Cyber Security Regional Security
China’s Underwater Great Wall
T By Sarosh Bana APSM Correspondent
10 | Asia Pacific Security Magazine
he stakes in the South China Sea (SCS) are apparently reaching down to the murky depths of this contentious waterway as Beijing readies its undersea surveillance network to consolidate its presence in the region. The China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), one of China’s top shipbuilding and defence groups that builds virtually all People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warships, has been laying a network of ship and subsurface sensors that it calls the ‘Underwater Great Wall Project’ that is designed to gain Beijing an enormous undersea warfare advantage. Estimated to be close to completion, the project will help China push its effective control zone and track all submarine, surface and aerial activity in the littoral. CSSC is also flaunting the system as “a package solution” in terms of underwater environment monitoring and collection, real-time location, tracing of surface and underwater targets, warning of seaquakes, tsunamis and other disasters, as well as for garnering research data on marine life and geology. Project details were made available at a CSSC booth at a public exhibition in China late last year, with IHS Jane’s managing to have them translated from a government official. According to a recent IHS Jane’s report, the system proposed by CSSC will likely be obtained by PLAN and may also be offered for export. The CSSC document is quoted as claiming that one of the company’s objectives, among others, is to provide its customers with “a package solution in terms of underwater environment monitoring and collection, real-time location,
tracing of surface and underwater targets, warning of seaquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters as well as marine scientific research”. Describing itself as “an extra-large conglomerate and state-authorised investment institution directly administered by the central government of China”, the 17-year-old Corporation notes: “Under its wing, there are totally 60 sole proprietorship enterprises and shareholding institutions, including a batch of most powerful and some renowned shipbuilding and ship-repairing yards, research and design institutes, marine-related equipment manufacturers and trading firms in China.” The CSSC stakeout model appears to be a vastly advanced and comprehensive version of the SOund SUrveillance System (SOSUS) that had accorded the United States a significant advantage in countering Soviet submarines during the Cold War. SOSUS was the result of an ultra secret mission tasked by the US’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) to AT&T and its manufacturing arm, Western Electric, in 1950 to develop an undersea surveillance system designed to detect and track Soviet submarines. The System was an array of hydrophones on the ocean bottom connected by undersea cables along the entire US East Coast to on-shore processing centres. SOSUS was itself a high engineering spin-off of the US Navy’s SOFAR (Sound Fixing And Ranging) channel discovered toward the end of WWII to detect submarines hundreds of miles away by listening for the noises they generate. The Underwater Great Wall gives visible shape to China’s intent on asserting its role in the region. Beijings’ claims of