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Book Review: Sarah Kirchberger. 2015. Assessing China’s Naval Power—Technological Innovation, Economic Constraints, and Strategic Implications

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 April 2017
Date01 April 2017
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/2347797016689396
Subject MatterBook Reviews
AIA689392_138-148.indd 146
Book Reviews
Sarah Kirchberger. 2015. Assessing China’s Naval Power—Technological
Innovation, Economic Constraints, and Strategic Implications. Heidelberg:
Springer. 318 pp. (Hardcover). ISBN 9783662471265.
DOI: 10.1177/2347797016689396
With the growing number of incidents related to the territorial disputes in the East
and South China Sea, there is an increase of interest among academics and analysts
directed towards the military capability of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy
(PLAN). The fact that PLAN receives the largest share of the Chinese military
budget—grown nearly tenfold since the 1996 Taiwan crisis—is causing great anxi-
ety, especially among proponents of the realist school. This anxiety is exemplified
by the recent study Asia-Pacific Rebalance 2025, commissioned by the US
Department of Defense, which foresaw that the South China Sea will be a ‘Chinese
lake’ by 2030, threatening the freedom of navigation in the region (Green, Hicks,
Cancian, Schaus & Cooper, 2016).
In her book Assessing China’s Naval Power, Sarah Kirchberger offers a fresh
insight into the issues related to China’s military power on the rise, representing a
nonconventional approach to the topic. Assessing China’s Naval Power questions
the Western perspective on PLAN, which is often exaggerated in terms of its
capabilities. The author reveals that a typically Western point of view fosters a
misperception concerning PLAN due to the existing tendency to evaluate the
naval power only in terms of new vessel acquisitions, without taking into account
the complex nature of navies (p. 4). This tendency not only is questionable from
an academic point of view but, as Kirchberger emphasizes, has potential political
consequences. The author accuses previous studies of conducting inadequate
analyses, creating the ‘monster we are afraid of’ (p. 7). Therefore, the author
chooses as her main objective to unravel the real power of China’s PLAN. As a
sinologist and a former analyst at...

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