Little by little, China is forming military links in Africa and in the Indian Ocean in order, experts say, to protect Beijing’s economic interests in the region.
In the past three weeks Beijing has committed to supporting Ugandan forces operating in Somalia and to helping the Seychelles fight piracy. “It is very clear that the Chinese leaders recognise that military force will play a bigger role to safeguard China’s overseas interests,” Jonathan Holslag, of the Brussels Institute of Chinese Contemporary Studies told AFP.
“There is a willingness, and even a consensus, in China, that this process will take place.”
The Indian Ocean is strategic, Holslag said, noting that 85 per cent of China’s oil imports and 60 per cent of its exports are routed via the Gulf of Aden.
Beijing does not so far have any military base in the region: its military presence consists of three vessels in the Gulf of Aden to fight Somali pirates.
But the deployment of those ships in 2009, the first of its kind for the Chinese navy, was already highly symbolic. For the moment, cooperation between China and the islands of the Indian Ocean is still limited to “low profile military-to-military exchanges, but it is getting broader and more structured,” Holslag told AFP.
“The mere fact that China has a multi-year naval presence in the Gulf of Aden has great symbolic and diplomatic significance,” said Frans-Paul van der Putten, senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael. “Symbolic because it shows other countries that China is an emerging naval power in the region, and diplomatic because China uses its navy ships for occasional visits to ports along the Indian Ocean rim, which helps it strengthen its diplomatic ties with countries in the region,” he added. During an unprecedented visit by Chinese defence minister Liang Guanglie earlier in December, the Seychelles asked China to set up a military presence on the archipelago to help fight piracy in the Indian Ocean. Victoria is ruling out a military base but is looking rather at having “reconnaissance planes or patrol ships stationed” there, along the lines of what the US and Europe do, foreign affairs minister Jean-Paul Adam said. Japan’s coastguard also said on Tuesday it had arrested a Chinese boat captain in a possible fresh test for sometimes fraught maritime relations, just days after a South Korean officer was stabbed to death at sea. A coastguard vessel pursued the fisherman’s 130-tonne boat for over six hours after it was spotted lowering ropes into the water around four kilometres (2.5 miles) off islands in Nagasaki, southwest Japan, the second arrest in the area in less than two months. In total, five coastguard vessels took turns to chase the Chinese vessel until around 5 am, when the boat was stopped for an onboard inspection, the coastguard said.
Arrests by Japan of straying Chinese fishermen are increasingly common and usually pass off without much of a hitch, but can occasionally spark international ructions.
In September 2010 relations between Tokyo and Beijing turned icy after a collision between a Japanese coastguard vessel and a Chinese fishing boat off disputed islands in the East China Sea.
Japan arrested the skipper near uninhabited — but strategically coveted — islands known in Japanese as Senkaku and in Chinese as Diayou, which both countries claim, but which are administered by Tokyo.