Rambling around my ancestral Hainan

Copyright 2015

Trip 3 and 4 

2012 and 2013

Chapter 14: Farewell Hainan and two more trips

 

Sunday, May the twenty-ninth, is my second last day in Hainan.  With sufficient time in the morning, I hunt for my favourite drink.  Tea is cultivated also in Hainan, the lady owner of the nearby shop informs me, a fact which I have been hitherto ignorant of.  Baishawan tea leaves are nimbly picked by discerning hands from Camellia sinensis shrubs flourishing on the central highland, north of Wuzhishan.  

It is a “green” tea, lightly oxidised or “fermented” through sunning or heating like the Oolong produced in Fujian and well-known to tea imbibers.  In contrast is the fully oxidised “black” or “dark” Pu-erh of Yunnan Province.  Packed and sold in a compressed form like a thin sponge cake, the Yunnan tea “bricks” were once presented as tributes to the imperial court.

Tea was discovered by chance when Shen Nong (Divine Farmer), one of China’s mythical “Three Sovereigns” living five thousand years ago, caught a whiff of the hidden sweet fragrance exuded by falling leaves that drifted into an uncovered pot of boiling water.

Re-packing my luggage to accommodate the three caddies of Hainan tea leaves occupies me until my host and his family fetch me to dinner at a large open-air food court that has many stalls and occupied tables.  Chefs or their assistants are rushing platters of hot cooked dishes to their customers.  Our “steamboat” (or “hot pot”) spread includes five wild birds, which have been denuded beyond identification.  However, their thin bodies and long legs are indicative of their aquatic environment, the seashore or ponds.  I presume they are snipes.  I ask my host. 

They are White-breasted Waterhen (白胸苦恶鸟; bai xiong ku e niao), he replies after confirming with the stall owner.  This bird species (Amaurornis phoenicurus) has a white face, neck, and breast but dark-grey back.  It belongs to the Rallidae (Rail and Crake) family.  If I have known, I would have stopped him from picking the dish.  Although their conservation status is of “least concern”, they should be running freely along water’s edge, thrilling the younger generation of residents.  For the record, their meat is lean and tough.  

After Monday’s lunch, Xue Xin and Cai Hong send me off.  The Jetstar plane leaves at a quarter to six in the evening with only thirty-two passengers.  Sitting by the window, I lean backwards and slowly turn my head to look outside.  The evening sky is still blue and bright, and the houses and fields now seem familiar.  Tears trickle down; I fight back.  I sigh.  It is not the adventures I miss; it is the home that I once left.  And I am leaving again.  I do not know if or when I will be back.  My second trip may well be my last.  But I am fortunate.  I thank God.  Not many are blessed with the time and opportunity to experience the special joys, especially in meeting relatives and making new friends.  My thoughts wander.  

To political outcasts like Li Deyu and Zhao Ding, my ancestral home was the “gate of hell”.  How desolate the island of Hainan was, it is hard for me to imagine.  If it was akin to the infernal lake of fire and brimstone during the ninth century, then the island was probably in a far worst state three centuries earlier, at the time when Feng Bao and his Li wife came to pacify the restive tribes. 

Even up until the turn of the twentieth century, the extant tourist paradise was still considered as the backwater of China.  If French Catholic missionary-ethnographer F.M. (Francois Marie) Savina’s obscure comment in his 1929 report Monographie de Hainan were true, Sun Yat-sen had - during the nineteen-twenties - even toyed with the idea of selling the island to a foreign state (Japan!) for fourteen million U.S. dollars to buy weapons for the battles against the mainland separatist warlords.  Fortunately, he went no further, although he did, as early as 1906, propose making Hainan a separate province.  A separate province it was during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 A.D.), perhaps the gift of Tugh Temur.  But it was re-absorbed into Guangdong by the Ming (1368-1644).

Traditionally, the peripheral island of the Chinese empire was not on the main trade route between China and the West.  Trade was conducted principally via the overland Silk Route, initiated more than two thousand years ago when Western Han’s military commander Zhang Qian reported his encounters with the isolated tribes of central Asia.  These inland inhabitants declined the invitation to be emperor Wu’s military allies against the Xiongnu raiders but they agreed to business transactions.  

Their desert loci consequently became prosperous commercial cities as China territorially expanded with each nomadic incursion to attain a population of seventy-one million by 2 A.D.  However, civil and external wars reduced the number to forty-three million in 88 A.D.  Like the rising and ebbing tides, peace and wars then lifted it to sixty-two million in 156 A.D. but depressed it to fifty-four million in 606 A.D.  Chang’an (or Xi’an) and Luoyang, the capitals of the Han, Sui, and Tang emperors, were trade beneficiaries in times of peace.  

In Hainan Island, the Dan’er and Zhuya commandaries, established by emperor Wu in 110 B.C., controlled within their sixteen prefectures only more than twenty-three thousand taxable households, a paltry figure compared to the total population of China.  Within the first seven decades of their establishment, nine revolts erupted.  The physical toll on the Han was the death of ten thousand men, including nine commanders, and the financial cost was three hundred million cash.  The island was temporarily abandoned until its re-capture by Ma Yuan.

Only through Lady Xian’s intervention could the Liang dynasty gain effective control of Hainan.  She made further visits to Hainan after the gift of an honorific title and fief of Linzhen Prefecture (now Sanya) and its one thousand and five hundred households from the first emperor of the short-lived Sui dynasty (581-618).  The elderly leader was a wealthy woman, receiving an income from almost eight percent of the nineteen thousand and five hundred taxable households in the ten townships established around the island.

After her death in 601, rebellions erupted, one when the Sui dynasty was collapsing.  The construction of the Grand Canal, reconstruction of the Great Wall, and disastrous campaigns against a Korean kingdom had imposed a heavy burden on the people through their conscripted labour and on the treasury which then raised the taxes that aggravated their plight.  Emperor Yangdi was assassinated in 618, and the Tang dynasty emerged. 

Lady Xian’s grandson Feng Ang pledged allegiance, becoming a Tang general.  He helped stabilise the conditions in Lingnan and Hainan.  Could Feng Bao and his Li consort be my ancestors?  

When sturdier coastal and pelagic ships were constructed, the attention of merchants shifted from the mainland’s interior to its coast where Guangzhou and Hangzhou subsequently developed as important ports.  Porcelain, silk, and tea - the major export items - were produced in huge quantities in the hinterland.  There, the producer and consumer base is also larger.  Although situated close to Southeast Asia, Hainan was still not the main contributor to or beneficiary of the political or economic rise of the whole country.  

Coming to China by sea during the seventh century, enterprising Arab traders flourished in Guangzhou and Quanzhou.  Some were unfortunate.  Blown off-course by typhoons, their ships skirted close to Hainan, where they were seized by local pirates and became slaves.  Feng Ruofang, a Hainanese administrator and leader in Wanning during the eighth century, was one of those who plundered some of the passing vessels.  Is he a relation of mine?

China of the twelfth-century Southern Song and Jin dynasties had a population of one hundred and twenty-three million.  When the northern Mongols invaded, thousands of Han fled to remote Hainan, increasing its Han population to about four hundred and seventy thousand.  After his service to the ruling khan, Marco Polo brought the island to Western notice through his Travel published in 1298.  The existence of “Cheynam” was confirmed, and depicted as “Caynam”, in the Catalan Atlas in 1375.

Rebellions against the Mongols decimated China.  Declared in 1381, the Ming started with only sixty million people, which was half of the number thriving two and a half centuries earlier.  The population reported for Hainan Island (Qiongzhou Prefecture) in 1413 was 71,212 Han households and 17,394 Li households, although the “calculated” figures were higher: 75,463 and 21,322 respectively.  Based on an average of four persons in a household, some writers estimated Hainan’s population at about four hundred thousand in 1400.

Around this period, Admiral Zhenghe was chosen to lead the Ming naval expedition to Africa.  Departing from Nanjing, his ships sailed southwards, hugging the east coast of Hainan.  Stunned by its beauty, some of his sailors expressed their desire to settle there.  

Increasing migrations from Guangdong and Fujian into Hainan during the sixteenth and seventeenth century pushed the Li people inland as well as south, creating resentment.  When the latter rose in revolts the following century, Miao mercenaries from Guizhou were recruited by the Manchu court to subdue them.  These fighters subsequently settled on the island.  Being a part of Guangdong, the island was then known as the “Hainan Li-Miao Autonomous Prefecture”.

Westerners explored Hainan only from the turn of the nineteenth century.  Shipwrecked off its shore, British merchant-ship captain James Purefoy was forced to walk its northern and eastern coasts between 1804 and 1805.  He was treated kindly by the local officials and citizens.  After his rescue, he narrated his maritime adventures.  For a decade from 1856 to 1866, Robert Swinhoe, a British civil servant in Hong Kong and later Taiwan and Ningpo, studied the flora and fauna.  

Four centuries after the inception of the Ming, Hainan’s 1823 census showed a population of only 987,725 persons, minuscule in comparison to China’s total population of about three hundred and fifty million.  Two “Opium” wars from 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860 pushed more mainland Chinese southwards into Hainan, hiking its population to one and a half million by the middle of that century.  Under the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, Haikou was designated as a “treaty port”.  But little trade was transacted in Hainan because of its sparse population and poor infrastructure.  Its chief exports were sugar, oil, and live pigs.  Haikou had only one major street.  According to missionary and botanist Benjamin Couch Henry, the dozen of foreigners living in the town in 1882 soon flooded the island with illicit opium.  

At the commencement of the new century, Hainan remained unattractive.  Haikou Port was “poorly equipped”.  Although the streets were concretised, sanitary conditions remained “primitive”.  Who could blame Sun Yat-sen for his exasperation over its future?  After World War II, Hainan suffered with the rest of the country from the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.  Experiments with new crops faltered.  Wenchang farmers replanted their coconut plantations with sweet potatoes until unrewarding yield led to a reversion.  Grain cultivation also flopped because of humid climate while industries suffered from shortage of electricity and raw materials.  With the end of the traumatic periods, hope and optimism returned.  A century, indeed a millennium, went like a twinkling of an eye.  A new chapter in Hainan’s history began.  

My plane touches down in Changi International Airport at nine at night, slightly earlier than scheduled.  As before, I spend the transit time in Singapore with church brethren, friends, and relatives.  (Here, I am amalgamating the transit meetings.)  Lending their sympathetic ears, my former colleagues Ho Wing Meng, Ho Hua Chew, Cedric Pan, Ten Chin Liew, and Yeo Kim Wah also update me on their latest project.  Catching up with relatives like the families of Hee Hon, Soon Chin (Mrs Richard Tay), cousin Lawrence, cousin Hee Juon, and auntie Jong Kin as well as friends like Ruth Loh Hwee Kiang, Anita Low, and Chay Wai Chuen is always a delight.  Regrettably, I do not have the extra time to accept other invitations.

Wai Chuen is my friend for more than four decades.  His commitment and sense of duty saw him inducted into the People’s Action Party, serving as Member of Parliament for almost eighteen years and, later, as a Non-resident Ambassador in Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ruth, who had read a philosophy course of mine at the National University of Singapore, later became a teacher.  Her hospitality and generosity to her former students, some of whom I get to meet, makes the friendship of her Christian family (Ann Hock Kee, Abigail, and Victoria) a treasured one.  Hock Kee is the managing director of a property investment company.

 

Hainan, its future and my heritage

 

Back in the comfort of my Sydney home, I collate some data on China as well as on Guangdong and Hainan Province.  Through measured national reforms and liberalisation, the Chinese economy expanded rapidly over the last half century.  From 233 billion RMB in 1960, its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) vaulted to 347.5 billion RMB in 1970, 591.5 billion RMB in 1980, 1,426.7 billion RMB in 1990, and 3,909.7 billion RMB in 2000.  China became the world’s fastest growing economy during the nineteen-eighties.  Spectacularly, between 1985 and 1989, the number of desperately poor people halved.  The proportion of people engaged in agriculture decreased while those in light industries increased.

Over the decade from 2001, the national economy quadrupled from US$1.5 trillion to US$6 trillion.  In 2007, it overtook Germany to become the third largest economy (in purchasing power parity terms); in 2010, it bypassed Japan.  (To the surprise of some economists, it surpassed the U.S. in 2014, five years ahead of earlier International Monetary Fund forecasts.) 

Socio-economic progress is evident everywhere.  All Chinese provinces benefitted, although some at a slower pace and lower rate than others.  Deng Xiaoping would smile.  Does it really matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it is able to catch a rat?  His rhetoric against hardline Maoists resonated with the people languishing from the preceding four or more decades of hardship.  Yes, they would also agree: to be rich is glorious.  Gregory C. Chow, the Class of 1913 Professor of Political Economy and Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, was right in observing: 

 

“As of 2001, the majority of the Chinese people appear to be satisfied with the government.  With people getting richer and having more economic freedom, there will likely be gradual change towards a more democratic political system.”  (China’s Economic Transformation)

 

At the provincial level, the GDP of Guangdong (of which Hainan was a part until 1988) increased gradually at an annual rate of 5.1% from 1973 to 1978, and then jumped by 12.6% annually from 1979 to 1991.  In 1992, its GDP soared by 19.5% to 221.8 billion RMB.  Excluding Hainan, Guangdong had a population in 1992 of more than sixty-five million and a per capita GDP of 3,440 RMB.

Its spectacular growth was fronted by its three special economic zones.  Shenzhen expanded from 327.5 square kilometres with 71,400 people in 1980 to more than 2,000 square kilometres with a million people by 1992.  (Shantou and Zhuhai had less than fifteen square kilometres each initially.)  The success of free trade zones encouraged their extension to other coastal provinces. 

Surfing on this rising tide is, of course, the Hainan economy.  Its GDP increases were phenomenal: 1.933 billion RMB in 1980, 4.326 billion RMB in 1985, 10.242 billion RMB in 1990, 36.325 billion RMB in 1995, 52.682 billion RMB in 2000, 90.503 billion RMB in 2005, and 206.5 billion RMB in 2010.  From 11,165 RMB (US$1,363) in 2005, the GDP per capita doubled to 23,831 RMB (US$3,520) in 2010.

Life has improved tremendously for the Hainanese people, who are inhaling the clean sub-tropical air in a province with one of the lowest population densities in the country.  Their diet has nutrition and variety.  In 1979, just after the internal chaos, the per capita income in Hainan was only 254 RMB, and the national average was 316 RMB. 

Deng Xiaoping’s reforms also improved strained ties and trade with bordering states like the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, India, and Mongolia by the end of the nineteen-seventies.  These border economic transactions were often not reported in official statistics because of traders’ non-declaration and avoidance of custom duties or income tax payments.  No trade was reported, for instance, between Vietnam and Guangxi Province in 1990, although it was evaluated at about US$150 million, making Guangxi the second largest partner of Vietnam after Hong Kong.  Beneficiaries of Deng’s liberalization included Heilongjiang Province, which saw its border trade with the Soviet Union surged by thirty times since 1987.

Blotting the economic miracle of Hainan were some exceptional blemishes lobbed by a few officials who went overboard on a splurge, purchasing - through bank loans - RMB 4.2 billion worth of foreign goods like cars and videocassette recorders for domestic sales, activities which contributed to the national foreign reserves depletion by more than a third in 1985.  Despite the scandals, the central National People’s Congress formally made Hainan a province as well as a Special Economic Zone on the thirteenth of April 1988.  Party Secretary-General Zhao Ziyang described Hainan as “more Special than the Special Economic Zones”. 

Fuelled by Deng’s promotion of the liberalization policy during his southern China tour in January 1992, property speculation by local entrepreneurs and foreign investors continued.  Without Beijing’s permission, the local governor even opened a stock exchange in April 1992.  Vice-Premier Zhu Rongji flew to Hainan to halt the operation.  After a compromise for some stocks to be listed in Shenzhen, he described Hainan as a “Special Economic Zone with Hainan characteristics”.  President Jiang Zemin dropped in for a visit.

Teething idiosyncratic problems pale in significance to the throes of the last century; they were easily resolved.  The new province enters into the new century, poised to become a future metropolis.  Recent economic reforms are encouraging.  In conjunction with the central government’s promotion of the general welfare, the people’s desire for stability and prosperity has produced an increasingly progressive society.  If a trillion-dollar reserve could be conjured by China virtually from scratch out of the pre-nineteen-seventy shambles, then the next three decades should favour Hainan.  It would excel.

Hainan’s inevitable rise would be accelerated by the buoyancy and prosperity of neighbouring states.  Mine is not an unwarranted optimism born out of ancestral bias.  Cast on the Hainanese shore two hundred years ago, Captain James Purefoy was moved to remark after his involuntary sojourn and excursion: 

 

“In the hands of any commercial powers independent of China, this island would present immense advantages, lying almost in contact with the Chinese continent, and covering the south-eastern side of the bay of Tonquia, the trade to every part and creek in which is exceedingly valuable.”  (A corruption of the Vietnamese “Dong Kinh”, Tonquin, now Hanoi, was also spelt as Tonkin, Tongkin, and Tongking.)  

 

The naval commander was right.  After one hundred and forty years of the golden age of emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, the rampant corruption of the privileged Manchu officials became intolerable to the long-suffering public.  Neglected Hainan would have been better off if it were an independent state during the early nineteenth century.

Two centuries later, the central government is well aware of the “immense advantages” of Hainan.  The island is closest not only to the economically prospering ASEAN nations but also to Xisha (Paracel) Islands and Nansha (Spratly) Islands.  With the U.S. returning its surveillance on the Pacific, Hainan has been thrust into the spotlight. 

Its inherent strategic value resurfaces.  Sanya now hosts China’s nuclear ballistic submarines while Wenchang its new space centre.  Escorted by two destroyers and two frigates during an exercise in 2013, the sole Chinese aircraft carrier docked at the Yalong Bay naval base.  It is ironic that in August 1932, during the Japanese-U.S. acrimony, Haikou was offered, as widely rumoured, by the Nationalist government on loan as a naval base to the Americans.  

If built, the twenty to twenty-six kilometre tunnel and bridge across Qiongzhou Strait will reinforce Hainan’s significance in the international power game.  Cost is not an insurmountable obstacle to a government that is willing to funnel 260 billion RMB into the construction of a railway track stretching one hundred and twenty-three kilometres from Dalian in Liaoning Province to Yantai in Shandong, part of which running through a ninety-kilometre undersea tunnel.  The Qiongzhou cross-strait links will be gates not to hell but to the paradise of China.

Tourism is a booming industry in this exotic haven.  Thirty million tourists, of which 814,600 were foreigners, landed in 2011, generating 32.2 billion RMB (US$4.3 billion) of revenue.  Like the local Hainanese, they will enjoy a relaxed time and rustic lifestyle in the sun and topical forest.  International-class hotels and resorts are embracing them, enticing them in droves.  Sixteen golf courses of international standard are open around the island.  English and other foreign languages taught in schools will prepare the younger generation of Hainanese to cope with the expanding sector. 

Currently, ASEAN’s prosperity has provided Hainan with cash-rich travellers, who are big money-spenders.  The growth in foreign tourist number will be phenomenal if more international flights are permitted and visa requirements relaxed.

Every suburb and town I have travelled through witnessed huge investments pouring into their properties, heavy industries, and services by mainland millionaires and perhaps also overseas Chinese and foreigners.  These inflows of cash have boosted employment and propelled the Hainanese economy.  Up until 1994, much of it was in property, although the aim of the Hainan Special Economic Zone was to promote the general economy.  When the brake was pressed on property speculation, economic growth slowed.  Resolve is needed to channel Hainan’s creative energy into the right direction, and resolve is not in short supply in China and Hainan.  

Hainan will be caught in the crossfire if war breaks out between China and some of its neighbours.  Some islets in the Paracel and Spratly groups are claimed and occupied by countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.  Three hundred kilometres south of Hainan, the Paracel group was occupied by China without contest from 1955 to 1974.  In 1974 a reunited Vietnam stationed troops on one of the islets, an action which led to a war with China.  The Chinese marines dislodged the Vietnamese troops.  After another battle in 1988, the Chinese constructed a military fortress on Yongxing (Woody) Island, the largest islet.

China’s right over the Spratly group, situated about one thousand five hundred kilometres south of Hainan, was consistently recognized by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.  Taiwan occupied Itu Aba in 1946, left in 1950, but returned in 1956.  China’s right was only first challenged in 1971 when the Philippines claimed some of the islets as falling within its two-hundred nautical mile (370-kilometre) exclusive economic zone.  Repelled from Itu Aba, Filipino forces occupied three other islets, including Thitu Islet.  In 1976, Vietnam followed, occupying Spratly Islet and Northeast Cay.  In 1982 and 1983, Malaysia joined the kill.  Infuriated, Beijing seized Mischief Reef and constructed a reconnaissance station and naval facility in 1995.

Although the land and Tonkin Gulf sea border between China and Vietnam have been resolved by 2000, Vietnam has a tensed relation with China since two millennia ago.  On a clear day, it is claimed, Vietnam is visible from the northwestern heights of Hainan.  Facing Vietnam, western Hainan is dotted with army, naval, and air bases.  The Hainan air bases of People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) South Sea Fleet are located in Haikou, Meilan, Jialaishi, Foluo, Sanya, Lingshui, and Yongxing Island.  Hainan will be the frontline battle ground, potentially trapped by the “pincers” of Vietnam, during a war with Southeast Asian neighbours.  

Taiwan is a province awaiting reunification.  The island was ceded to Japan in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki.  But confirmed in the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation, the 1943 Cairo Declaration, which was witnessed by the leaders of U.S., Britain, and Republic of China, laudably boasted “that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and The Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China”.  Was the term of the declaration honoured?

Post-war internal conflict over the question of government of the Chinese saw Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT seeking refuge in Taiwan.  The general and his son had consistently maintained the existence of only one “China” and that Taiwan is part of “China”.  In 1958, the communist government attempted to unify Taiwan, an attempt that was thwarted by the U.S.  In 1971, the communist government was recognized in the United Nations as leader of the Chinese, replacing Taiwan’s representative.  But the U.S. isolated Taiwan, by agreeing to supply arms. 

Emboldened, some Taiwanese political leaders flirted with the idea of independence, leading China to enact in 2005 the Anti-Secession Law which permits the use of “non-peaceful means” to reunite the island.

“Stolen from the Chinese”, Taiwan must be returned to “the Chinese”.  Its political and legal status can only be determined by “the Chinese”, by all the Chinese on both sides of the strait and not by a mere region of them.  A referendum initiated only in Taiwan to determine its status invites the resumption of the disastrous Second World War civil war.

A compromise in political ideologies between the Chinese on both sides of the strait might be necessary to induce their peaceful reunification.  Since western democracy (as practised in Taiwan) and Marxist social democracy (as practised in the mainland) are both “foreign” to Chinese culture, the Chinese are not necessarily antagonistic to things “foreign”. 

Perhaps a modified form of democracy that is compatible with Chinese culture would serve as an interim unifying force.  Such a political system would, firstly, institutionalise some extent of socio-political freedom, secondly, endow “mentally responsible” adults (say, those aged between 25 and 65) with the right to vote and, thirdly, permit them to nominate and elect representatives based not “physical territory” (as in western democracies) but on “occupational functions” (which the extant Hong Kong electoral system partly implements).

That arrangement, or some others, could be constitutionally subject to periodic electoral reviews and referendums, say, every fifty years, to attune it to prevailing conditions.

Mao Zedong once said that China was prepared to wait a hundred years before fighting a war over Taiwan.  In the absence of a peaceful reunification, the interregnum is a time of preparation; a resurgent and self-confident giant will be ready to salvage its pride after a century of humiliation at the hands of European and Japanese conquerors.

No self-respecting nation with one thousand three hundred million people could continue tolerating humiliation after humiliation by less populous states.

Currently, China’s military strength is credible and improving.  But it is not enough to overcome a concert of major powers, given its total military expenditure in 2010 was US$160 billion, according to a Pentagon report, compared to the U.S. military expenditure of US$500 billion annually (or US$700 if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were included).  Recent estimates suggest the presence of approximately two hundred and forty nuclear warheads, the majority deliverable by its one hundred and forty land-based nuclear ballistic missiles.  China has developed four new series of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles: DF-21 (“Dongfeng”; “East Wind”), DF-31, DF-31A, and JL-2 (“Julang”; “Giant Wave”).  A DF-31A missile can hit targets up to a distance of 11,200 kilometres while a submarine-launched JL-2 missile can deliver a warhead up to 14,000 kilometres.  

China has at least three Jin-class SSBNs (nuclear-powered submarines), each capable of launching twelve nuclear missiles.  Although it has seventy-two Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) capable of hitting American territories, only about forty could hit continental U.S., which might however be immunised by the latter’s recently developed national missile defence system. 

None the less, in January 2007, China employed a kinetic kill vehicle, launched from a modified DF-21 missile, to destroy a disused weather satellite, indicating its ability to disarm adversarial satellite communication and warning systems during a conflict.  In January 2014, a hypersonic glider was tested, hurtling down to earth at a speed exceeding Mach 10 (12,250 kilometres per hour) after being carried to sub-orbital height on an ICBM.  Whether it could defeat an advanced variant of the Laser Weapon System (dubbed LaWS) tested by the U.S. in December 2014 is an interesting question.

Supplementing the Chinese arsenal are two hundred cruise missiles, each with a range of 1,500 kilometres.  The number and capability will invariably be bolstered.  The country tested a new-generation stealth jet fighter J-20 in 2011 and unveiled another stealth J-31 in 2014.  Its few nuclear bombs are deliverable by bombers.  Ready in October 2014, its fourth satellite launch centre in Wenchang awaits rocket launches.  The refitted training aircraft carrier bought from the disintegrated Soviet Union was inaugurated in 2011 but three battle-capable ones are under planning and might be ready by the next decade.  An aircraft carrier battle group could possibly be based permanently in Sanya.  

China’s dependency on Middle Eastern oil is also its dependency on the navigability of the Strait of Malacca, factors which may impede its military reach.  During a confrontation, the water could be mined by littoral states like Malaysia and Indonesia, thus preventing passage.  Only about twenty-five metres deep and two and a half kilometres wide at its narrowest, this waterway is not deep enough for supertankers carrying oil and is too narrow for comfort to the two hundred ships that pass through daily.  

Over the last few decades the Thais have been discussing the feasibility of cutting a canal across the Isthmus of Kra to capitalise on a golden opportunity.  If it is constructed, transportation time and cost for ships travelling from China to the Middle East would be substantially reduced.  The sailing distance for a one-way trip would be cut by more than nine hundred kilometres.  Surrounding states and provinces like Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan would boom with increased inter-regional and extra-regional trade if peace prevails.  Sadly for Singapore, its economic progress and prosperity might be adversely affected.

 

Copyright 2015

Photos

      The strategic province of Hainan

will be home to China's aircraft carriers

Page 463 - 475, Chapter 14, Farewell Hainan, 2 more trips