China's New Diplomatic Style Added: Maritime Joint Military Exercise Study

Maritime combined military exercise or joint military exercise is the advanced stage of maritime military cooperation between nations, and is important for the international community to put the cooperative security theory into practice. Up to the April 2009, China has altogether participated 22 combined exercises since its first participation at the end of last century. The author attempts to analyze the changes in China's way of participation, explore the features that have arisen during China's participation, and discuss the problems as well as the possible countermeasures which could be taken on China's side. The author points out that the ten-year history of China's participation could be divided into three different stages—"observer"stage,"bilateral"stage and"multilateral"stage, with the multilateral maritime combined exercise as the trend of China's future participation. Then he argues that the combined exercise is a positive complement to China's diplomacy and is conducive to China's implementation of diplomatic and security strategies, and that China's participation also helps enrich diplomatic activities, such as"bilateral diplomacy"and"multilateral diplomacy", and furthermore influence China's diplomacy in a profound way. But it should be noted that there are many problems, such as the shortage of partner countries, high repetition of the exercise subjects, vulnerability to outside factors, etc. Based on this, the author suggest that, China should start from its national conditions and try to enrich the exercise content, extend the scale of the navel vessels, improve mechanism and routine exercises, etc. By bringing the combined exercise in line with the national defense policy that is defensive in nature and an independent foreign policy of peace, the combined exercise will play a much more positive role in the future.