Only way its not a check box on an escalatory ladder for PR reasons is in the case of general back door agreement to look like one's doing something without really doing something. For example, Japan and Korea get cold feet and don't want to lose ships, so work out a gentlemen's agreement where the Japanese seize 1 million tons of oil "contraband" and hold Chinese ships in a Japanese port for a few days, while the Chinese navy seizes 1 million tons of oil from Japanese ships as part of their counter blockade, keeping them in a Chinese port before sending them on their way.
In order for China to have the ability to sink other nations shipping, they would first need to defeat the USN and/or said nations navies. Sure, if they launched surprise undeclared attacks, they could get a few, but then they're in a shooting war with the US and allies.
Korea is an exception to this, being close enough for China to threaten 'locally,' and they might be able to get a few elsewhere with submarines, before said submarines are all sunk.
Otherwise, if the US declares a general blockade against China, China declares a counter blockade against people with US troops stationed, or whatever specific wording that gives a fig leaf justification to blockade Korea, Japan, and Taiwan if they put US troops on the Island. And something to wave at others in the region as a threat to getting involved.
Critically, in order for the Chinese to try some sort of blockade, in order to attempt to enforce that, they need to draw the US into a shooting war, which is a losing proposition for China.
US is then obligated to defend its allies ships or back down, and assuming the US doesn't back down (not a given, seeing where else the US has backed down), you then have general naval warfare and lots of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ships will get sunk, the question being who will do more damage and be better able to absorb it.
And probably gearing up to invade South Korea, which is probably in such an escalated fight the most direct rout for creating a situation where Taiwan can be taken.
Japan and South Korea being nervous about losing ships being one of the reasons I find escalating to such a general naval war unappealing to them if any other option is available, like a limited Falklans style fight.
The reason the Falklands fight was limited, was because Argentina lacked the ability to exert meaningfully more power against the Falklands than they did.
If China starts a shooting war with the US, the PLAAF and PLAN will be memories by the time they could muster for an invasion of SK, meaning that such an invasion is basically doomed to fail.
Eh, not entirely. The main point is to give some ability to resist boarding actions, so such low level attacks aren't viable, forcing the US to back off or escalate. Once in general war there's probably some value in still being armed enough that the cheapest attacks, and ones which can grant prizes to the enemy, are non viable.
With the increase in drones there's likely to be some targets a 50 cal or MANPAD could be useful against, so at least its not as trivial. Bigger ships you can slap on whatever the Chinese equivalent of the 23-40 mm cannons on to give a little bit more protection and generally add more friction to American operations: if your launching an airstrike against targets on the surface, if living ships might have AAA or SAMs on them, on top of basic spotting and early warning functions, that adds more friction to other operations.
Otherwise more hands is useful for Damage control if nothing else with a bit of training. Especially useful if operating off the Chinese coast, where a little slower sinking could allow either rescue of all the crew to replace other losses or man newly built ships, or the ship limping back to harbor so the ship itself can be repaired, which adds more friction to the US operations as the needed weapondry to score true kills is increased somewhat.
All those marginal improvements seem like they would be well worth throwing men at the problem, something China isn't short of.
These 'marginal improvements' are not easy to implement.
First off, there are reasons that it is not standard practice to arm merchantmen, both financial and political. China deciding to arm its merchant ships as part of a general military build-up is going to go over pretty poorly with the international community, and would also be expensive to try to implement on scale.
Even if it
did arm its
own ships, as Marduk has addressed, it's going to be pretty bloody difficult for the kinds of weapons they can feasibly stick on a merchant vessel to actually stop attacks. Make them more expensive? Possibly, but you're increasing the cost of the attack by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, on a ship+cargo that is worth hundreds of millions.
And it will only take so many examples made for the rest of the Chinese ships to start obeying the blockade.
At the
very best, arming your merchantmen is going to result in you shooting down maybe one or a few military helicopters, before the situation devolves to 'USN tells you to surrender, or you're getting an over-the-horizon attack that sinks the ship.'
Also, the non-Chinese flagged ships are definitely not going to try to run the blockade once it's clear the US is serious, and that's going to be the majority of shipping anyways.
Given past performance, probably most. And of course, this is something Marines can also be helpful on. At the very least, most are going to wait until a very clear victor, and if this was isn't going to be persued to the destruction of the Communist State, all their family are still there and they likely have to go back after the war. In which case you don't want to be too obviously a traitor to the war effort. Not trying to hard can be covered. Stealing company property and sailing off course, less so.
True, if they joined the naval fight before one side was clearly winning, their naval assets are fairly minor. They have their abilities to take their pound of flesh in other ways though. A lot of it would be in what they permit and don't. For example, Chinese tankers could pick up oil in Iran, carry it through Iranian waters, Pakistani waters, Indian Waters, and drop it off in Burma, which already has an oil pipeline which could probably be expanded. Sinking ships in any of those countries water will annoy them. India could simply refuse any other nations military ships operating in its water or harbors, which hurts the US more than China, who even if they want to operate some naval assets in the Indian Ocean can use bases in Burma, Iran, Pakistan, and possibly Shi Lanka.
'An oil pipeline which could probably be expanded.'
Yes, they will just casually carry out a years-long infrastructure development project in a politically unstable area.
Also, you keep suggesting India would side with China at least tacitly, rather than against the nation which is trying to claim some of their border territory, and has been having (very restrained) border skirmishes with them for years. Why on earth do you think this would happen when China is looking to be taken down several dozen pegs in a fight against the US?
Iran has its own buttons it can push in the local area, and China can supply them with weapondry and other equipment quite easily through Russia or Pakistan even if direct ocean supply is difficult. They could also close the Strait of Hormuz, and the Chinese could intercept ships coming down from the Suez Canal from their base in Africa. Obviously both of those are risky operations, more useful as a threat than executing, potentially. But, in case of general war it does draw US naval and air forces away from the China sea making victory there more likely.
No, Iran cannot close the Straits of Hormuz. That is a joint Omani/Iranian sea lane, and the world at large will not tolerate Iranian attempts to close it. The US could send a single Amphibious Assault Ship and its escorts to smash the Iranian Navy flat and force the straits to be opened again, and if we felt like it, blow the Karg Island industrial facilities up and wreck their economy while we were at it.
Yeah, every day an F-35/F-18 spends shooting at freighters, especially if its not doing enough damage to actually sink them and they can limp back to port, is probably a net win for China. A Carrier is only really good for something like 100-200 sorties a day, so even if you had all the carriers brought to the front, that's only about 2,000 sorties a day. Which with all the other needs of the air wings in a combat situation doesn't leave that many free sorties, and using those on merchant ships might be a bit of a waste. Protecting allied shipping is probably going to be a big issue as well.
You again have this fantasy that it is going to take direct applied force to each and every ship to make them stop. A more reasonable expectation is that after a handful are sunk, and maybe a couple dozen boarded, no further attempts will be made. Even if the CCP manage to browbeat more crews into trying down the line, it's not going to be all or the majority.
Further, despite having generally had a positive perspective of you historically, you're starting to strain my ability to believe you're arguing in good faith with the other point in this paragraph.
If the US is enforcing a naval blockade, it's explicitly as a scenario where it is
not in an open shooting war with China. Thus, there is no need to weigh blockade-enforcement sorties against combat sorties.
If China
does start a shooting war with the USA, then yeah, some ships might slip through while the US is sinking the PLAN and shooting down the PLAAF, but at least a few smaller ships will still be spared to keep the blockade partially intact, and once the PLAN and PLAAF are largely memories, it'll be bloody easy to fully re-implement the blockade.
Pretending that the USN would need to be fully committed to both at the same time as an honest proposition seriously strains the idea that you're not just throwing shit out there at this point, rather than trying to have a serious argument. Again, I expect better of you.
I think the range issue is a bit overstated, or at least the cause seems to be miss allocated. A Burke for example only has a range of 8,000 km, while the New type 55 destroyer seems to have roughly equivalent range. The smaller more numerous Type 54 frigate have a range of about 7,000, and regularly travels to Africa and has made it all the way up to the Baltics. The main range issues are 1) at sea replenishment, which China does have now, 2) Bases over seas, which they have some now, and many locations that can be turned into overseas bases with political wrangling, and 3) blocking forces, which this war of course partially is occurring to remove.
They can almost certainly get basing in Cambodia, Burma, Pakistan, Iran, and of course they're current naval base in Africa. That's enough to support fairly extensive operations in the Indian Ocean and middle East as necesary, especially with pre-positioning. Keeping oil coming in is probably the short term need to keep the war effort going, see how the naval war is progressing, and gear up for whatever land war might make the naval war more likely to end in victory.
It doesn't matter how far out the PLAN can or cannot base, if they're either not in an open shooting war with the US, or all their naval assets away from their mainland AA envelope are sunk because they don't have carrier support. Either they can't use ships operating out of those bases militarily, or those ships are acting as highly-expensive new reefs because they decided to play FAFO.
And I've already addressed the fact that yes,
some of the PLAN can operate at long ranges, but it is not
enough to contest the USN in any meaningful way. Until they have properly functional Aircraft Carriers, or utterly overwhelming swarms of missile frigates, anything they send outside the Chinese mainland's AA envelope is just going to flat-out die in a shooting war. They might inflict some damage as they go down, but there's no feasible chance at victory.
And all of this is before you take into account the institutional corruption of the Chinese industrial complex, and what impact that will have on their navy's ability to actually fight effectively,
on top of the fact that standard practice for decades has been heavier political indoctrination and less training than the US military has been decaying towards,
by far. And, you know, their complete and utter lack of any kind of actual combat experience.
At every single turn, your arguments are based on absurdly optimistic expectations for how almost every peripheral factor will go for the PLAN, and completely fail to account for the fact that, in this hypothetical scenario, they're picking a fight with the most powerful and advanced nation in the world, which has an extensive network of allies, including almost all other advanced and powerful nations in the world, which China has been systematically pissing off.
