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China as a Maritime Power. By David G. Muller Jr., [Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983. 277 pp. $32.00.]

No other book even approaches the detail and depth of Lieutenant Commander Muller's study of the Chinese navy. Moreover, it is extraordinarily well-organized and clearly written, featuring non-technical explanations of such diverse subjects as oil-rigs, "flags of convenience," and shipyard construction. Muller eschews the acronyms that usually infest military writing, and provides a glossary, convenient uncluttered maps, well-chosen photographs, and an excellent selected bibliography. In the 1950s the fledgling navy received an infusion of the Soviet navy's thinking, along with its latest technology. In the early years of the U.S.S.R., "Old School" naval strategy was replaced by the "Young School," which envisaged coastal defence by numerous submarines, small boats, and shore-based aircraft. Such thinking was forced upon the Soviet navy by poverty, the long coastline, the overwhelming seapower of its adversaries, and a land-army bias among national leaders. In 1950, of course, these factors also applied to the Chinese navy, which readily adopted the "Young School," relabelling it "people's war at sea." Along with doctrine and hardware, Chinese naval leaders absorbed a relatively high degree of military professionalism from their Soviet advisers (who numbered up to 2,000 by 1953). According to Muller, early on the navy was "granted a position of privilege in the Chinese system of compulsory political participation" (p. 69). He further asserts that a "symbiotic pattern of lip service and loyalty in return for being left alone to pursue professional development continued" even during the Cultural Revolution (p. 137). In this, as in other areas, Muller overstates the uniqueness of the navy, slighting or ignoring similar phenomena elsewhere in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and in society. For example: he describes the 1964-65 emphasis on maritime militia as a sop to Maoism which was characteristic of the "navy's knack for deriving dual benefits," since the militia was a valuable adjunct to the navy's coastal surveillance and fisheries protection missions. Exactly the same was true of militia along the land borders. Muller describes the fall of navy commissar Su Zhenhua in January 1967 with barely a hint that he was involved in something bigger: the "January Storm" in which dozens of military "professionals," including He Long, Liu Zhijian, and Liao Hansheng, were purged. Worst of all, Muller repeatedly asserts (p. 131, inter alia) that "When political activity began to endanger combat readiness [naval leaders] sought to draw the line. This was the navy's initial approach to the Cultural Revolution." The same was true of most PLA commanders (and commissars) who reacted similarly to radical political interference; generally with the same avoidance strategies.