The recent arrival of a Chinese navy hospital ship carrying doctors and medical supplies to treat the needy in Jamaica flew mainly below the radar of mainstream American media.
But the People's Liberation Army's “Peace Ark” mission highlights the delicate balance China is seeking to strike as it tries to show off its growing global military capability and boost its influence in regions once exclusively dominated by the U.S. military, without triggering suspicion and alarm in Washington and elsewhere.
“In some sense this underscores that you can’t put China in just a regional category any longer,” says Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow with the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington.