A S MILITARY PAGEANTS go, multinational parades of warships deliver quite a complex message. Over a dozen countries—ranging from friends to overt rivals—sent naval vessels to the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao on April 23rd. There they steamed past a destroyer carrying China’s commander-in-chief, President Xi Jinping, in honour of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Paint gleaming and brass fittings buffed to a hospital shine, there were frigates from near-allies such as Russia, and destroyers from almost-foes like India. Their mission was friendship and diplomacy. But these were heavily armed peace envoys, warily visiting a China whose emergence as an ocean-going nation is shaking Asia, and may one day change the world. Visitors involved in territorial disputes with China, including Japan and Vietnam, sent ships bristling with weaponry. America sent no ships at all.

China sent mixed messages, too. As the celebrations began, the visitors were hailed by Mr Xi as a sort of floating United Nations. A peace-loving China yearned to work with foreign navies to secure international sea-lanes and safeguard the ocean’s riches, Mr Xi declared. On state television presenters noted that, as a mainstay of anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since 2008, the Chinese navy had escorted more than 6,600 ships, from China and other countries, through bandit-infested waters.

Then came the bit which many Chinese viewers probably preferred: shots of their newest warships, dwarfing foreign visitors. Along came a Chinese ballistic-missile submarine—nuclear-powered and designed for destroying enemy cities, not arresting Somali pirates. It glided past the destroyer carrying Mr Xi, who boarded wearing a dark Mao suit befitting his other jobs as the Communist Party’s general secretary and chairman of the Central Military Commission. “Comrades, greetings!” barked Mr Xi over a radio. “Chairman, greetings!” came the submariners’ shouted reply. On state television, presenters compared China’s newest destroyer, the 10,000-tonne Type 055, to the most powerful of America’s. Screens filled with archive footage of jets roaring from the deck of the Liaoning, China’s first aircraft-carrier.

On shore in the handsome, fog-shrouded port city of Qingdao, bilingual posters celebrating the naval anniversary offered variations on Mr Xi’s favourite diplomatic slogans, such as: “The ocean connects us all, a community with a shared future.” Others, in Chinese, hailed the navy’s role as a political force, under the direct control of Mr Xi as the party’s chief. A banner outside Qingdao’s naval museum suggested that Mr Xi’s peace of mind was the ultimate test of naval modernisation. “Obey Chairman Xi’s commands. Answer to Chairman Xi. Let Chairman Xi be reassured,” it read.

Cui Junkai, a 19-year-old student, had travelled from the city of Chengdu, hundreds of kilometres inland, for the fleet review. The parade-eve found Mr Cui in Qingdao’s naval museum, inspecting a wooden torpedo-boat from the years when China’s navy was merely a “brown-water” one, tasked with launching guerrilla attacks in muddy coastal waters. A mighty navy offers China a double benefit, Mr Cui said. “It not only defends the nation, but demonstrates our power to the outside world.”

Behind the teenager, rusty patrol boats bobbed at the museum quayside, recalling the decades when China boasted a “green-water navy”, capable of intimidating smaller neighbours but powerless when American battle-groups steamed by. That navy was a defensive force that aimed to ward off seaborne threats, not to project power over far horizons. In 1990 China’s then-president, Jiang Zemin, urged the navy to be “the motherland’s Great Wall at sea”. The next Communist leader, Hu Jintao, signalled a change in 2012 when he called for China to become a “great maritime power”. The navy saw its budgets soar and its fleet quality transformed. China now has the region’s largest navy, with over 300 surface and underwater vessels, the Pentagon reported last year. It will have as many as 78 submarines by 2020, up from 56 in 2018, says the Pentagon.

Chinese scholars have pored over the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American navy captain and 19th-century writer on “sea power” as a source of global strength resting on three pillars: commerce, naval firepower and access to far-flung bases. Mahan was a prescient man. In a report from China’s first naval base abroad, which opened in Djibouti last year, Chinese state television included a revealing on-camera prediction from the base’s political commissar: that support for far-flung missions would increasingly depend on such facilities.

Change of plan

Such talk alarms military chiefs in America and other countries. Their anxiety in turn worries Hu Bo, a leading maritime strategist at Peking University. For as China’s navy rises it has more than one goal, he says. First, to become a blue-water navy capable of providing security worldwide, which may perhaps involve opening a few more bases, for instance around the northern Indian Ocean. China’s other goal is “near-sea control”, Mr Hu says, meaning the capability to contain any threat in the western Pacific and northern Indian oceans—just as America and Russia currently enjoy comparative advantages close to home. That does not mean that China can or will evict all American ships from the South China Sea or other nearby waters, Mr Hu insists. In a generation’s time he can imagine a more restrained America and a more confident China reaching a new balance of power in those near seas, after a period of competition. The dangerous period is the next five or ten years, he says. “China’s capability is growing fast, but the United States is not ready to grant China status matching that power.”

A balance must be reached, though. After millennia as an agrarian, continental power, China is a maritime nation, bound to the seas by strategic and commercial interests. Few foreigners would recognise the Chinese naval ensign today. That will change.