Chinese Warships Show Muscles

Ao Yangli

In the past 40 years of reform and opening-up, China Shipbuilding Trading Corporation (CSTC) under CSSC has given full play to main force of Chinese military ship export, main channel of ship foreign trade and an important bridge of technology exchange. A series of domestic frigates,submarines, missile boats and other ships were pushed to the international market,and the Chinese warships sailed into ports of 30 countries and regions.

Foreign military trade of China's shipbuilding industry was born in the breeze of reform and opening up. In December 1980, 24 ships of five ship forms, including 053HE frigates, were exported to Egypt. This order was the beginning of China's shipbuilding industry's foreign military trade.

With the continuous deepening of reform and opening-up and the continuous development of China's diplomatic and foreign trade work, the overall design capacity and construction level of the shipbuilding industry have also been greatly improved. By the end of the 1980s,the military ship trade had achieved initial but gratifying results. CSTC signed four 053HT missile frigates with the Thai Navy, which was the largest overseas order in Thai naval history and the largest export order for China's shipbuilding industry.

Since the mid-1990s, the development of Chinese ship's military trade has been steady and mature, and CSTC’s military trade was developing in depth, and transacted typical military-trade projects are mainly joint development, cooperative construction and refitting and repair. China began to send a large number of engineering technicians to international cooperation abroad. The military and trade work in this period is characterized by the development of the export of pure ship products to the equipment and technology exports, such as export port equipment, construction of shipyard facilities and the like, and it started diversified development; and the construction site is also transferred from domestic to the outside.

In the 21st century, CSTC’s military trade business goes on with“enrichment, improvement and steady development”. in April 2005, CSTC signed a contract to export four frigates for Pakistan's F22P project, which pioneered the history of military trade in China in time span, equipment integrity and complexity. It remained the largest and most far-reaching military trade project in China for a long time.

During the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period, CSTC's military trade business reached a number of “first”.Firstly, it was the first time to achieve independent R&D on the export of major combat warships. In December 2011,CSTC signed a contract for exporting three frigates to Algeria, which was another major warship full-ship export project following the Pakistan F22P frigate project, creating a new era of military trade business. Secondly, in June 2015, CSTC signed a contract for six patrol vessels with Pakistan, making a breakthrough in the export of public service vessels. In addition, one sea patrol ship was exported to Trinidad and Tobago, which was the first time Chinese public service ship entered the Caribbean Sea market. Thirdly, CSTC entered the waterway dredging field for financing lease overseas for the first time. CSTC signed a 7000-cubic-meter dredger lease with Pakistan, the first financial lease in a third-world country market.

After 40 years of development,whether on traditional third world countries or for western developed countries, China's ship military trade has had considerable influence, and has become a force that cannot be ignored in the international naval trade market.CSTC has become a first-class military trading company with international influence.

From the time span, the military trade business is a “protracted war”,from bidding, negotiation, contract signing, implementation to later-stage support, usually it takes five to six years to complete a short-term military trade project, and 10 years or more for a long period of time. CSTC's two frigate projects which set record in the military trade history both lasted about 10 years.

The first is the nine-year F22P frigate project for Pakistan. In 2005,China and Pakistan signed a fourfrigates contract, and the first three were built in China; and the fourth was built in Karachi Shipyard, Pakistan,with Chinese material, equipment and technical assistance. In addition,the Chinese side provided one-year warranty service for the Palestinian side, so the project was not finally completed until 2014. The second is the three-frigates export project to Algeria for over 10 years. Since 2005, CSTC had actively promoted the 3,000-ton frigate to the Algerian Navy through a variety of ways; an international procurement request for bids was received in April 2010,and a contract was signed in 2011;on December 29, 2016, No. 3 ship was delivered, and the project ended successfully, with a 2-year warranty thereafter.

In order to win “protracted wars” one after another, CSTC's military trade team has worked hard,trained a number of elite forces that are particularly capable of “fighting”and “winning the battle”. “A military tradesman is a soldier who does not wear a uniform, but the blood of a soldier is shed in his bones.”Li Hongtao, CSTC general manager,said, “You can't do this without dedication.＂ This dedication lies in overcoming all kinds of difficulties,handling every detail, completing successive tasks, and making military trade projects one after another.

In the Pakistan F22P frigate project, in order to deliver No. 4 ship at the Karachi shipyard by pitch points,the CSTC project team in Pakistan repeatedly communicated with Pakistan and worked closely with the shipyard.In spite of the high temperature and extreme heat, they got out of the workshop with the technicians, boarded the shipyard berth, kept informed of the construction progress, discussed technical issues of the construction,finally achieved the timely completion of the important nodes, and created the history of the first scheduled delivery of the ship in the 63 years since the construction of the Karachi Shipyard,thus highly praised by the Pakistan side.

The project team of CSTC has also done a good job in after-sale maintenance and support services,led technical service personnel and related personnel of shipbuilding enterprises to study the Pakistan needs carefully, and provided them with good warranty services. “The quality of military products is absolutely in the first place, and we rely on the responsibility for the user to maintain the market and cultivate the market,”Li Hongtao said. The details of products and services have shaped the credibility and reputation of CSTC overseas. The company's professional competence in project management, collaborative construction, system integration and after-sales service has been gradually recognized and has become the “golden key” to start cooperation in followup projects. During the implementation of Pakistan's four-frigates project, two more follow-up ships contract was signed between the two sides.

In the long-term development,CSTC has condensed 32-Chinese characters military trade culture-- loyalty to duty, no complaints and no regrets; no fear of hardship,perseverance; profound understanding and consideration of the overall situation;meticulous, due diligence. This is the nature of the CSTC's military tradesmen.

With the rapid development of science, technology and industry for national defense, the trend of customer demand diversification is obvious. CSTC put forward the target direction of the“three transitions” in a bid to make a breakthrough in the business model-- the system planning and the overall solution capability are promoted, and the equipment and technology cooperation,joint development and technology transfer transformation are realized gradually from mainly equipment export to equipment and technology cooperation,joint research and technology transfer,from single equipment export to systematism, seriation, standardization and integration, from purely military equipment export to the comprehensive trade mode of equipment plus military engineering, infrastructure and energy resources cooperation, so as to achieve more brilliant performance.