15th May 2023 Mumbai: China has two ballistic missile trackers: the Yuan Wang 5 off the coast of Durban in the South Atlantic Ocean and the Yuan Wang 7 off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea.
China is now extending its naval presence beyond the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean with a concentration on the west coast of Africa and making inroads into South America after essentially securing the South China Sea on the basis of imagined historical rights.
While China gave Mandarin names to q19 sub-surface sea-bed features in the South Indian Ocean in the name of so-called “soft power,” its surveillance activities in the Indian backyard have increased with no less than 73 research, surveillance, and strategic missile tracking ships spotted from 2018 to May 2023.
10 Chinese research ships out of 713 Chinese-flagged ships visited the Indian Ocean in 2018, and 14 Chinese research ships out of 826 Chinese-flagged ships visited in 2019. In 2020, there were 14 out of 846 of them, 16 out of 1003 in 2021, 10 out of 996 in 2022, and nine out of 575 flagged vessels as of May 2023 are research ships. Even now, China possesses two ballistic missile trackers: the Yuan Wang 5 off the coast of Durban in the South Atlantic Ocean and the Yuan Wang 7 off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea. Through the self-serving Belt Road Initiative, which uses excess infrastructure capacity of China to be deployed in third world markets on the basis of loans and investments, Beijing has influence over the majority of the nations on the east coast of Africa and maintains a naval station in Djibouti.
Beijing’s influence is visible on the west coast of Africa, where many seaports have been sponsored or built by Chinese corporations, despite pressure on Argentina and Brazil to grant bases to the Chinese navy. The list of ports on the west coast of Africa that were sponsored and later built by Chinese enterprises is as follows:
Lekki Deep Sea Port in Lagos, Nigeria
· Tonkolili Ore Project, Pepel port and Tagrin point port in Pepel, Sierra Leone
· Kribi Container Terminal, Kribi Deep Seaport in Cameroon
· Autonomous Port of Abidjan in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire
· Tin-Can Island Port Container Terminal Limited in Tin-Can Island, Lagos, Nigeria.
· Lomé Container terminal in Togo
· Conakry Container Wharf Expansion Project in Conakry, Guinea
-by Kashvi Gala