China is becoming an Atlantic naval power, venturing into the ocean’s southern waters as it steps up investment in the region and counters perceived threats from the United States, according to a report in a security journal.
The assessment, written by Ryan Martinson, an assistant professor at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island, said that in the last five years China’s presence outside of Asia had expanded from anti-piracy operations and port visits to training and setting up a military port at Doraleh in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, close to the Gulf of Aden, Red Sea and Persian Gulf.
“Once limited to port visits and largely symbolic joint exercises, PLAN [People’s Liberation Army Navy] activities in the South Atlantic now include independent operations and training,” Martinson said in the report, published on Monday in the journal of the Royal United Services Institute, a British military think tank.
“It has also shown early efforts to develop mastery of the ocean battlespace environment in key areas of the South Atlantic.”
It said the Chinese naval presence had become more sophisticated, with longer missions. In one case, a PLAN task force spent 24 days in the Atlantic before putting in at Cape Town, South Africa, in August 2017. In another, a PLAN task force spent 13 days sailing from Douala port in Cameroon to Cape Town, longer than a typical voyage.