China Showcases Rising Maritime Power in Airliner Search

[Purveyor]

By Bloomberg News Mar 27, 2014 10:45 PM ET

China, in the midst of a military buildup challenging the U.S. and Japan, is showcasing its expanded capabilities in the search for Malaysia’s missing plane by deploying hardware from satellites to warships to an icebreaker.

With pictures of gray-hulled naval vessels and planes operating in seas thousands of miles from Chinese shores, state media has hailed the hunt for Malaysia Air Flight MH370 as the country’s “strongest-ever search and rescue.” China, which had a majority of the passengers on the Beijing-bound flight, says it has sent at least 13 ships to the search zone in the Indian Ocean.

That ranks as the largest naval deployment outside its waters in modern history, according to Gary Li, a senior analyst for IHS Maritime in Beijing. The deployment plays well at home, where President Xi Jinping has vowed to make China a combat-ready maritime power and is being assertive in territorial disputes with neighbors including Japan and the Philippines.

“It’s an enormously valuable training exercise for them, it’s not something they’ve ever done before,” Steve Tsang, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in England, said. “It means the Chinese can deploy ships at quite considerable distance away from home operating in difficult conditions.”

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-27/china-showcases-rising-maritime-power-in-hunt-for-malaysian-jet.html

[wall_dish]

1. Their Navy is growing stronger but they're nowhere near having the capabilities to the US Navy.

They don't have the maritime history nor combat experience of the American Navy, nor the capital ships to challenge either the Japanese Navy nor the American Navy.
In an actual shooting war involving either the Japanese or US, China would most certainly come out the loser.