.[13] Confucian ideals of reciprocity and propriety further “disesteemed” military service as disreputable or vulgar.[14] Students returning from the United States and Europe with new skills faced xenophobic skepticism or outright hostility from Chinese officials.[15] All these biases made it exceedingly difficult to find or cultivate enough Chinese with the root knowledge necessary to use warships.
As an addendum, a word on the strategic sense of “Chinese Conservatism.”[16] It is easy to ridicule Chinese reformers as reactionary or obstinate, clinging to ancient texts and rejecting real change in order to protect their own positions in the existing regime. After the Sino-Japanese War, observers and historians–in and outside of China–caricatured “Chinese” or “Confucian” conservatism as a kind of strategic culture hostile to military power and institutional adaptation. On their own terms, however, most Qing-era Chinese could frame the limitations of their training and personnel system(s) as a mark of success. The point of a navy was to defend China, its territorial sovereignty, and its values. If building such a force required Chinese officials to repudiate their own culture, why bother with “strong ships and powerful cannon” at all? What use are ways and means, if those ways and means are hostile to one’s ultimate ends?
Concentration and Regionalization
Regionalism–a sense of parochial loyalty, usually to a province–further hampered Chinese naval organization and expansion. Throughout the self-strengthening period a “Grand Council” (军机处) composed primarily of ethnic Manchus reported directly to the emperor on matters of imperial security, but in reality decisions about fleet design and acquisitions took place among Han Chinese officials in the provinces. Arsenals and shipyards relied on the patronage of these provincial governors, making consistency of effort a persistent irritation. The quality of naval hardware varied, following the energies or attentions of local leaders. Coordination between regions was still more challenging. Northern forces were reluctant to assist those in the South and vice versa. That sort of regional fragmentation had disastrous implications for fleet design and deployment during the Sino-French (1883-1885) and Sino-Japanese Wars (1894-1895).
Ironically, the regional character of Chinese self-strengthening began as a successful experiment. Military regionalism was a calculated and likely necessary response to internal rebellions–above all the Taiping War (1850-1864). Unlike contemporaneous wars of “national consolidation,” around the world, for China victory against the Taipings came at the cost of the Qing Empire’s fragmentation.[17] In 1865, for example, the United States defeated the Confederacy, and won a nation state united by a federal political system, railroads, and telegraphs. Facing their own army of Southern rebels–the Taiping–Chinese officials took a different tact. Instead of centralizing their forces, Chinese officers discovered that their best troops were regionally organized by provincial commanders. Army units recruited locally from Anhui or Hunan were most cohesive and therefore militarily effective. Combat motivation–as it so often is–was a function of geographic loyalty. By 1864, such units were strong enough to put down the Taiping Rebellion. But that then left a recursive problem: how to manage regional armies and powerbrokers that were now both strong and attenuated from central control?[18]
Most damagingly for the Chinese navy, patterns of regionalism resulted in divided Northern and Southern Fleets, augmented by forces on the Yangtze River and in Guangdong. These fleets were geographically aligned and struggled to integrate as a joint force for political reasons. For most of late-Qing history it is more appropriate to speak of “Chinese navies” in different regions than it is to imagine a unified, imperial whole. During the Sino-French War, French forces destroyed the Chinese fleet at Fuzhou while forces in the north avoided combat. Leaders of the North Sea Fleet came under scathing criticism for their failure to aid their Southern counterparts–not that this pressure moved them to action. On paper, the central government addressed the problem by unifying naval forces under an “Admiralty” or “Naval Yamen” in 1885, but this did little to solve internal divisions or jealousies.[19] Li Hongzhang, the Governor General of Zhili with responsibility for Hebei Province, Beijing, and Tianjin built one kind of military in the Bohai Gulf. Zuo Zongtang, Governor General of Shaanxi and Gansu, pushed for another. Such rivalries–regional, bureaucratic, and ethnic–made crafting a unified imperial strategy for force design or employment impossible. When war with Japan came in 1894, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked as a concentrated force against the Chinese North Sea Fleet. With the war on the line, Northern officials appealed for support. No help came. Chinese forces in the south sat out the decisive battles of the First Sino-Japanese War, motivated by self-preservation, regional rivalry, and petulance. Divided, they fell.
Regionalism was effective as a strategy for confronting insurgency in the 1850s and 60s–the then existential threat to the Qing Dynasty. As an inherent tradeoff, it also built divisions into Chinese self-strengthening. Fragmentation complicated naval construction in the 1870s and 80s. As an operational matter, it rendered unified fleet action untenable. Regionalism was antithetical to the Mahanian principle of concentration, and the results showed in Chinese defeat to the French and Japanese. On a slightly longer timeline, the devolution of military power to the provinces was fatal to the Qing Empire. In the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, when Han revolutionaries far from Beijing rose up to topple the dynasty, regional powers overmatched the tottering central authorities.[20]
Land and Sea
Zuo Zongtang was one of the foremost regional leaders to emerge from the Taiping War. After his success as a counter-insurgent, he turned his attention to constructing a naval arsenal and shipyard in Fuzhou. Zuo intended the Fuzhou Navy Yard to become the industrial heart of a new Chinese navy. On the yard’s completion in 1867, however, Zuo had no time to admire his achievement. Almost immediately, the imperial government called him away to campaign against rebellions in western China (Nian Rebellion, 1851-1868; Xinjiang, 1862-1877).[21] His diversion from coastal to frontier security is a telling example of a long-running dilemma in Chinese geostrategic debates; a tension between naval and frontier defense (海防与塞防) that would tie up resources and degrade the efficacy of Chinese naval expansion.
That dilemma came to a head most clearly in 1874. That year, Japanese forces raided Taiwan while at the same time a rebellion in Xinjiang threatened the Qing’s far western frontier. Leaders argued over how to prioritize those threats–one maritime one continental. No less than Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang hashed out the issue in a series of memorials; what can be read as a proxy debate over China’s geostrategic identity as a “land” or “sea” power.[22] Li thought the maritime threat from Japan required an immediate answer–to do otherwise meant humiliation. Zuo argued that Xinjiang and the Russians mattered far more than a coastal incursion by the Japanese. Regionalism exacerbated matters. As Governor General of Shaanxi and Gansu, Zuo naturally focused his regional military on the western frontier with Russia; from his position in Tianjin as the Governor General of Zhili, Li prioritized Japan. The continental threat won out and Zuo led a massive army west. Zuo often maintained in his writings that both maritime and continental defenses were critical to Chinese security, but in the real world it was (and is) impossible to defend all things simultaneously.[23]
As Zuo’s experience demonstrates, at the level of imperial strategy, Qing leaders were forced to deal with divided geostrategic attention. Whether China was intrinsically a “landpower” was less important to leaders than the concrete and simultaneous demands for security on land and sea.[24] The threat of Russia on the continental frontier, maritime raiders on the coast, and internal rebellion made for a difficult balancing act. In 2012, a PRC historian contended that the Opium War reformer Wei Yuan anticipated Mahan’s concept of sea power by half a century.[25] Perhaps, but while Wei and subsequent navy builders like Zuo and Li recognized the importance of the sea, they never had the advantages of Mahan’s United States after the Civil War: a unified, territorialized nation-state with secure borders to the north and south. For Chinese advocates of naval funding, threats from within and along the continental frontier were an ever-present distraction. It was a rough neighborhood.
Variations of this attentional dilemma are at work in the histories of other continental states turning to the sea. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, France and Germany struggled unsuccessfully to build navies that could contend with Great Britain, while also maintaining standing armies to defend against each other. Contemporaneously, and by clear contrast, Meiji Japan was free of a continental threat. Its naval victories over China (1894-1895) and subsequently Russia (1904-1905) relied on that geostrategic advantage.
Fleet and Coastal Defense
Even with funding, Qing naval planning faced a final dilemma: what naval technologies to prioritize? After generations of Great Power peace, it was unclear what weapons were best to deliver victory at sea. One official reviewed the “unceasing” (日新月异) nature of technical change in the 1860s, complained that the pace of innovation made decisions about acquisitions fraught with danger.[26] Should navy builders in China purchase battleships to attack an enemy fleet? Small torpedo or “mosquito” boats to defend near shore? A network of fortifications and torpedoes for a land-based coastal defense? Each of these strategies had proponents, but without hard data about novel weapons under combat conditions, no one knew with any certainty which was best. New technology was an opportunity to “catch up” with foreign standards, but it also posed massive risks–what if officials got choices about acquisition wrong?
As a product of such uncertainty, by the 1890s Chinese maritime defenses were a kind of curious and expensive hybrid of coastal defense, brown water, and blue water navy. In part, this confusion owed to regional patterns in self-strengthening that encouraged different leaders to experiment with different weapons in different geographic contexts. It was also a product of a global uncertainty (and anxiety) about what Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1875 called the “very unsettled, transition state” of navies given technological advances in metallurgy, propulsion, electricity, etc.[27] Many schools of thought contended. Some argued in line with the French Jeune Ecole’s preferences that torpedo boats were the key to an economical defense.[28] Success in acquiring “mosquito boats” in the 1870s–small ships that acted as floating gun platforms–primed thinking about asymmetrical forms of defense.[29] Most Chinese agreed that battleships conferred prestige, but fifty torpedo boats could be had for the price of one ironclad.[30] Other leaders promoted the construction of coastal fortifications as a panacea against foreign gunboats on the cheap; an idea Li Hongzhang dismissed as no defense at all unless supported by torpedoes and ships.[31] Still others wanted large platforms–“strong ships with powerful cannons”–capable of deploying to sea. Toward that end, the North Sea Fleet maintained two battleships, the “glorious” German-built Dingyuan and Zhenyuan that could fight at sea and represent Chinese prestige in peacetime.[32] These were supplemented by a force of gunboats and protected cruisers of varying designs. Largely because of its heterogeneity, the Qing’s ability to maintain these forces and to upgrade platforms with new subsystems was poor. The best strategy for using such a mixed force in battle was, likewise, unclear.
To make matters worse, the Qing conversation about what technologies to acquire was driven as much by budgetary constraints as it was strategic calculation. Foreign loans floated to finance campaigns against internal rebellions in the 1870s put naval funds under pressure. Much of what remained was lost to chronic graft in the 1880s and 90s. Foreign advisors to the Chinese complained frequently about “corruption, speculation, and nepotism.”[33] In this environment, acquisitions would have to account for technological uncertainty as well as budgets riddled by fraud and waste. Having sunk funds into large, armored battleships, Li Hongzhang complained constantly of insufficient resources for training, maintenance, and logistics to keep them working. Platforms offer little without money for coal, ammunition, and personnel. “Strong ships and powerful cannons” was a good slogan, but wholly insufficient as a strategy given the gaps between Chinese naval aspirations, security needs, and its budgetary realities.
Conclusion
Chinese naval development in the nineteenth century was motivated by external threats and then hamstrung by a series of internally imposed strategic dilemmas. Observations of foreign naval power–particularly in the hands of the Japanese–clarified China’s need for a navy. Articulating a coherent strategy for the construction and employment of naval power was a more nettlesome challenge; one that the Qing never fully resolved. Striking the correct balance between root and application, centralization and regionalism, land and sea, and coastal defense vs. blue water navy, was simply too much. As a historical matter, those failures of strategy–in regards to force design, geostrategic balance, and institutional adaptation–shaped the course of the Sino-Japanese War and the waning years of the Qing Dynasty.
Because we too, like these earlier navy builders, live in a world of radical technological change and “Great Power Competition,” Qing-era dilemmas are also relevant to modern policymakers wrestling with geostrategy, force design, joint operations, and institutional culture. Those hoping to deter the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) today might consider the fraught experience of the late-Qing navies. Start with geostrategy. The CCP successfully absorbed the borders of the Qing Empire (mostly) after 1949 and in doing so inherited its geostrategic conundrums. Balancing between internal, continental, and maritime threats is as much a challenge for Xi Jinping as it was for Li Hongzhang in the 1890s, or Mao Zedong in the 1970s. The “triangular” configuration of power between China, Russia, and maritime empires (in succession imperial Britain, Japan, and the United States) remains and with it the pressure to split focus between continental, internal, and maritime security.[34]
Equally enduring, are conversations about force design, and most particularly the right mix of coastal defense vs a blue water power projection. Qing self-strengtheners invested in a program of coastal defense fortifications, mines, and small ships–what might be called “Anti-Access/Area Denial.”[35] At the same time, leaders maintained an ambition to build an armored fleet. Given resource constraints, this was likely an inappropriate match between means and ends. Today, the doctrinal division between “near” and “distant” seas in PLAN documents reflects the latest iteration in a debate dating to Qing-era questions about ironclads, torpedoes, and mosquito boats.[36]
Thinking institutionally, the People’s Liberation Army quest for “integrated joint warfare” (一体化联合作战) between branches and commands has come a long way administratively.[37] Since the 1990s, the modern PLA has celebrated joint operations as a marker of military professionalism.[38] Administratively, the old “Military Regions” are gone, replaced by “Theater Commands” in 2016 that promise greater integration.[39] Those reforms should allow the PLAN to avoid the kind of regionalism that beset the Qing. But the legacies of a land force-dominated budget and service culture are sticky. So too are differences in geographic priorities. On paper, the Qing unified its naval forces a decade ahead of the First Sino-Japanese War, but in practice regional divisions endured–fatally.
Most fundamentally is a question of political-military culture. To wit: can the institutional demands of a modern navy–leveraging technocracy and meritocracy–co-exist with an authoritarian CCP political system?[40] Or will a prioritization of political reliability curtail the lethality of PLAN hardware much as a late-Qing bureaucratic culture frustrated naval officers in the 1890s? For officers in the late-Qing it was a balance of application and root; for the Maoists it was a seesaw between being properly “red” and sufficiently “expert” (又红又专).[41] Today, ambitious PLA officers face a similarly unenviable test: of whether to prioritize party loyalty or military competence. Almost all the dilemmas of late-Qing naval strategy exist today in an evolved form. Whether or not the PLAN will address those challenges better than its predecessor remains to be seen.
[1] From the seventeenth century, the Qing organized naval forces to protect against piracy and smuggling. See: Ronald C. Po, The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 7. For recognition of imperative in nineteenth century see: 李鸿章创建轮船水师条款 [Li Hongzhang on Founding a Steamship Navy] (1867) in《清末海軍史料》[Late-Qing Navy Historical Materials] 张侠 [ed. Zhang Xia, et al.] (北京: 海洋出版社, 1982)], 1; 總理各國事務衙門奏 [Memorial of the Zongli Yamen], 《洋务运动》第1册 [Foreign Affairs Movement, Vol I] (上海: 上海人民出版社, 1961), 26-27.
[2] 陈悦 [Chen Yue]《洋海军舰船志》[Warships of The North Sea Fleet] (济南: 山东画报出版社, 2015), 291-293.
[3] 《一八九四-甲午大海战》[1894: The Battle of the Yellow Sea] Directed by 冯小宁 [Feng Xiaoning] (PRC: China Film Group, LTD, 2011);《北洋海军兴亡史》[The Rise and Fall of the Beiyang Navy], Episode 1-6, Directed by 陈红 [Chen Hong] and 雪野 [Xue Ye], PLAN Documentary Unit (2014).
[4] S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power and Primacy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); 张明金 [Zhang Mingjin]《落日下的龙旗: 1894-1895 年中日战争纪实》[The Sunset of the Dragon Banner] (北京: 燕山出版社, 1998); 戚其章 [Qi Qizhang]《甲午战争史》[History of the Sino-Japanese War] (北京: 人民出版社, 1990).
[5] John Rawlinson, China’s Struggle for Naval Development, 1839-1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1; David Pong, Shen Pao Chen and China’s Modernization in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Bruce Elleman, Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795-1989 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 94. The role of Li Hongzhang figures prominently. See: 钱钢 [Qian Gang]《大清海军于李鸿章》[The Qing Navy and Li Hongzhang]（香港:中华书局, 1989); 王家俭 [Wang Jiajian]《李鸿章与北洋舰队》[Li Hongzhang and the North Sea Fleet] (北京:生活·读书·新知三联书店, 2008).
[6] Xiaobing Li, China’s New Navy: The Evolution of PLAN from the People’s Revolution to a 21st Century Cold War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2023).
[7] Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2013), 1.
[8] 魏源 [Wei Yuan], 师夷长技以制夷 [“Study the foreigners’ advanced technologies and by means of them control them.”]《海国图志》[Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms].
[9] Schell and Delury, Wealth and Power, 42-59; 冯桂芬 [Feng Guifen]《校邠庐抗议》[Dissenting Views from Jiaobinlu], .
[10] Meng Yue, “Hybrid Science versus Modernity: The Practice of the Jiangnan Arsenal,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 16 (1999): 13–52; Benjamin Elman, “Naval Warfare and the Refraction of China’s Self-Strengthening Reforms into Scientific and Technological Failure,” Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004): 283–326.
[11] Zhang Zhidong, "Exhortation to Study” (1898) Ssu-yu Teng and John Fairbank, China’s Response to the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 169. See also: 张之洞 [Zhang Zhidong] 奏创办水陆师学堂折 (1887) [On the Establishment of a Navy and Army Academy]《清末海軍史料》[Late Qing Historical Materials], 399.
[12] Kenneth Swope, Struggle for Empire: The Battles of General Zuo Zongtang (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2024), 94; 李鸿章奏天津水师学堂请奖折 [Li Hongzhang Memorial on the Maritime Academy at Tianjin] December 21, 1884,《清末海軍史料》[Late Qing Historical Materials], 394.
[13] 沈旭 [Shen Xu]《晚清军事教育转型及历史启示》[The Transformation of Late Qing Military Education and its Historical Enlightenment]《军事历史》[Military History], 2013年第3期, 26.
[14] John Fairbank, “Introduction,” Chinese Ways in Warfare, edited by Frank Kierman and John Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 5.
[15] 李鸿章 [Li Hongzhang] 奏续先学生出洋折 [Memorial on the Selection of Students to Send Overseas] December 2, 1881,《清末海軍史料》[Late Qing Historical Materials], 392; Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 197. See also: Edward J.M. Rhoads, Stepping forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011).
[16] Mary Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).
[17] For example: Germany (1870-1871), the United States (1861-1865), and Japan (1868-1869).
[18] Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Overcoming regionalism to construct Chinese nationalism took generations. See: Arthur Waldron, From War to Nationalism: China's Turning Point, 1924-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[19] “A Decree from Her Majesty the Empress Dowager,” Peking Gazette, January 21, 1886; 陈悦 [Chen Yue] 《洋海军舰船志》[Warships of The North Sea Fleet], 404.
[20] Joseph Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975); Edward J.M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
[21] Swope, Struggle for Empire, xxv; Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
[22] Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, “The Great Policy Debate in China, 1874: Maritime Defense Vs. Frontier Defense,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, (1964-1965), Vol 25, pp. 212-228; Sarah C.M. Paine, “Centuries of Security: Chinese, Russian and U.S. Continental versus Maritime Approaches,” The Journal of Military History, 86 (October 2022): 813-836.
[23] 左宗棠 [Zuo Zongtang] 海防塞防等情形 (1875) [The Situation of Maritime and Continental Defenses]《清末海軍史料》[Late Qing Historical Materials], 221.
[24] For a critique of a simple “landpower” identity in China, see: Ronald C. Po, The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); 张文木 [Zhang Wenmu],《中国地缘政治论》[On China’s Geopolitics] (Beijing: Ocean Press, 2015).
[25] 戚其章 [Qi Qizhang] 北洋舰队覆没的历史反思 [Reflections on the Annihilation of the Beiyang Navy], in 《北洋海軍新探》[The Beiyang Navy: New Explorations] (北京: 中华书局, 2012), 12.
[26] 李宗羲 [Li Zongxi] 奏總理衙門 [Memorial, Zongli Yamen]《洋务运动》第1册, [Foreign Affairs Movement Vol I] 69.
[27] A.T. Mahan to S. Ashe, May 21, 1875, in Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Vol I, Ed. Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975), 434.
[28] 刘名誉 [Liu Mingyu] 水雷艇策 [Torpedo Boat Plans]《洋务运动》第3册 [Foreign Affairs Movement, Vol III], 431; 陈悦 [Chen Yue]《洋海军舰船志》[Warships of The North Sea Fleet] 185; Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 1871-1904, ed. Stephen Roberts (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987).
[29] For order of battle see: Richard Wright, The Chinese Steam Navy 1862-1945 (London: Chatham, 2000); 陈悦 [Chen Yue]《洋海军舰船志》[Warships of The North Sea Fleet], 291-293.
[30] 醇親王 [Memorial of Prince Chun] (1886)《洋务运动, 第3册》553-555;《論購造鐵甲船》[Discussion of Purchasing Ironclad Warships], Shenbao, December 15, 1874.
[31] 李鸿章 [Li Hongzhang],《李文忠公全書》[Complete Works of Li Hongzhang], 光緒元年七月二十五日《洋务运动, 第3册》[Foreign Affairs Movement, Vol III], 291-293.
[32] 《海東耀武》[Military Power on the Eastern Sea] Shenbao, July 5, 1891.
[33] William F. Tyler, Pulling Strings in China (London: Constable & Co., 1929), 42; P. N. McGiffin, “The Battle of the Yalu,” Century Magazine, Vol. L, No. 74, 593.
[34] Gordon Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
[35] Brendan P. Walsh, “Access Denied: Future Military Operations in an Anti-Access Environment” (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College, April 5, 2011); Robert Haddick, Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2014).
[36] Jennifer Rice and Erik Robb, "China Maritime Report No. 13: The Origins of "Near Seas Defense and Far Seas Protection"" (2021). CMSI China Maritime Reports (13).
[37] Joel Wuthnow, "A New Step in China’s Military Reform," Joint Force Quarterly 117 (2nd Quarter 2025), 4-13, ; 李成刚 [Li Chenggang],《海湾战争中美国如何把握制胜关键》[The Keys to How America Grasped Victory in the Gulf War]《军事历史》[Military History] 2013, Issue 6, 65; Sugiura Yasuyuki, “The PLA’s Pursuit of Enhanced Joint Operations Capabilities,” National Institute for Defence Studies China Security Report, 2022 (Tokyo: National Institute for Defence Studies, 2022), 1.
[38] Dean Cheng, “Chinese Lessons from the Gulf Wars,” in Andrew Scobell, David Lai, and Roy Kamphausen, eds., Chinese Lessons from Other Peoples Wars (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute: U.S. Army War College, 2011), 153-200; China’s Military in Transition, ed. David Shambaugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[39] 我国从军区到战区演变历程 [China’s Transformational Process from Military Regions to Theater Commands]《中国军视网》February 2, 2016.
[40] A difficult task, see: Caitlin Talmadge, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
[41] 《毛泽东选集》第五卷 [Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol 5] (北京: 人民出版社, 1977), 466-479.