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China is building an advanced surveillance network and supporting its navy through a growing system of ports in foreign countries, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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China currently owns or operates terminals in 96 ports in 53 countries, many of which perform maintenance on Chinese military vessels, as part of longstanding Chinese policy to expand the country’s influence, according to an April 2022 report by researchers at the U.S. Naval War College (USNWC) and Indiana University. These ports support the Chinese navy via logistics and intelligence support, but also provide an independent trade network should China ever be cut off by the West for taking aggressive action, such as an invasion of Taiwan, senior research fellow Brent Sadler of the Heritage Foundation, who previously served a 26-year career in the Navy which culminated in a role at the Pentagon’s China branch of the Navy, told the DCNF.
“These efforts do enable a global naval presence for sure, but it also builds in greater resilience to Western sanctions or economic statecraft should the [Chinese Communist Party] do something beyond the pale,” Sadler said.
Intelligence work “is one of the easiest, most effective, and least preventable uses of commercial port terminals and associated infrastructure [or] equipment, and probably much more relevant than whether those facilities could one day become [People’s Liberation Army] bases,” one of the report’s authors, Dr. Isaac Kardon, then of the USNWC and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the DCNF.
“Chinese investments in ports and airfields should be viewed through the lens of economic [or] trade facilitation as well as military usefulness,” Sadler told the DCNF.
Sadler noted that different facilities often accomplished different purposes, with the balance of some — like in the Solomon Islands — tipping toward military utility.
