China at the Line of Actual Control is not the handiest thing India needs to fear. According to current media reports, China is developing its army presence in the Indian Ocean too. Satellite photographs in May this year endorse China\’s navy base at Djibouti is being modernized. The facility, set up in 2017 as a logistics assist unit, is being upgraded right into a full-fledged naval base with a 1,120-ft pier that can berth Chinese warships, which includes the Liaoning plane carrier. This follows China\’s enlargement of an artificial island within the Maldives, a development with seeming strategic overtones, main a few to say that China is encroaching on India\’s sphere of influence.
Recent satellite photographs show security fences, sentry posts, and elevated watch towers inside the port, fuelling the hypothesis of the development of army facilities. There also are reviews that China is helping Bangladesh build a naval base at Cox Bazaar, such as wharves, barracks, ammunition depots, and a naval shipyard.
It is the People\’s Liberation Army\’s Djibouti base that vividly demonstrates China\’s Indian Ocean ambitions. With an estimated location of nearly 250,000 square ft, China\’s Djibouti compound is no regular military base. With outer perimeter walls, watchtowers, and underground quarters capable of hosting an envisioned 10,000 troops, the facility is a veritable military garrison. China insists the undertaking is an \”aid facility\” meant mainly for anti-piracy missions within the Horn of Africa, however, analysts claim the base can helping other key missions along with intelligence collection, non-fight evacuation operations, peacekeeping operations help and counter-terrorism.
When China first started deploying warships off the coast of Somalia for anti-piracy patrols a decade ago, Indian analysts believed China\’s maritime safety hobbies were usually commercial, and that the People\’s Liberation Army Navy or PLAN\’s were driven especially by way to defend Beijing\’s exchange and strength hobbies. That view is rapidly changing. Many now see China\’s rapid local expansion as a part of a broader effort to embed Beijing into the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean.
