China currently has the most powerful shipbuilding capability, but its naval combat power in far-seas carriers and amphibious landing still lags behind the United States Navy.
Although China’s Coast Guard (Second Navy) has the largest tonnage of coast guard ships, its overall scale is much smaller than that of the US Coast Guard.
Starting from Mao Zedong’s people’s war, mainland China’s fishing boats have always cooperated with the People’s Liberation Army Navy and can be mobilized at any time.
In 1954, the Nationalist Navy’s Taiping, a 1430-ton escort destroyer, was sunk by a few-ton torpedo boat hidden among fishing boats.
When I was young 50 years ago, I also heard senior military personnel talk about how the Chinese Communist Party’s armed fishing boats, numerous and brave, attacked the Nationalist Navy’s large warships regardless of personnel casualties. When the Nationalist Navy ran out of ammunition, torpedo boats emerged and sank the large warships.
In the 1974 Battle of the Paracel Islands between China and Vietnam, China’s small gunboats defeated South Vietnam’s US-made escort destroyer, setting a record in modern naval warfare. However, the civilian militia on China’s armed fishing boats were the ones who achieved great success.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union also used fishing boats as spy ships, but on a limited scale.
Mainland China has the world’s largest deep-sea fishing fleet. About 10 years ago, the fleet numbered over one million fishing boats, but in recent years has been reduced to 564,000 boats, still the largest in the world.
Mainland China’s fishing boats often operate in the South China Sea, with around 300 militia fishing boats active there daily. These fishing boats can provide weapons, ammunition, food, and water supplies.
In 2014, smaller Vietnamese fishing boats in the South China Sea were sunk by China’s steel-hulled fishing boats. In 2023, at 4 a.m., near the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, a Filipino fishing boat was sunk by an unidentified foreign commercial vessel, resulting in 3 deaths.
After undergoing mobilization training, China’s civilian militia fishing boats are equipped with recoilless guns, machine guns, and individual anti-tank missiles, making them the third navy of China.
The US military is also starting to pay attention to this issue.