"We are watching them," a crew member of a U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine said at an American fast food restaurant while on shore leave here. "The Chinese are a real concern."

Ever since the U.S. Marine Corps defeated Japanese forces here 60 years ago, the Marianas have been widely considered an American lake. Now, the United States may have to get used to sharing the western Pacific with China, the world's rising naval power.

According to military analysts, China is rapidly expanding its submarine force to about 85 by 2010, about one-third more than today.

"They want to become the dominant power in the western Pacific, to displace the United States, to kick us back to Hawaii or beyond," said Richard Fisher Jr., who studies Chinese naval strengths and strategies for the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a Washington research institute.

China is embarking on a $10 billion submarine acquisition and upgrade program and is buying destroyers and frigates and equipping them with modern antiship cruise missiles, according to Eric McVadon, a retired U.S. Navy admiral who served as defense attache in Beijing in the early 1990s.

"The Chinese are converting their surface navy into a truly modern antiship cruise-missile surface navy," McVadon, now an East Asia security consultant, said after attending a naval review conference in Hawaii. "The modernization of their navy has taken a great leap forward. Their nuclear sub program has taken off like wildfire."

In contrast, Russia, which once had 90 submarines in the Pacific, has mothballed all but 20. Japan has 16 submarines and no plans to buy more. The U.S. Pacific Fleet has 35 submarines, with many considered to be the most modern in the world. "We don't have to worry about losing control of the seas anytime soon," Richard Halloran, a military affairs analyst based in Honolulu, said by telephone. "But the Chinese are moving a whole lot faster on military modernization than anyone expected a short time ago."

For its open-water navy, China is concentrating on submarines. The immediate goal, analysts say, is to blockade Taiwan, an island nation seen by Beijing as a breakaway province.

In response, the U.S. Navy is reversing an old Soviet-era formula, where the United States had 60 percent of its submarines in the Atlantic and 40 percent in the Pacific. In addition to shifting toward keeping 60 percent in the Pacific, the United States recently set up an antisubmarine warfare center in San Diego.

In January, Guam is to receive a third U.S. nuclear attack submarine, the Houston. In three years, the United States will have brought from zero to three its forward deployed submarines in Guam, the U.S. territory 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, south of here. Since March, the United States, using satellites and maritime surveillance planes, has detected Chinese submarines in waters west of Guam.

The Chinese Han Class submarine that passed near here cruised first near Guam. From the Marianas, the Chinese submarine went north to Okinawa, where Japanese forces detected it Nov. 9 as it shadowed a joint naval exercise between the United States and Japan.

Violating international law, the submarine passed between two Japanese islands without surfacing and identifying itself. Japan protested strongly, and Japanese officials said they had won a private apology from Chinese officials.

The rise of China's navy is watched with apprehension in the Pacific, where, down through the centuries, the islands have long been playthings for the world's maritime powers: Spanish, American, British, French, German and Japanese.

"I have talked to several Chinese residents here who are quite proud that China will have a big navy again," Samuel McPhetres, regional history professor at Northern Marianas College, said in an interview. "But are two big maritime powers willing to share the Pacific?"

In October 2003, a destroyer and a supply ship from the Chinese Navy made a goodwill visit to Guam, reciprocating a visit made one month earlier by two U.S. Navy ships to Zhanjiang, in southern Guangdong Province. It was the first call by U.S. warships to the headquarters of China's South Sea Fleet there.

But a few years ago, alarm bells rang in Washington when Chinese companies were the only bidders for a U.S. Navy ship repair facility that was to be ceded by the Pentagon to Guam's territorial government. Washington stopped the sale. Later, Guam signed a 20- year lease with a Japanese company.

Today, Washington is cautious about extending to Chinese tourists the same Guam-only visa privileges extended to South Korean tourists.

Robert Underwood, who served until 2003 as the territory's nonvoting delegate to the U.S. Congress, warned that huge Chinese tourism might scare away military strategists who are investing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Today's era of carefully negotiated port calls and surreptitious surveying reminds some historians of an earlier era.

"In the 1920s American military and Japanese military had to size up each other to see what the challenges were," Daniel Martinez, National Park Service historian at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, said in an interview in Saipan. "You could see today the potential of what was happening in 1930s, when the U.S. and Japan sought to spread influence throughout the Pacific." Japan's influence is eroding with new air links from here to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

"The Chinese influence in the Pacific islands will be very, very big, bigger than Japan's today," Hiroshi Nakajima, executive director of the Pacific Society, an academic group, predicted in a recent interview here. Eventually, Nakajima said, "Chinese interests and the American interest will clash."

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