近󠄁現代中國とマハン「海權」論

Abstract

In recent years, China's advance into the oceans has been problematized, and thus the influence of Mahan's theory of sea power has become the subject of attention and discussion amongst Chinese researchers and military personnel. However, much of the discussion has simply pointed out that China's advance into the oceans have been strongly influenced by Mahan's theory of sea power, but little research has considered how Mahan's sea-power theory had actually been recognized and evaluated by the Chinese people, nor how the Chinese evaluated their country from the perspective of Mahan's theory. In other words, no empirical studies have been made from these historical perspectives. In this paper, I chronologically examine and evaluate historical literature in which Chinese people have referred to Mahan's theory. This examination led to the following conclusions. First, as far as I have been able to determine, the earliest Chinese intellectual to come into contact with Mahan's sea-power theory was Liang Qichao at the end of the Qing Dynasty. He responded methodically to Mahan's theory, which was then sweeping the world, and incorporated it into his own analysis of China's contemporary situation. Second, when we consider the reception and application of Mahan's theory of sea power from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, we see that Mahan himself emphasized the chain of production and commerce, shipping, and naval affairs, and referred to these collectively as sea power, but in China, great attention was paid to the relationship between sea power and fisheries, and the exercise of sea power was discussed from the standpoint of fisheries, which thus differed from Mahan's theory in several respects. In addition, sea power was considered by some to refer to naval power, in other words, maintaining a strong navy was the only way to secure sea power, and therefore the reconstruction of a powerful navy was actively called for. Third, during the Republican period, Guo Shousheng conceived an image of Chinese sea power that China would aim for in the mid-1940s, which was based on Mahan's theory of sea power. Guo argued that sea power was most relevant in the North Pacific and that China, along with the United States, should guarantee the freedom of the seas. Finally, although the postwar Chinese Communist Party evaluated Mahan's theory of sea power critically as representative of maritime hegemony, it is no exaggeration to say that in fact China is on its way to becoming a modern version of a maritime hegemonic state that transcends Mahan's theory.