Defence News
China’s great push forward: PLA’s foregin military outposts a threat to India?
On the day that the Donald Trump administration unveiled its first national security strategy that identified India as “a leading global power and stronger strategic and defence partner” and described China as a “rival”, Beijing had a quiet announcement of its own.
On December 18, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officials for the first time confirmed that China was “planning to explore the possibility of more foreign military outposts in Africa, West Asia and other areas”, to add to the PLA’s first overseas base in Djibouti opened in July.
The aim, PLA advisors told the South China Morning Post, was “to protect [China’s] expanding overseas interests in the Indian Ocean Region”.
The announcement came as the Trump administration, for its part, outlined a vision to mount a robust opposition to China’s fast-expanding influence and presence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and Asia-Pacific.
Trump’s strategy explicitly identified China and Russia as “rival powers” that seek to “erode American security and prosperity”.
The Trump administration said it would “seek to increase quadrilateral cooperation with Japan, Australia, and India” and “help South Asian nations maintain their sovereignty as China increases its influence in the region”.
The strategy left unsaid how Washington plans to do so, especially as many countries have, in Trump’s first year in office, gravitated deeper into China’s economic orbit even as the US President has spoken of “America First” and withdrawn the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the region’s biggest counter till date to Chinese economic influence. On the economic front, China is powering ahead with its One Belt, One Road infrastructure plan.
The December 18 announcement by the PLA now hints at how Beijing’s military footprint in the region is also set to grow. Six months after opening the first overseas base in Djibouti, signs are that China has ambitious plans to beef up its first outpost.
In September, the PLA conducted its first live-fire drills in its new base in the Djibouti desert, a drill that carried its own significance as the first PLA live-firing deployment overseas (outside of UN peacekeeping missions) since the 1979 Vietnam war.
Mathieu Duchatel, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of China’s Strong Arm, Protecting Chinese Nationals and Assets Abroad, notes that behind this changed calculus for China and the spurt in recent activity in spreading its overseas footprint was a key turning point in 2015, when the PLA was pressed into service for the mass evacuations of tens of thousands of Chinese nationals from unrest in Libya and Yemen.
Following Djibouti, two additional IOR bases are already being considered, according to Chinese planners and media reports.
China has reportedly had preliminary discussions with the Seychelles, while many Chinese observers believe that Gwadar in Pakistan would be a natural location, given that it’s also being developed as the hub of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor.
China is also building or managing ports in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
These developments, Duchatel says, suggest China’s foreign policy is undergoing a transformative shift away from its traditional ‘non-interference’ to a gradual ‘militarisation’ of foreign policy.
CPEC, he says, is further moving this shift into uncharted territory, with tens of thousands of Chinese nationals expected to move into one of the world’s most unsafe countries.
The prospect of a Chinese ‘string of pearls’, littoral military bases in the IOR, set up with the aim of encircling India, has preoccupied strategists for many years.
Today, it’s not only India that is driving China’s calculus but its growing global footprint. The pearls are growing in number, and the string ever longer.
