The threat of a Chinese aircraft carrier is not one that is easily disguised. Taiwan’s defense ministry, ever vigilant toward its old political rival China, spotted one moving around the island in December and January. Some reports expect a carrier will return here soon for the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from the United Kingdom to China, reminding self-ruled Taiwanese of the war that might happen if they declare formal independence someday from China. Photos of China’s second carrier were easy to spot online.
But now China is planning for 2020 what official media describe as a global scientific expedition of ocean floors using a harder-to-see “submersible” vehicle named Jiaolong. A submersible is defined as a vehicle that operates underwater and usually refers to small research craft. This one probably works something like a bathyscaphe (see full definition here). The Jiaolong, which finished five years of trials in February, is equipped to dive to depths up to 7,000 meters for info on marine life, hydrothermal movement and “multi-metal nodule mining,” the official Xinhua News Agency says. It can be manned, as well.
Like a lot of underwater missions that China pursues, this submersible comes off at first like another harmless research effort. Chinese officials are also protecting a rare oceanic “blue hole” in the disputed Paracel Islands of the South China Sea and planning an underwater observation system to send real-time seabed information back to shore and explore its chemistry, Chinese media reported in March. The system would cover the South and East China seas, both disputed by neighboring Asian countries.
More from Forbes: China's Take-And-Talk Strategy In The South China Sea
You can see from those descriptions an obvious location issue - Japan’s control over parts of the East China Sea overlaps Chinese claims. Five other governments including the easily angered Vietnamese leadership contest Beijing’s sphere of influence in the South China Sea. The submersible may be gathering info on what other countries are doing. It can at least lock in Chinese claims by getting to know disputed tracts of sea better, as less developed countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines are unlikely to have advanced submersibles.
“A relatively uninformed observation is that (Xinhua) mentions metal nodule mining in the South China Sea as one of its purposes,” says Jeffrey Wilson, senior international political economy at Murdoch University in Australia. “One can, of course, only mine a seabed over which one has sovereignty.”
The undersea diving machine will add to Chinese pride as an advanced maritime nation, not just a land-based one, says Collin Koh, a maritime security research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The State Oceanic Administration has shared deep-see findings before with other countries, Koh says. So it may offer up the same in 2020. But although Chinese officials would never say so, the undersea mission might be murkily linked to ever-secretive military use, he says. Outsiders have raised the same fear about the Chinese space program. Japan with its international deep-sea drilling program could vie with China's Jiaolong technology. Weaker rival maritime claimants could only watch, fret and fear.
“This is a problem that highlights the challenge in blurring the lines between civilian and military technologies used for marine scientific and technological work, and the duality of use of such data that is obtained,” Koh says. “We need to recall that back during the Cold War, major navies were reported to have used deep-sea submersibles for underwater espionage activities.”
