Late last month, the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) accepted its first purpose-built floating hospital, the 10,000-ton "Ship 866." While seemingly innocuous on the surface, ships like this are windows into an evolving military strategy for an emerging world power. Hospital ships can be used for a wide range of missions, from supporting full-scale amphibious assaults against heavily defended targets, to humanitarian "soft-power" expeditions winning hearts and minds.
Given the state of China's navy--little global reach--the ship makes little sense for supporting power projections against distant targets. China can't deploy enough troops so far away to make a hospital ship worth the effort. And using the ship for a close target would probably not make sense either, since you'd just send casualties to Chinese hospitals on the mainland.
I'd guess that the main purpose is to make sure that China isn't an observer while the United States sends help to China's neigngorhood after a major disaster, as after the 2004 tsunami that ravaged Indonesia and Thailand, among others in the area.
But there is one military scenario where a ship like this makes sense: Taiwan. Reportedly, the Chinese have a worry about enduring too many casualties in a military assault to capture Taiwan. My question is, do the Chinese worry about a certain level of casualties because they think any up to a certain level is a price worth paying and anything above that is not? Or do the Chinese believe that their public will falter in their support of an invasion of Taiwan should Chinese casualties exceed that amount?
This is an important distinction. If the Chinese are simply worried about the impact of casualties on their home morale, one way of nullifying that effect for the short run (which would be sufficient to complete the conquest of Taiwan) would be to keep the Chinese people from seeing those casualties. If the Chinese had to ship all their wounded back to Chinese hospitals, the Chinese people will see the price of conquering Taiwan very quickly. And if hospitals all over China fill up with military casualties there will be no way of hiding the price China is paying.
But if many of the casualties, including the most severe, are sent to a PLAN ship that is operating away from Chinese civilian eyes, the Chinese public will not see much of the price of the invasion. Support for the invasion will be extended.
The ship could affect hearts and minds in very diverse ways depending on the target audience.
