Brown - Chinas world: what does China want?

On 27 November 2015, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) declared that it was establishing, for the first time ever, a naval installation beyond its shores, in the impoverished eastern African state of Djibouti. These facilities will help Chinese vessels to better carry out Chinese missions like escort and humanitarian operations, spokesperson Hong Lei declared. In practical terms, the project being envisaged was minuscule, and focused purely on Chinese naval assets. But this did not stop some commentators from reading much more into it. In the British Daily Telegraph , one writer stated that

Chinas decision earlier this month that it is to build its own naval base in Djibouti, the first time Beijing has sought to establish a permanent military presence beyond the countrys borders, has been greeted with deep concern at the [US] Pentagon.

For much of the Western media, this was a tangible sign of Beijings ambition, its desire to become a new kind of superpower, one with the ability to project far beyond its borders, a force to be reckoned with way beyond its traditional theatre of influence, Asia.

Even with a story as simple as this, however, there are no easy conclusions, and Chinas new planned facilities can be read as much as a sign of reluctance and weakness as one of assertiveness and strength. That the worlds second largest economy had no military assets abroad is the first anomaly. US capability stretches to almost every corner of the earth, with over 640 installations in more than 120 countries. China is the main trading partner for about 130 countries across the globe. And yet, it has one aircraft carrier (an old, retrofitted one bought from Ukraine in the early 2000s). The United States has more than 11, France two. China may well have showed off a lot of new-looking weaponry when it held its grand parade marking the 70th anniversary of the ending of the SinoJapanese War in September 2015. But, as analysts were quick to point out, almost all of this was untested. In nearly four decades, since the Reform period started in 1978, China has seen only one war, a brief skirmish with Vietnam in 1979 from which it came out badly. It is therefore a vast, important country with a huge military (some 2 million active servicepeople) and almost zero experience.

Djibouti was therefore remarkable because of the amount of interest and speculation such a minor facility drew. In the same tiny country in eastern Africa, the United States has a major site with 4,000 people (almost two and a half times the number of people that China planned to deploy). They have intelligence-gathering assets to hand, and a runway to accommodate aircraft. China simply aimed to have a port. It has a simple reason for this, too, linked not to neo-imperialist designs but to trade. For a country led by a political movement which had made economic development the core pillar of its legitimacy since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, it was odd that China did not have, at the very least, some local capacity to look after their interests especially considering its growing reliance on oil imports from the restive Middle East region and the fact that oil transportation along stretches of the Indian Ocean is becoming increasingly vulnerable to US control or piracy. Nor was this situation new. For over a decade, it had been participating in United Nations anti-piracy operations. Within this context, Djibouti made eminent sense. It was strange, in fact, that China had not gone along this route earlier.