Eurasia Review
28 January 2016
- RSIS
- Media Mentions
- China and its Navy: Drifting towards Normality? – Analysis
China and its Navy: Drifting towards Normality? – Analysis
The proposed establishment of a Chinese naval base at Djibouti suggests that China is after all developing a normal major navy able to operate far outside its immediate area. Whether this should be seen as alarming will depend on what China does with it.
The recent disclosure that the PLA Navy intends to set up a ‘base’ in Djibouti, for operations off Somalia and beyond, has come as something of a surprise, for two reasons. Firstly, until quite recently, the idea of any country setting up a base on foreign soil seemed to have gone out of fashion, because of their cost, their political vulnerability and, normally, their very limited value in situations of serious conflict unless considerable resources are invested in their defence.
Fixed bases which cannot be adequately defended, for whatever reason, become strategic liabilities, just as was Singapore in 1942. For this reason today’s navies – led by the US Navy – have instead invested in ‘sea-basing’ – building a sophisticated fleet of supply ships that increase their capacity to operate independently from the sea.
… Professor Geoffrey Till is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow with the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
IDSS / Online
