People's Liberation Army Navy purely defensive and peaceful

CNN ran a lengthy article on Saturday fearmongering about the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Titled "China has built the world's largest navy. Now what's Beijing going to do with it?", Senior Producer for Digital Programming & Alerting Brad Lendon pushes the narrative that the PLAN's historic buildup over the past three decades, especially the last one, presents a serious security challenge to the US' rule over the high seas. Although he does to his credit include some counters to this argument in his piece, the impression that the reader is left with is that the world should at the very least be suspicious of China's long-term intentions.

The international community can rest assured however that China has no ambitions to displace the US' global naval hegemony, let alone employ the PLAN for the purpose of disrupting sea lines of communication (SLOC) or waging wars of aggression abroad. To the contrary, the PLAN is purely defensive and peaceful. It only wants to secure China's SLOC that now stretch around the world and possibly participate in UN peacekeeping missions, disaster relief, and naval diplomacy, as two of the experts that Lendon cites point out. The only combat that they'd ever potentially see would be in defending China's territorial integrity, not infringing on that of others.

Concerning that scenario, the question on many observers' minds is whether the PLAN intends to "invade" Taiwan, as some voices abroad provocatively phrase it while ignoring the fact that one can't "invade" one's own territory. Semantics aside, Beijing has consistently pursued a peaceful solution to the sensitive issue of reuniting its wayward province with the motherland. The problem, though, is that third parties are strategically invested in the dispute and aim to exploit it in order to serve their divide-and-rule interests for neo-imperial purposes. The US in particular is first and foremost among such hostile parties.

In fact, it has become increasingly popular in recent years for some anti-China hawks in the US — across administrations — to speculate about the US militarily intervening in the event that the Chinese mainland and Taiwan peacefully reunite. They want to prevent that from happening at all costs because they fear losing the geopolitical leverage that they currently employ to create problems for Beijing. This explains the provocative US naval buildup in the South China Sea and similarly unfriendly passages through the Taiwan Straits, to say nothing of arms shipments to Taipei and tacit political support for separatist forces.

Manufacturing the false narrative about the PLAN's purportedly aggressive plans is meant to serve as the pretext for pressuring regional states to request more American military aid, especially in the naval domain. The cumulative effect of this in practice will be to further destabilize the South China Sea by deceptively portraying the PLAN's defensive and peaceful buildup in a fearmongering fashion. Subsequent Chinese naval moves would then be presented according to the earlier explained propaganda paradigm in order to catalyze a self-sustaining cycle of unrest that the US hopes to perpetually exploit.

What the targeted audience of this information warfare campaign is not supposed to know, however, is that the PLAN would only respond to any US attack against it in the scenario of the Chinese mainland's peaceful reunification with Taiwan. Since the US indisputably wields global naval hegemony, it is ridiculous to speculate that the PLAN would ever attack it first, whether in the South China Sea or anywhere further away. China's far seas protection strategy, as Lendon's cited experts call it, is only aimed at protecting China's SLOC and participating in UN-authorized missions or upon request by a sovereign state to aid in disaster relief.

It is imperative that the global audience is made aware of these truths in order to not fall victim to the false narrative that is being pushed by CNN. The PLAN doesn't threaten anyone. It is an anchor of security in the South China Sea, which the US is trying to destabilize. It is perverse to flip the roles of victims and villains by misportraying the PLAN as worsening regional security when that is actually what the US Navy has been doing since the Obama Administration's "Pivot to Asia". Hopefully the rest of the world wakes up and realizes that CNN is deceiving them once again in order to justify further US aggression abroad.

Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.