Shanghai, Chinese maritime officials laid out a timeline calling for China to become one of the top eight navies by 2020, one of the top five by 2030, and one of the top three by 2049 (the centennial of the PRC’s founding).[8] In the new national security law passed in 2015, one of the first tasks enumerated for the PLA is to provide for maritime security. Article 17 states:

The State increases the construction of border defense, coastal defense, and air defense, taking all necessary defense and control measures to defend the security of continental territory, internal waterbodies, territorial waters and airspace, and to maintain national territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests.[9]

This growing emphasis on maritime power and its role in Chinese national security thinking is reflected inthe steadily expanding capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). As recently as the 1990s, the PLAN was largely oriented toward near-shore and near-sea operations. The former focuses on countering attempts by an adversary to land forces on China’s shores, as well as riverine operations and activities in inland waterways, which are comparable to “brown water” operations. Near-sea (jinhai) operations involve light and medium naval forces, operating farther from shore, but for limited duration. They are oriented toward not only forestalling invasion of the Chinese mainland, but challenging adversary operations in key nearby maritime areas, including the East and South China Seas and the Yellow Sea. They constitute a combination of “green-water” and some “blue-water” operations.

However, as China’s dependence on the maritime domain has increased, the PLAN