China’s next overseas military base likely a Sri Lankan port - Report

China’s military is most likely to build its second overseas naval base in Sri Lanka, according to a new report that studied where Chinese commercial firms have invested most heavily in establishing harbor and port infrastructure to protect international trade in such things as consumer goods exports and imports of oil, grain, and rare earth metals.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy built its first overseas outpost in Djibouti, East Africa, in 2016, at a cost of $590 million, where up to 2,000 personnel have used the base to stifle piracy of Chinese cargo vessels sailing the waters around the Horn of Africa and the approach to the Suez Canal leading to the Mediterranean and Europe.

Sri Lanka tops this list of eight international ports where China is most likely to land its next overseas military base in a July 2023 report, titled “Harboring Global Ambitions: China’s Ports Footprint and Implications for Future Overseas Naval Bases,” written by researchers at the AidData lab at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. 

To come up with the short list, researchers assessed 78 international harbors in 46 countries that are most likely to harbor ships from the PLA Navy’s fleet of approximately 500 vessels, the largest navy in the world.

AidData’s inaugural report of this kind found that Chinese firms spent about $30 billion from 2000 to 2021 to build out the 78 ports assessed. 

The report assumes that China will locate its next PLA Navy base by leveraging influence built up by previous investments, as it did when the base in Djibouti was built next to the commercial port of Doraleh, which, until 2018, was part owned and operated by China Merchants Holdings, and was a major hub for livestock transshipment.

Ports assessed in the report were ranked based on their strategic location, harbor depth for naval vessels, political stability in the host country, and the host government’s tendency to vote with China in the UN General Assembly.

Hambantota, Sri Lanka:

Topping the short list in the AidData report is the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. China has invested $2.19 billion in Hambantota, more than in any other port, and the government in Colombo agreed to lease majority ownership of the port to a Chinese firm in 2017. 

In 2018, China gifted the Sri Lankan navy a frigate and the report notes that Sri Lankan elites and the general public have a favorable opinion of China and the Chinese people.

Western analysts speculate that in addition to Hambantota, the ports at Ream, Cambodia, Gwadar, Pakistan, and Equatorial Guinea’s Bata or Cameroon’s Kribi could host the PLA Navy. 

The report’s authors said that they hoped to widen the discussion to include a broader range of possible locations better reflecting China’s ambitions for a global navy. The Pacific island Vanuatu, the port of Nacala in Mozambique, in East Africa, and Nouakchott in Mauritania, in West Africa, round out the short list.

“China has this very ambitious foreign policy, and it has this massive navy, which for sure was not built to hang around in Chinese waters,” Alexander Wooley, one of the report’s authors, told The China Project. “There’s a certain logic that these bases have to come, but China has been very restrained so far. The sheer range of options that China has hasn’t been appreciated as much previously.”

AidData’s report departs from past scholarship on China’s ambitions for overseas naval bases. In 2022, the think tank the RAND Corporation published “China’s Global Basing Ambitions: Defense Implications for the United States,” a report whose authors noted that Hambantota and Gwadar, at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman and called, by some, the crown jewel of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, were likely ports for PLA Navy bases. But, RAND argued, China might opt to build bases where Chinese have yet to invest heavily.

The RAND report concluded that Bangladesh and Myanmar also would make prime candidates for a Chinese naval base, despite the fact that ports in those countries have not seen the same levels of investment from China. Instead of using past investment in ports as a criteria in the analysis, RAND looked instead at Chinese investment in host countries as a whole.

While the AidData report’s data-driven approach was useful in highlighting possibilities that may have been overlooked, Harrison Prétat, the associate director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, told The China Project that political and strategic factors would be the primary drivers of Beijing’s efforts to establish overseas bases.

“I think it’s clear that the scale of Chinese investment is not a direct determinant of whether a given port is likely to be considered for military development or use by China, and that political and strategic factors remain primary,” Prétat said. “The study itself acknowledges that Ream Naval Base in Cambodia, which seems very likely to offer some level of access for China’s navy upon completion of its upgrades, had very little invested in terms of dollar amount.”

For now, China may refrain from building out bases for explicit military use, concluded a 2022 article titled “Pier Competitor: China’s Power Position in Global Ports,” in the journal International Security. The authors noted the challenges and vulnerabilities of building overseas military bases and emphasized China’s capacity to use commercial ports for military logistics and intelligence-gathering.

Getting foreign governments on board with a permanent Chinese military base abroad is also simply a tough sell, said Prétat.

“At the moment, almost no one wants a Chinese naval base on their soil, whether for domestic political concerns or their own strategic hesitations about inviting that level of Chinese presence,” Prétat said. “A deal providing for regular Chinese military access to a commercial port or a country’s own naval facilities is theoretically an easier sell that could accomplish the same goal of allowing more Chinese ships to operate further from China for longer periods.”

Wendy Leutert, one of the authors of the article in International Security and a professor at Indiana University, agreed that China will face challenges in building bases abroad.

“Any moves to develop a large, global base network would invariably face intense international pushback,” Leutert told The China Project. “This makes leveraging commercial port assets for military purposes an attractive alternative in the near term, despite this strategy’s clear limitations in wartime or crisis scenarios.”

A new dataset:

To assess the top eight international ports likely to land a new PLA Navy base, AidData drew on the third edition of its Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, set to be released in full this fall.

The first-of-its-kind dataset compiles more than 20,000 projects financed by more than 300 Chinese state-owned enterprises from 2000 to 2023, making it the largest dataset of its kind in the world, the AidData report authors said.

“The dataset provides a holistic picture of where these Chinese-funded ports are located,” Wooley said. “The data has lots of detailed information about the actual financial agreements, the geospatial information, the project narrative, etc.

“We were personally and professionally interested in the topic of potential [PLA Navy] bases, as each new rumor in the media seems to galvanize national security types,” he added. “So we decided to see if our data could help us answer the question, or point us in the right direction.”

Source: The China Project