China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) did not just appear out of nowhere with China’s rise to military superpower status in the 21st century, though there has been very little written in English about its origins. Until now: Toshi Yoshihara, a former professor at the Naval War College and currently a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, traces the PLAN’s beginnings to the Chinese Civil War and the early years of Mao Zedong’s rule in his new book Mao’s Army Goes to Sea.
Considered one of America’s foremost experts on the modern Chinese navy, Yoshihara’s book Dragon Against the Sun: Chinese Views of Japanese Seapower won the 2021 Kokkiken Japan Study Award. His Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to US Maritime Strategy (co-authored with Naval War College professor James Holmes) is in its second edition (2018) and has been translated into several languages. Before that, Yoshihara (again with Holmes) wrote Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan (2008). He believes that to understand China’s approach to seapower “requires an acquaintance with its maritime past.” And he draws on Chinese-language sources to provide insights about that past, including PLA histories and writings, and Republic of China (ROC) sources.
Although Yoshihara notes that most Western literature on the subject attributes the emergence of Chinese naval strategy to developments in the late 1970s and early 1980s (during Deng Xiaoping’s “reform” era), he shows that China’s Civil War was the laboratory in which Mao’s fledgling navy was conceived and born. “Mao’s armies went to sea to complete the final tasks of the civil war”, he writes, and that task was the conquest and occupation of offshore islands, including Taiwan—a task, it is worth noting, that is unfinished. Yoshihara focuses on the institutional and intellectual foundations of the PLAN and the offshore naval actions of 1949 and 1950, including what modern Chinese naval analysts have written about those amphibious operations and battles. He believes that these early naval actions along China’s coast “have had an outsize impact on China’s long-term security and strategy.”

China’s civil war between the Communists and Nationalists was renewed full-scale after Japan’s surrender in the Second World War. After some early victories by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies, Communist forces won a series of “decisive and bloody battles” in 1948 and 1949, resulting in Mao’s capture of much of northern China and the Central Plain north of the Yangzi River. The fighting then shifted to the south where Mao’s armies captured the Nationalist capital of Nanjing and most of the rest of mainland China. These were huge World War II-type campaigns that caused millions of casualties on both sides. Communist victories on land led to the amphibious operations and battles that occurred between August-September 1949 and the summer of 1950.
Mao had to create a navy almost from scratch, and Yoshihara notes that he benefited in this endeavor by the actions of mutinous Nationalist naval officers and seamen who joined the PLA in the midst of the civil war. Zhang Aiping, a veteran of the Long March and a high-ranking army officer, was assigned the task of developing communist naval power, and it was he who established the East China Navy, the precursor to the PLAN. Zhang recruited high-ranking Nationalist naval officers and gained control over the Nationalist navy’s “infrastructure, force structure, and personnel”, including shore facilities, shipyards, warships and small craft. Zhang also established a naval bureaucracy to oversee naval affairs and founded a naval academy. In early January 1950, Mao appointed Xiao Jinguang, another Long March veteran, to the post of commander of the PLAN. And the CCP leadership reached out to the Soviet Union for advice on naval matters, as well as technical and material support, which the Soviets supplied.
Yoshihara notes that Xiao viewed naval warfare as a “three-dimensional” effort. He quotes Xiao’s speech at an early naval conference:
We must use the aircraft above the waves, the warships on the ocean’s surface, the submarines beneath the seas, and artillery along the coast to form a synergy of integrated power.
The building of a strong navy that could conduct offensive operations would take time, but the CCP’s early naval leaders were already planning for naval expansion. Yoshihara credits Xiao with laying the strategic foundations for the growth and development of the PLAN.
Yoshihara details the separate offshore operations beginning in August 1949 with the Zhoushan Islands, a cluster of mostly small islands located east of Ningbo. Communist forces seized four smaller islands but were unable initially to seize Dengbu or Zhoushan itself. The next year, Nationalist forces on Zhoushan were withdrawn to Taiwan. Meanwhile, in October 1949, Communist forces launched a campaign to seize Xiamen Island, Jinmen Island, and from there Taiwan. Mao’s forces seized Xiamen but suffered a devastating defeat at Jinmen. Mao considered Jinmen the CCP’s “greatest loss … during the entire Chinese Civil War”. And it was a battle that both Communist and Nationalist strategists studied in later years.
In the spring and summer of 1950, Communist forces seized Hainan and the Wanshan Islands, and in a separate operation seized Tanxushan Island near Shanghai, Dayangshan and Xiaoyangshan Islands, and Shengsi Island. Success in those endeavors led to operations targeting the Dachen Islands, Yijiangshan Island, and Pishan, with the main thrust leveled at Pishan, which the Communist forces seized. Yoshihara notes that the Hainan-Wanshan Islands campaign “was the PLA’s first exposure to sea combat and first joint maritime campaign”, which also “eliminated a Nationalist foothold in the South China Sea.”
The ultimate target of all of those offshore operations was Taiwan. But the planned invasion of the Nationalists’ island fortress was called off when the United States positioned the 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait after the outbreak of the Korean War.
In the book’s last chapters, Yoshihara assesses the institutional and operational aspects of Mao’s turn to the sea, conveys how Chinese scholars and strategists have analyzed the origins of the PLAN, and concludes with evidence that, in his words,
the Chinese navy’s founding era left an indelible mark on its outlook, values and institutions, offering clues about the PLAN’s present and future.
As tensions gather in the western Pacific—largely because of the PLAN’s unfinished business to reunify Taiwan with the mainland—those with an interest in the region need to learn as much as possible about the PLAN—its history, traditions, operational concepts, intellectual product, and practical capabilities. Toshi Yoshihara’s books are a good place to start.
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