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 IssuesNuclear 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