http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/world/asia/china-military-presence-djibouti-africa.html?_r=0
China Retools Its Military With a First Overseas Outpost in Djibouti
By JANE PERLEZ and CHRIS BUCKLEYNOV. 26, 2015
BEIJING — China announced on Thursday 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 longstanding policy against emulating the United States in
building military facilities abroad.
The Foreign Ministry 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 United Nations antipiracy
missions.
Yet by establishing an outpost in the Horn of Africa — more than 4,800
miles away from Beijing and near some of the world’s most volatile
regions — President Xi Jinping 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 Mr. Xi is pushing on the People’s Liberation
Army, which for decades has served primarily as a lumbering guardian
of Communist Party rule.
Mr. 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 Communists took
power, said David Finkelstein, director of China studies at CNA, an
independent research institute in Arlington, Va.
“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,” Mr. Finkelstein said.
The new facility would enable the navy to live up to a strategy laid
down this year by the Communist Party in a major defense document,
known as a white paper, that outlined its ambitions to become a global
maritime power.
The United States 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,
President Obamarenewed the lease on that base for 20 more years.
China has invested heavily in Djibouti’s infrastructure, including
hundreds of millions of dollars spent upgrading the country’s
undersize 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 Mr. Xi’s program to shift its 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.
Mr. 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, the official Xinhua news agency
said Thursday.
But 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 over two million.
Enactment of the military reforms would be a political victory for Mr.
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, Gens. Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou.
That military graft was lubricated by rapidly rising defense budgets.
In the decade up to 2014, China’s official military budget grew an
average of 9.5 percent annually, after taking inflation into account,
according to a recentCongressional Research Service study. That budget
is set to grow an additional 10 percent this year, reaching about $145
billion. But many foreign analysts say China’s real military spending
is higher.
Despite Beijing’s traditional rejection of what it calls American
imperialism and hegemony, some Chinese experts believe that it is time
to reconsider the need for overseas military facilities.
Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan
University in Shanghai, who has argued that China should develop bases
commensurate with its growing military power, said on Thursday that in
doing so, China would only be doing what America 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,” Mr. Shen said. “Now, what the United States has done in the
past, China will do again.”
Mr. 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.”
He added, “If whoever — pirates, ISIS or the U.S. — wants to shut down
the passage, we need to be able to reopen it.”
The head of the United States Africa Command, Gen. David M. 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 United States military has praised China’s participation in the
international antipiracy operations, which protect vital commercial
shipping in a volatile part of the world.
But some American 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 American base
where 4,000 service members, including Special Forces, and civilians
train and carry out counterterrorism operations.
Hong Lei, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, offered few details about
the Djibouti facility, but said it would provide Chinese ships with
reliable supplies and enable crews 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
American base at Camp Lemonnier. Washington announced in 2013 that
$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 United Nations
antipiracy operations, keeps surveillance aircraft and several hundred
personnel there.
Yufan Huang and Adam Wu contributed research.
Received on Thu Nov 26 2015 - 21:01:30 EST