Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion 20240704

Informed. Cspan, unfiltered, unbiased, word for word, from the Nations Capital to wherever you are. Because the opinion that matters the most is your own. This is what democracy looks like. Cspan, powered by cable. X, a National Defense researchers discuss chinas global footprint and geopolitical relationship. They also consider how Financial Data can be used to predict attentional locations for the next Chinese Naval base. This event is hosted by the Heritage Foundation. We are delighted you could be with us today. A reminder to silence your phone so we can all be uninterrupted here. If there is one area a bipartisan agreement in this town, of which there are very few, there is one, and that is the danger that chinese common is Party Presents to the rest of the world. Congress holds frequent hearings on this topic and has stood up a select committee on the strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist party but most of the attention thus far has focused on topics like ship counts, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, Nuclear Issues Nuclear Missiles and silos. Today were looking at a different aspect. For naval power, is not just the function of ships you have, is indeed the sum of many factors, logistics, training, and our topic today, naval ports. Amidst the recent recent tensions about Chinese Naval activities ranging from the South China Sea to the bering sea, a major concern is, where did they go next, and one way of ascertaining where the chinese navy may go next for sustained distant operations is to analyze where they place bases today. A few places have been in the news front but today we will hear from experts on the topic who can give us some insight into what is shaping chinas thinking about such future basis. Prompting the discussion is the publication of a recent report titled harboring global ambitions, chinas ports footprint and implications for future overseas naval bases. Buyer Research Institution based in williamsburg, virginia on the campus of the college of william and mary by alumni who used a range of novel techniques to provide insight to policymakers. They have studied Financial Moves and overseas court investments. The director of partnerships and communications, he has contributed to Foreign Policy and wrote one of the cover stories for the fall 2021 issue, and in 2022 he wrote a story for Foreign Policy on the implications for the South China Sea on the sinking of a russian cruiser which was a Foreign Policy most read story. He is a former section editor of the georgetown journal of International Affairs and former officer in the British Royal navy and holds a master of arts and Security Studies from georgetown university. Also with us is brent sadler, who joined Heritage Foundation after a 26 year navy career with numerous operational tours on Nuclear Powered submarines was his assignments include tours on the chief of Naval Operations staff at u. S. Pacific command and the Senior Defense official in malaysia. As the Heritage Senior Research fellow he focused on Maritime Security and the technologies shaping our future Maritime Forces in the navy and is the recent author of the book naval power in the 21st century, what he describes as a contest in the chinese designs to reorder the world to its interests by playing to u. S. Strengths and chinas weaknesses. We will start on stage by asking the experts some questions and after a bit of that we will go to you the audience for your russians, both online and the ones in the auditorium here. Power in the 21st century, what he describes as a contest in the chinese designs to reorder the world to its interests by playing to u. S. Strengths and chinas weaknesses. We will start on stage by asking the experts some questions and after a bit of that we will go to you the audience for your russians, both online and the ones in the auditorium here. When we get to that version, please be thinking of a question. If you are online you can use the application to submit a question at any point in time and we will have those ready and if you ask a question now that has been subsequently answered we wont ask the question again. Without further ado, lets get to it, here. Alex, thanks for joining us. Did you come up from williamsburg . Alex actually, yesterday. Traffic on i95. [laughter] very good. Im fascinated by this report. Can you talk about what sets the report and methodology apart from any other previous works on this topic . Alex for more than 10 years, weve been collecting granular data on project information around what china is spending overseas. That typically goes into a large data set that has many rows of information to help us as well as analysts analyze chinese intentions and strategy around development finance. From that we have up coding data sets including 20,000 projects, looking at all official chinese developments in 100 625 countries. From that we then subsumed a set. We wanted to sort of delve a bit into that subject matter since it is obviously very newsworthy and of concern. We then took the data that incorporates geospatial information and project narrative around financial flow and we combined it with other data inputs. This included looking at how the host country of a potential naval base aligns in u. N. General Assembly Voting with china. We looked at satellite imagery to look at the ports themselves. We looked at the regime type of the potential host country to identify the potential ports. Safe to assume the Chinese Communist party graciously makes all this Data Available to you . Alex they do not. [laughter] and they dont typically signal where their intentions are. We gather it all through open source information. We are lucky enough to have an integrated team of faculty and staff and more than 100 Student Research assistants engaged year round in scraping this information and assembling it within doing a deep dive. Safe to assume, this is fascinating stuff, some of this is not english . You have to use a native speaker to mine the data . We are alex we are lucky to leverage our multilingual staff, including our students who can access information through the host countries, they are depositories of that information. Very good. Brent, over to you, sir. We talked about naval bases. It doesnt sound that ominous or threatening but what are some of the negative implications if the Chinese Communist party establishes a new naval base on the say atlantic side of africa. Brent alexs work, thats one of the areas they are looking at and we have looked at that as well in the gulf of guinea in west africa. Just in that geography, it would be a new entry for china to be that far away and it would allow them to sustain military Naval Operations in the atlantic. Again the key transit routes from the panama canal in which they have major investment and presence, they have trade in traffic over to europe back and forth. From a trade perspective, high interest. From a military operational perspective it could also happen. Its also worth noting that the islands that are not far away from there are where the u. S. Military does missile testing certification. So you know lets. What would be the big deal about the chinese getting a naval base, if you will, in one of these countries . Brent there are a couple of aspects. Most commercial ports you can get food and medical as well as American Marine diesel fuel. Highend modern warships require jet fuel and thats harder to come by. That is one of the items where if you have a presence you are invested in you can have it when you need it to sustain military operations. Then there are dry docks and military repair facilities in the mix. Thomas very good. Your report is fascinating reading and you identified eight places as potential nearterm Chinese Naval bases and do us the favor of rank ordering them in what you think the priority is but missing is any port in the Solomon Islands, which has been in the news, lots of people talking about it. Its mentioned but it doesnt make the top eight. Can you talk about that . Brent absolutely. Our Data Collection effort covers all chinese investments from 2000 to 2021. The fairly recent announcement about the awarding of a contract to a Chinese Company working in the Solomon Islands is from this year. Its a little bit outside of our existing data set but we did look carefully at those islands. Obviously last year they refused a u. S. Navy warship and a british ship from docking. It seems like they are being pulled in a few different directions. Late last year the leadership there looked like it might be leading back towards providing some security assurance. And then the developments this year, obviously, such as recent construction. From our point of view, in some ways it was less important for us to focus on specific ports. We are all agreed that the South Pacific is going to be clearly a targeted region. We had identified it because reports in the research tracked the money. And where the money had gone. Because thats what we do we look at where china had put the most money and at that point they had not made a significant investment in the Solomon Islands. In 2019 they tried to purchase and so we. But there had not been significant financial investment. Looking at man u out to, where they invested 70 million to upgrade the port there as our candidate port in that region. Wherever we looked at in central africa, there are swaths of ports where they put in massive amounts of money and we sort of landed on the caribbean, cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea as two of the likely ports, only a hundred miles apart. They will probably choose may be one of those or one of the other ports around west africa. More like having a base in the region. Which one . They are not telling anyone. Thomas very good. You said you had a wide range of years you look at. 2000 2021. 2000 to 2021. Are there any trends . Can you discern a trend there . Alex i dont know about a trend. There has been an observable pause during pandemic. It looked like they might have hit pause during that time but the Port Investments are throughout the entire time. We tended to downplay a little bit some of the investments that were very early on and completed because we tend to see an increasingly convergence in the economic and geopolitical from china. So what might have been seen as a purely commercial venture 20 years ago, it seems like in addition to the belton road initiative, it seems they have other initiatives with more clear strategic intent. Its very possible that they are uniting more through the commercial and these other harder initiatives that sort of bring those two together. We tended to favor a little bit more the recent. Thomas gotcha. So maybe early on they speckled money in wider places and in more recent years they have become more strategic . Alex thats definitely a possibility. They were keen to portray themselves as openhanded with money and the narrative throughout is that we are like you. We were a very poor country not long ago. We are not colonial unlike the other powers active in the region. So we are presenting something completely different and we just want mutual cooperation of mutual benefit. I think whats interesting from our point of view is there is a fair amount of Public Events right now, with bri turning 10 right now, counting from 2013, thats roughly the same time the u. S. Launched the asia pivot as well. So looking at how over the past 10 to 12 years, how the two different movements have paralleled and differed, there is deftly a move towards a strategic intent in these investments. Thomas brent, going back to you and your book about naval power in the 21st century, you advocate for this time together with u. S. And a diplomatic naval presence, it creates a synergistic effect. Can you address how that might affect their view on naval bases . Brent i think its a useful construct for competition with china. They have emerged with economic leading geopolitical and now we see the geopolitical as increasingly back by more explicit military or naval presences. They have been exercising what i would call naval statecraft already and what the u. S. Needs to look at is reframing the way they do statecraft with naval presence and Economic Development with forceful diplomacy. But in the work that alexs team thats doing thats worthwhile, it helps to inform so that you can get ahead, looking at certain key factors like Equatorial Guinea. Focusing not only on the elite powerbrokers in the country, the chinese favorite approach, the United States takes into counterinsurgency the people at the center of the effort. Looking at helping small and medium enterprises, waterfront fishing communities, the maritime police, the coast guard in the country better safeguarding the larger more popular money and capital generations in the gdp markets. That is where the u. S. Has an opportunity to push back on some of this. That is one of the aspects of one of the book. Its sort of the so what do you do with this data, it informs where you go next. In cambodia there are things playing out now about naval bases for the chinese. Solomon islands is another place where there could be a chance to apply naval statecraft. Thomas i remember it was a couple of years ago there was this report coming out of nowhere showing that suddenly the chinese were expressing interest in Equatorial Guinea and i wondered why i should care about that and you were persuasive that it was a big deal. Can you tell a little bit more about that . Brent certainly. When you look at the whole area, there are so many ports and they could go to any one of them but it has to line up with those factors. The assurance that the regime in power is going to survive. Equatorial guinea stood out and it was obvious from that perspective that it would be a place they could double down. There was an economic rent there. You cant avoid geography. A deepwater port is now a strategic asset. Why does it matter question mark first is the missile range is not far away. If you are the chinese and want to watch what we are doing with our Nuclear Submarine force and our ballistic missiles, you would want to park nearby. Its similar to what was playing out in the South Pacific where we have another missile test range as well. So there is operational as well as economic. Thomas alex, a question from sherlock holmes, the dog that doesnt arc. Lets say that despite your data in your forecast, china does nothing about a naval base for the next five years or so. Does that mean anything . Should we draw conclusions from that or does that just mean that they have decided maybe the time isnt right . Alex its a great question. From our point of view they have built this enormous navy. Now numerically larger than the u. S. Navy. Not intended to be brown water, its clearly bluewater. There is a lot of rhetoric that china itself is looking to shift and go further afield. Their main incident over recent history where chinese ships have broken down and been unable to get repaired because they dont have facilities, you do see these ship visits into different parts of the world. The fact that they have this new Aircraft Carrier that is very similar in concept to a u. S. Carrier, all of that is for projection, for being further out in the world. And then you know you sort of also think they do not belong to a typical Defense Alliance like nato or the relatively new aucklands. They dont have relationships with countries where there has been a level Playing Field in terms of the relationship where they could base their ships like the u. S. Fleet in naples, for example. There is not equivalent in china. They are catching up in terms of replenishment at sea but they are still somewhat far behind and if they wanted to deploy further afield, they dont have that relationship with an ally or as many replenishment ships as other modern navies might have. So it makes sense to be looking for a place to have a naval base from our point of view but they definitely and we make note of this in the report, they have taken their time so far. Djibouti was 2017. Back in 2016 the Chinese Foreign minister said that they would be looking for an increasing number of supply and logistics spaces. There is clearly something. Its a restraint and we dont know exactly what it is but its inevitable, the growth of the chinese navy is going to continue in the next decade. Its not like it reached steady state final number. You would like to have a base, you imagine, but its hard to imagine that there isnt going to be overseas naval bases in addition to djibouti. Thomas to that point, this distinction between a blue water navy, the pursuit of it, with plans for at least three carriers, i want to say, but the lack of real overseas presence, is there a contradiction there . I have always had this thought that maybe this fascination with carriers is a mirroring thing. How do you think about it . Brent its worthwhile refreshing that the chinese denied any intention of ever developing Aircraft Carriers until they had one. Thats decades of saying that when it became almost impossible to ignore. They are finishing up the type three, their first indigenous flatbed. Not with a ski jump at the end of it. That allows you to sustain Strike Missions at further range. They also designed the type 901 heavy logistics ship. Having the ability to rearm, doing combat operations for three or four days its still a conventional carrier. By all measures, there navy has been responding to historic new Mission Statements by the secretarygeneral in 2004. 2008 they do antipiracy off the horn of africa. They start doing exercises in large numbers by passing through the islands there to get into the Philippines Sea in 2010 and it has become commonplace in little the last few years. The basis that they need to sustain over the next step, you need a place like djibouti where you can store munitions and fuel. Jet fuel, most importantly. The cruisers, the type 55, use gas turbines like our highend worships. So you have a military base where you can be sure you have access to the critical fuel and ambition, making the naval base in cambodia stand out as a forward place to reload ammunition and critical fuels. Less is a place for you have sailors based. Thomas very good. Alex, youre up has a session all its own about russia and we know that putin has said that their friendship enjoys no boundaries. Boundaryless, Something Like that. In your report even though you talk a fair amount about russia, i know russian ports made the top eight. Can you speak to that . Alex absolutely. There is one port thats actually in our data set but the amount china gave is so large, we cannot disaggregate each part is only the port. On the arctic coast there is a port that is an lng facility. China has invested 13 billion into that. But the total facility includes a short side with other associated infrastructure. But because we did that as an asterisk. They also built a number of icebreakers for the port. I think that we make the broader point that, a strategic point, that as china looks at the success of the bri after 10 years, increasingly they have built the ports, these commercial ports, in a vacuum, while we were focused on the global war on terror, china now is seeing one what is the extent of the bri and how successful it is being. And in terms of russia, if china gets a lot of pushback against building a naval base, do they potentially look at staunch allies like russia and look at code locating a naval base, for example, somewhere in russia . We have mentioned some of their options. A lot of people dont count it as a part of the belt and road but china themselves call it their arctic pearl and this passage is one of their three blue passages. The main sea lines of communication so thats clearly of interest to them. And we have looked at potentially colocating at Russian Naval bases. Somewhere in the baron c, somewhere like that. It would get them the same strategic advantage and they would not have to necessarily worry about persuading a host country to join the effort because they are already operating together. The Navy Operating in south africa doing joint exercises around japan, for example. There might be some logic to it but it is pierced speculation at this point. Thomas presumably the National Security council has asked you over. Alex we have been doing briefings and the invitations are coming. Thomas good, i would like to think that we will avoid strategic the prize and try to get ahead of this before we get the next newsflash that the chinese are in a port somewhere. Do we have any digital questions to take . Who is monitoring those . James, whats the first one . How do you see the differences between the how the u. S. Uses bases in singapore versus how the chinese might use them and does it have implication for their ability to project power in areas like the atlantic . Alex ill start with that so the first real look at this was back in 2014 at National Defense university looking at infant types of models. There were six different types, if memory serves. The one that is playing out is the hybrid to support military operations many of the entities are controlled by the Chinese Communist party, even if it is commercial shipping for a ship builder that happens to be operating a port or the infrastructure. That is what we are seeing playing out. They are likely being supported by controlled contractors. The very close second, because you cannot move munitions or do sensitive naval warship repair, especially in war time where you will be highly technical and sensitive from a security classification and from a physical security aspect, repairs to the warships that have had severe battle damage, that means you are driving more towards the djibouti construct. Places like the Solomon Islands, i have a big question about because of geography and if they are going to operate more in the southcentral pacific they have to have a place they can rely on to do repairs and ship munitions. The model is different but in many ways at the end of the day they will have bases that look more like the United States. Thomas the starting by looking at the financial flows, we are also using djibouti as that template, if you will. China made that commercial investment right before they made the military investment. So there is a clear tiein between the commercial and the political. To brents point, we tracked more than 300 official chinese entities that Fund Different types of projects. They are all official and some have the appearance of being commercial when in fact they are actually official entities of the government, of the State Government or a corporation thats ultimately reporting to the government. In the next data set coming out in the fall we track over 100 entities carrying out these investments. Some of them can be traded on the shanghai stock exchange. Thomas when you look at these investments, i assume they are a mixture of what i would call grants, just giving you money and some of it is loans. Is it overwhelming . Are they mostly loans . Alex thats an inversion compared to the u. S. Model. The u. S. Model has typically been more aid and less commercial looking investments. In china the majority are these other financial flows. Not strictly aid according to the definition in paris. Overwhelmingly it may look commercial but there are other types. Thomas mostly not just grotto us. Its an obligation with collateral . Alex exactly. And i should be clear we dont track specifically direct investments or private sector. It has to come from an official source. Thomas gotcha. Wilson, you have a microphone . Right in the middle here, please. Im peter humphrey. Former intelligence analyst. Particularly in the case of the solomons, the interest is much more for future utilization of manganese nodules and to a lesser extent, fishing. Rather than some grand geopolitical scheme beyond the Second Island chain. Did you look at all of those resource potentials . Alex we do have parallel studies looking at for example Transition Minerals that obviously china is very interested in and we looked at ports where, and to some degree downgraded our analysis where the ports clearly are accessing Natural Resources for example. And we dont think there is potential military. Linked possibly to coal production. The other thing as well, your point about breaking island chains will be one of the main incentives, there or wherever else. Strategically. So far the investments have not been significant enough that you would be able to have a naval facility with drydock, etc. So far the investments have been small, extending peers or wharfs that might accommodate some destroyers. Maybe that cluster of three Aircraft Carriers. In the short term its a naval station with a resupply space rather than a fullscale naval base with operating dockyards. Brent they do have anchorages. Naval ships going into anchor are limited on the types of logistics of getting out quick. In peacetime there are a couple of anchorages there. Significant dredging and significant investment in the waterfront. Thomas that may validate pulling out of the economic ports as opposed to military. Saw a lot of hands. Yes, right here. That was convenient, wasnt it . [laughter] thank you for this fascinating wonderful panel presentation. My questions are on the statement that alex made based on china being new amit numerically greater than us in numbers. Your talks at the pentagon included strategies to elevate numbers in our navy. Alex when i wrote my article in 2021, one of the key themes was addressing the numeric shortfall of the u. S. Navy. Increasing not only construction but repairs as well, for example. As we all know there are long delays in being able to reset submarines and Aircraft Carriers, etc. Not enough shipyard. There was many decades over consolidated shipyards that were not enough and as we know the u. S. Navy is intending to expand when it is in fact contracting at the moment. Losing ships while intending to grow. I think it is a conundrum that really, really hasnt been solved just yet. Brent will know more on this. Brent yes. Thomas we could do a separate event on this and rent could talk for an hour. I will mention that Congress Sees this as well and last year they called for a commission on the future of the navy and that panel is supposed to be up and running this year by march and thus far not all members have been appointed to the committee or commission, if you will. Its just kind of out there lingering with no future of it much less the navy. Any other questions . Maam, over here, please. Thank you for the really interesting talk, i greatly appreciate it. Can you talk more about the nittygritty of how you draw causality between the investment and the future establishment of naval bases . Brent theres not causality. We dont know for sure what china is likely to do. We start with the financials and we look at it to some degree from the beijing perspective. So if you were in china and had this massive expanding navy and you wanted to go further afield, where would be the logical places . From our point of view, constructing a massive civilian port requires years of patient investment. Not just the economics but also the relationship. You cant hold these huge ports in West Central Africa without becoming ingrained in the partner country and host country where the port is going to be built. From our point of view, china would be thinking about a naval base where they have not made these types of investments. From our point of view its looking at where the correlation would be. In terms of the investment itself, we are talking about sierra leone, where china has put in some 700 million for the port. The countrys total gdp is 4 billion. So they have a massive amount of leverage into that country and china of course has been very successful at building relationships with the elites, political parties, the media, etc. If china was thinking about having a naval base in west africa, these bases on the coast would have a normas investments that had more logical choices than somewhere starting fresh with no economic investment. Especially given the investments that are coming from official entities. They are not coming from john deere or caterpillar, an American Company who happened to invest in an overseas port. Its coming from organizational entities ultimately reporting to the chinese government. Thomas james, do we have anymore . Lets go with another online question, please. Do you think that the chinese future locations for naval bases will mimic locations of u. S. Bases, for example the basin djibouti . Brent i have been looking at that question for many years. Its not from that perspective. Its from the perspective of the operational need that drives the base. Still today the Main Operation is the war over taiwan. In looking at that, thats what guides the bases. The type of capability the chinese navy now hand has, its the informed type of base. These ships have a depth and length requirement and a fuel requirement. They also have only so many days of endurance in combat in peacetime, measured in a couple of weeks, several weeks. It tells me that if you do the time and distance and look at where the operations have to be from a military conflict, which in taiwan is the philippine seas, and then the geopolitical part. If you are going to try to influence the indian ocean because you want to secure your access to markets in peacetime. In wartime it will go into the east South China Sea around taiwan. That is where the bases would be. My calculus, a little different, i look at places like 3m and cambodia as a place to load munitions, not do repairs. Get in, get out quick. You also have a naval base that is there close to an ally. Solomon islands if you are sustaining operations to interdict shipping it makes sense to use these anchorages to reload and restock with fuel but if you have Nuclear Submarines operating in the pacific, getting in and getting out quick, its about reloading the food. You dont go on to think u. S. Auxiliary ships. That makes more sense. Alex i would agree. China has stated that the indo pacific are future priorities geographically. There is the idea of protecting the lines of communication. The major ones are across the indian ocean. Breaking these island chains, these perceived island chains containing china, its all important. To brents point as well, intercepting where the u. S. Might send reinforcements from around these different areas. It might come from the mediterranean, the gulf, etc. But these are also high priority where the indian ocean comes into it. We are always thinking about them wanting to Balance India within the indian ocean as well. Somewhat a fight for regional hegemony within the indian ocean. Thomas so i think the answer to that question was no. They have put their bases, since then, where it suits them, and not so much us. We could probably go on here for a while. Any really quick questions . Alright, lets do it really quickly. Thank you for the talk, i really appreciate it. I know there is no direct causality where chinese china is putting its bases but are there any tipping points out of the economic relationships that would make you think they are moving more towards naval bases within the area . Brent not alex not necessarily. The broader geopolitical focus is aligned to the economics of the thinking is probably that these two are more interconnected than they have been in the past. Clearly because a pandemic and domestic Economic Conditions as well, clearly china is reassessing bri and what they potentially want to do next. These other priorities have the u. S. And allies pushing back on some of these potential Expansion Efforts of the chinese military. I think it is all going to sort of coalesce within a calculus within china itself. Thomas ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. We have unfortunately run out of time. We will be posting the video of this event to our website in a day or two. I encourage you to share it your friends. Lets give our guests a round of applause. [applause] i look forward to welcoming you to a future heritage event. Meanwhile, have a great day. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2023] this week, campaign 2024 coverage from the eye with state fair. 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