The Merchant Marine; The Chinese Navy is growing, and expanding its reach in Asia to secure oil and gas supplies.(ports of call create oil route)

Byline: Melinda Liu (With Stephen Glain in Washington and bureau reports)

The new port of Gwadar will be unveiled April 6 as the "Dubai of Pakistan," even if it lacks the theme-park glitz of the Gulf's fantasy city. The point, say Chinese officials, who bankrolled 80 percent of the $248 million project, is that this new deepwater cargo port is "strictly commercial." But hawks in Washington and New Delhi believe Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has given Beijing the nod to use Gwadar as a port of call for the Chinese Navy. "Gwadar's a strategic location, just 400 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz," says William Triplett III, a Washington-based conservative analyst who warns Gwadar will become a Chinese naval base "on little cat feet."

Alarm bells are ringing in Washington, where some see a pattern in Beijing's naval build-up, combined with a foreign-port building spree and efforts to secure maritime oil-transport routes. An internal report circulated among Pentagon officials late last year says Beijing is assembling a "string of pearls"--including ports, listening posts and naval agreements from Pakistan to Bangladesh to Burma--to protect its fragile oil-supply routes. Gwadar is critical, because it would provide the Chinese a listening post for monitoring ship traffic to and from the oil-rich Middle East, according to the report, which asserts that China is building up naval power at maritime "chokepoints... to deter the potential disruption of energy supplies from potential threats, including the U.S. Navy." China's naval outreach program is of concern to New Delhi, too, and was an underlying theme during U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to India last week.

Until a few years ago, China's hunt for energy resources was confined largely to the economic sphere, spearheaded by its state-owned oil and gas firms. But Chinese officials came to see U.S.-led conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq as wars over oil, just as its own oil demands were booming. Two years ago China surpassed Japan as the world's second biggest oil importer, after the United States. Now crude-oil prices are hitting record highs, topping $57 a barrel last week, amid warnings from strategists of a coming "energy cold war." What began as a commercial rivalry for oil supplies engaging the United States, Japan and China now seems poised "to spill over into the political and military spheres," according to Chietigj Bajpaee, a researcher for Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong think tank. In the event of conflict over Taiwan, say mainland strategists, Beijing should expect the United States to try to starve China of oil with a naval blockade.

China is now lavishing funds on its Navy, long a neglected arm of the military services. Since George W. Bush took office, China has been building up its fleet of amphibious assault ships and submarines, and last December launched its first in a new class of nuclear subs, years earlier than anticipated by U.S. intelligence. In November, Japan chased a Chinese sub out of its territorial waters, near a disputed and gas-rich area of the East China Sea. Almost as soon as Beijing apologized for that incident, a ...