China out of five centuries of continental vision

Autonomy. China out of five centuries of continental vision. That, until the 1980s, had only a poor military fleet coast based, appears well decided to reconnect with the prestigious and distant golden age marine which was hers in the 15th century. From 1405, the Admiral eunuch Zheng He, the head of a fleet of 300 ships, left say the Chinese protectorate on the islands of the probe, and then explore the world India, in the Persian Gulf, and on the coast is Africa. This seven expeditions conducted almost a century before those of Christopher Columbus, until the Chinese empire decides finally to cut the world in the early 16th century.

This prestigious maritime past is now the subject of many celebrations. And this is not a coincidence if the first building of the Navy of the people of Liberation Army (MAPL) to stop in a port in the United States was in 1989, the great ship "Zheng He" at Pearl Harbor. Since then, the MAPL deploys regularly in Africa, America and Europe.

Before China's poor relative of the armed forces, the MAPL grows large V speed since thirty years. It is the vision and the talent of political persuasion of Admiral Liu Huaqing, Chief of staff of the Navy of the popular army of liberation between 1982 and 1988. A period which is also at the beginning of the explosion in the growth of China and therefore imports: their share in the Chinese gross domestic product increased from 10 to 33 from 1979 to 2008. Imports, as exports of the "workshop of the world", mainly through ships. The Chinese shipyards are now capable of building the range of warships, including the most complex, the submarine nuclear spacecraft launchers. This is China, as such, Member of a club that includes only the United States, the Russia, the United Kingdom and the France.

At the regional level, China, by a rise in power of his fleet which does lack not to worry its neighbors, said this which it considers to be its sovereignty in its maritime approaches. If it has three seas - Yellow Sea, East China Sea, South China Sea - front of its coast, they are delimited by third States which are barriers to access to the Pacific: in the North, the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, which, in the South, the Rosary of the Ryukyu Islands stretching up to Taiwan. Remember that at the Japan, especially in Yokosuka and Okinawa, leave more than 40,000 American soldiers, with the seventh fleet of the US Navy aircraft carrier and its escort.

To the Southeast is the funnel of the South China Sea, bordered by the Philippines in the East and the Indochinese peninsula to the West. There are the Islands Paracel and Spratly, object of the two strongest territorial disputes involving China. This sea, essential oil imports and exports to Europe, ends with a set of bickering between Malay and Indonesian islands, and two bottlenecks, the Straits of Malacca and the probe.

In this very crowded horizon, Taiwan, it is not only the link between the two seas of China, but mainly the large door to the Pacific. A goal clearly non-negotiable. .