On Thursday last week, China announced that it would establish its first overseas military outpost and unveiled a sweeping plan to reorganize its military into a more agile force capable of projecting power abroad.
The outpost, in the east African nation of Djibouti, breaks with Beijing’s long-standing policy against emulating the US in building military facilities abroad.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs refrained from describing the new installation as a military base, saying it would be used to resupply Chinese navy ships that have been participating in UN anti-piracy missions.
Yet, by establishing an outpost in the Horn of Africa — more than 7,725km away from Beijing and near some of the world’s most volatile regions — Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is leading the military beyond its historical focus on protecting the nation’s borders.
Together with the plan for new command systems to integrate and rebalance the armed forces, the two announcements highlight the breadth of change that Xi is pushing on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which for decades has served primarily as a lumbering guardian of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule.
Xi told senior military officers this week that he wanted to “build a robust national defense and a strong military that corresponds to our country’s international stature, and is adapted to our national security and developmental interests,” the Xinhua news agency reported.
A presence in Djibouti would be China’s first overseas logistics facility to service its military vessels since the CCP took power, said David Finkelstein, director of China studies at CNA, an independent research institute in Arlington, Virginia.
“In the grand sweep of post-1949 Chinese history, this announcement is yet another indicator that Chinese policy is trying to catch up with national interests that have expanded faster than the capacity of the People’s Republic of China to service them,” Finkelstein said.
The new facility would enable the navy to live up to a strategy laid down this year by the CCP in a major defense document, known as a white paper, that outlined its ambitions to become a global maritime power.
STRATEGIC PORT
The US maintains its only military base on the African continent in Djibouti, which it uses as a staging ground for counterterrorism operations in Africa and the Middle East. Last year, US President Barack Obama renewed the lease on that base for 20 more years.
China has invested heavily in Djibouti’s infrastructure, including hundreds of millions of US dollars spent upgrading the country’s undersized port. It has also financed a railroad extending from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to Djibouti, a project that cost billions of dollars. The country has a population of about 900,000, many of whom live in poverty.
Strategically, Djibouti offers an excellent place from which to protect oil imports from the Middle East that traverse the Indian Ocean on their way to China, military experts say. From Djibouti, China gains greater access to the Arabian Peninsula.
The news on Thursday of broad changes to the Chinese military signaled a major step forward in Xi’s program to shift China’s focus from traditional land armies to a more flexible, cohesive set of forces. China’s military planning and spending have increasingly focused on territorial disputes in the South China Sea and in waters near Japan.
Xi told a gathering of more than 200 senior military officers that the planned changes would take years and were essential to ensuring that the People’s Liberation Army could shoulder its increasingly complex and broad responsibilities, Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.
However, until now, efforts to revamp the way the military is run have stumbled because of the entrenched power of land forces that have dominated seven military regions, as well as the sheer complexity of reorganizing a force of more than 2 million troops.
Enactment of the military reforms would be a political victory for Xi, who since coming to power in November 2012 has enforced an intense campaign against corruption that took down dozens of senior military officers. They have included two former vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, generals Guo Boxiong (郭伯雄) and Xu Caihou (徐才厚).
That military graft was lubricated by rapidly rising defense budgets. In the decade up to last year, China’s official military budget grew an average of 9.5 percent annually, after taking inflation into account, according to a recent study by the US’ Congressional Research Service. That budget is set to grow an additional 10 percent this year, reaching about US$145 billion. However, many foreign analysts say China’s real military spending is higher.
MODERN HEGEMONY
Despite Beijing’s traditional rejection of what it calls US imperialism and hegemony, some Chinese experts believe that it is time to reconsider the need for overseas military facilities.
Shen Dingli (沈丁立), a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, who has argued that China should develop bases commensurate with its growing military power, on Thursday said that in doing so, China would only be doing what the US had done.
“The United States has been expanding its business all around the world and sending its military away to protect those interests for 150 years,” Shen said. “Now, what the United States has done in the past, China will do again.”
Shen, who referred to the planned facility in Djibouti as a “base,” said it was necessary, because “we need to safeguard our own navigational freedom.”
“If whoever — pirates, ISIS [the Islamic State group] or the US — want to shut down the passage, we need to be able to reopen it,” he said.
The head of the US Africa Command, General David Rodriguez, said in Washington last week that China planned “to build a base in Djibouti” and had reached a 10-year agreement with the country’s government to do so. He said the installation would serve as a logistics hub and would enable the Chinese to “extend their reach.”
The US military has praised China’s participation in the international anti-piracy operations, which protect vital commercial shipping in a volatile part of the world.
However, some US military experts, concerned about Beijing’s growing military capacity, have expressed unease about China having a land facility in Djibouti so close to Camp Lemonnier, a major US base where 4,000 service members, including US Army Special Forces, and civilians train and carry out counterterrorism operations.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Hong Lei (洪磊) offered few details about the Djibouti facility, but said it would provide Chinese ships with access to reliable supplies and enable its crew members to rest.
“These facilities will help Chinese vessels to better carry out Chinese missions like escort and humanitarian operations,” he said.
Such statements suggest a far more modest facility than the sprawling US base at Camp Lemonnier. Washington in 2013 announced that US$1.4 billion would be spent on expanding the base, from which drone operations over Somalia and Yemen are conducted.
France also maintains a base in Djibouti, which is a former French colony. Japan, which also participates in the UN anti-piracy operations, keeps surveillance aircraft and several hundred personnel there.
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