| As an important branch of geopolitical theories and ideas, the theory of sea power provides explanations for the rise and fall of many nations. China, as a coastal country, has three million square kilometers' territorial waters. So its sea power strategy centered by naval strategy is a distinctive reflection of its history since modern times, its current situation and even its future.Since the Opium War, China has been repeatedly defeated by many other powers, and the crisis of marine safety is becoming more and more severe. In 1894, when it came to the thirty-third year of China's Westernization movement, Japan which had also been awakened by the powerful battleships of western nations launched the Sino-Japanese War on China to seize more sea power. The Northern Fleet once known as "the Far East Navy" lost in the smoke, and the revitalization of China's modernization was brutally broken into pieces, then for the following hundred years, China remained week.In fact, early in the Westernization Movement, Mahan has put forward the sea power theory on the other side of the ocean. He stresses that sea power is one of the fundamental determinants of national power, a key to the power of international political power. At the national strategic level, ether in peacetime or wartime, the state should establish a clear and effective strategy to promote the growth of national industry and strategic industry. Thus the people of this nation can benefit from its National Foreign Trade and ocean development. Meanwhile the navy and overseas base should also be strengthened to protect its national interests; and at the level of naval strategy, that is, during the war, the primary goal of the navy is to seize command of the sea. Active offensive operations should be adopted to make full use of navy's mobility; meanwhile the attack must adhere to the "focus strategy" and complete the fleet battle with superior forces to protect and ensure the smooth transportation of the ground forces and create favorable conditions.However, the realities of China and Japan are essentially different. China's defeat, though, is fundamentally due to the decline of military strength caused by backward political system, corrupted leadership, improper response, but also because China still trapped in the natural economy, weighing farming cub business. So the concept of sea power was blank, and naval construction was isolated from the development of marine industries, consequently, national defense strategic industries stayed in weakness, impossible to achieve independent design and sustain naval construction. In addition, due to the low awareness of military intelligence, the navy took negative defense as its guiding ideology. What is worse, the central Government overstepped by local governments was unable to integrate the whole navy, which resulting in the low cooperation in wartime, eventually China's navy is defeated. By contrast, in Japan, everything went through in a reasonable way and both the strategic design and practical operations fitted the needs of sea power and the navy. Therefore, China's defeat was an inevitable result of thousands of years'ignorance of sea power.Look back into the history, is intended to alert the moment, and then explore the future.Surrounded by great powers, large areas of ocean territory stolen, China's construction of sea power needs to be clearer in strategic positioning and corresponding implementation strategies. Common factors extracted from the Sino-Japanese War provide useful insights for contemporary Chinese Sea Power construction, for instance, the moderate development of sea power, the confirmation of marine development as one important base of the national strategic interests and vigorous support to strategic industries related to the sea, the focus on developing long-range naval deterrent capability, the emphasis on the ability to terminate a war, and further clarification of the relationship between the construction of Navy Sea Power and peaceful development.
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