Its string of islands creates choke points through which much of the Chinese navy must transit to easily reach the “distant seas” of the Pacific Ocean. Extending about 1,200 km southwest from Japan’s home islands towards Taiwan, the Ryukyu archipelago forms a natural boundary between the East China Sea and the rest of the Pacific Ocean. Today, China routinely sends its warships beyond its “near seas.” But to do so, those warships must still pass through that first chain of islands, a key part of which are Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. Once that goal was achieved, China could push out its defensive depth to dier daolian, or the “second island chain” (the Marianas, Guam, and the Carolines). They began referring to the waters between China’s coastline and what they called diyi daolian, or the “first island chain” (the Japanese home islands, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Borneo), as an area where the Chinese navy needed to develop the capabilities to exert effective sea denial, if not sea control.
In the 1980s, with the advent of long-range standoff weapons, those strategists began to argue that China would have to push out its seaboard defenses into the Pacific Ocean to ensure its security. For most of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, the sea was the path over which foreign foes reached China, a fact not lost on Chinese naval strategists.
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