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  Date / Time: 4/23/2009 7:56 PM UTC

  China flexes new economic muscle at sea
  

  China flexes new economic muscle at sea

  Published: April 22 2009 18:43 | Last updated: April 22 2009 18:43

  In 1888, Qing Dynasty China splashed out some 1,350 tonnes of silver to buy its North Sea Fleet, which almost overnight became the world’s eighth largest navy and, supposedly, the most formidable in Asia. That fiction was dramatically exposed just six years later when China’s shiny new armada was crushed by the much better organised Imperial Navy of Japan in the Battle of the Yalu River. The humiliating defeat accelerated the decline of China and the rise of Japan, a shift in power cemented a decade later by Japan’s stunning naval victory over Russia.

  The rebirth of China‘s modern navy, which has just celebrated its 60th anniversary in the north-eastern port of Qingdao, is an inevitable by-product of the country’s economic renaissance. China’s navy may not yet quite match that of Japan, though it has a better name: the People’s Liberation Army Navy (which, in English, sounds like a revolutionary clothing store) versus Japan’s Maritime Self Defence Force. Yet the trend is clear enough. Japan’s military spending is limited – by postwar pacifist convention, if not by law – to 1 per cent of gross domestic product. Defence analysts estimate that China spends roughly 4 per cent of a smaller but far faster-growing GDP on its military, of which the navy is an increasingly prestigious part.

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