Potential locations for the next naval base. This event was hosted by the Heritage Foundation. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our program, china future naval bases, new Empirical Data points to likely places. Please welcome the director of the Heritage Foundations Center for National Defense. Thank you very much everybody, great to see you all, those in the auditorium here and those joining us online, we are delighted you could be with us today. A reminder to silence your phones so we can be uninterrupted here. If there is one area of bipartisan agreement in this town of which there are very few, there is one and that is the danger that the Chinese Communist party is presenting to the interest of the United States and the western 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 to call attention to this issue. Function of the number of ships and missiles that you have. It is indeed the sum of many factors, logistics, training, and our topic today, naval ports. Amidst the recent tensions about Chinese Naval activities, ranging from the South China Sea to the bering sea, a major concern is where do they go next, and one way of ascertaining where the chinese navy may go next for sustained operations is to wear basic bases today. There have been a few places that have been in the news on this front. Equatorial guinea, cambodia, of course the Solomon Islands. Today were going to hear from experts on this topic you can give us some insight into what is shaping chinas thinking about such future basis. Prompting this discussion is the promulgation of a recent report titled harboring global ambitions, chinas ports footprint and implications for future overseas naval bases by a data, a Research Institution based in williamsburg, virginia, on the campus of the college of william and mary, my alumni, who used a range of novel techniques to provide insights to policymakers. For over a decade they have studied chinese financial movements and overseas Port Investments. So id like to invite our guests up to the stage here first. Alex willey, director of partnerships and communications that aid data. He has contributed to Foreign Policy and wrote one of the cover stories for the fall 2021 issue on the u. S. Navys shipbuilding was and in 2022 he wrote a story for folarin policy on the implications for the South China Sea of the sinking of the russian cruiser,f moscow, which was a Foreign Policy most read story. Alex is a former section editor of the georgetown journal of International Affairs and a former officer in the British Royal navy. He holds a master of arts in Security Studies from georgetown university. Also with us is brent sadler, joining Heritage Foundation after a 26 year navy career with numerous operational tours on Nuclear Powered submarines. Previous assignments include tours on the naval chief of operations staff at u. S. Pacific command and as the Senior Defense official in malaysia. As heritages Senior Research fellow, brent is focused on Maritime Security and the technologies shaping our future maritime forces, especially in the navy. He is the recent author of the book, u. S. Naval power in the 21st century, which discusses what he calls naval statecraft to contest chinas designs to reorder the world to its interests by playing to the interests by playing to the chinas weaknesses. So were going to start up on stage here with me asking these experts some questions and after a bit of that we are going to go to you, the audience, for your questions, both online and the ones in thea auditorium here. So when we get to that portion please be thinking of a question. If you are online you can use the application to submit a y question at any point in time and we will chew those up and have them ready. And if you ask a question now and its subsequently been h answered, of course we wont ask that question again. I think without further ado lets get to it. Alex, thanks so much for joining us. Did you come up tuthis morning from williamsburg . Actually yesterday. The traffic on i95 wasnt too bad at all. Im fascinated by this report. Im unaware of anything similar to it in recent years. Could you talk about what sets r this report and the methodology kind of apart from any other previous works on this topic . Absolutely. For more than 10 years aid data and william and mary have been collecting very granular, project level information on project level information on so that typically goes into a very large data set that has many, many rows of information, to help us as well as analysts analyze chinas intentions and strategy around development finance. Finance. Data set coming out in the fall of this year that will include 20,000 projects, looking at all official Chinese Development planning to 155 countries. From that we then subsumed a set specifically of ports. So we wanted to sort of delve a little bit into that subject matter. Today is obviously very newsworthy and of concern. Ce so we then took that data which incorporates a lot of c geospatial information as well as project narratives, a lot of information about financial flows, and we then combined that with other data inputs, so this included looking at how o the host country of a potentiala naval base aligns in u. N. General Assembly Voting with china. We looked at satellite imagery to look at the ports themselves. We look at the regime type of the potential host country, to i identify the potential ports. Safe to assume that the Chinese Communist party graciously makes all this data y available to you . They do not, and they dont typically signal where their on intentions are. We gather them all through open source information. We are lucky enough that st william and mary to have an y integrated team of faculty and staff of more than 100 student researchers who are engaged year round in scraping this information and we then tried to do deep dives into this is fascinating stuff that some of this is not in english, that you actually have to use a native speaker to kind of mind some of this data. We are very lucky to leverage the multilingual staff, including students who have many languages, be deable access information, for example, through the coast countries, their depositories of information. Okay, very good. Brent, over to you, sir. We talked about naval bases and it doesnt sound that ominous and threatening, but what are mm some of the negative av implications if the Chinese Communist party does establish a new naval base on the atlantic side of africa, for x example . Right now its one of the areas theyre looking at. Y its one that weve also looked at at heritage in the gulf of guinea in west africa, and of course mauritania, a couple interesting ports of interest. Beteresting ports of interest. Be a new entry for china to be that far away. It would allow them to sustain naval operations, military naval operations, military again, the key transit routes from the panama canal, which they have major investment and n presence, and also with that de trade and that traffic over to europe, and back and forth. From a trade perspective, high interest, but also from a military operational perspective it could also al happen. Also the function islands, not too far away, thats where the United States military does its missile testing and certification of its rocket forces. You know, say a chinese shipw makes a port call at just a normal port. It can typically buy bananas g and diesel fuel. What would be the big deal about the chinese getting a od naval base, if you will, in one of these countries . Theres a recouple aspects. The logistics, getting food, medical. Most commercial ports you can get food and medical. Most commercial ports you can also get diesel fuel, marine diesel fuel. Highend, more modern warships require jet fuel. Thats a lot harder to come by. So thats one of the items that if you have a presence and you are invested in you can make sure youve got that when you needed to sustain military operation. Then theirs dry docks and repair facilities as well that enter the mix. Very good. Alex, ack to you, sir. In your report, which i commanded to the audience, its really fascinating reading, you identified eight races as potential nearterm Chinese Naval bases and you do us a in favor of ranking and ordering them and what you think is the priority. But missing is any port in the Solomon Islands, which has beent in the news. He lots of people talking about it. Its mentioned in your report ig but it doesnt take the top eight. Can you talk about that . Sure. Absolutely. Our Data Collection effort covers all Chinese Development islands invested from 2003 f 2021. The fairly recent nnannouncemen about awarding a contract to a Chinese Construction Company who work in the Solomon Islands is from this year, so its a little bit outside our existingy data set. But we did look carefully at the Solomon Islands. F obviously last year they refused the u. S. Navy warship ei and a british ship from docking. It puseems like they are being pulled in a few different directions. I think late last year the leadership there looked like it might be leaning back toward australia to provide some security assurance. And then developments this yearo obviously, such as this recent construction. From our point of view, in some ways it was less important for c us to focus on the specific port than the region. S i think we are all agreed that the South Pacific is going to be clearly a target region. We identified venue at two because core to our research was tracking the money and where the money has gone. Because thats what we do, we th looked at where china put the most money. At that point, vietnam made a significant investment in the fi Solomon Islands. I think in 2019 they tried to purchase an sop. China tried to purchase an m island in the Solomon Islands t that there is not big, significant, financial investment. When we look at vanuatu and th port luginbill, where they donated dollars to upgrade and expand the port bill, have been in our particular region. But for wherever we look at before example to brents point about west and Central Africa, theres a whole swath of ports t where they put massive amounts of money into and we sort of landed on caribbean cameroon and Equatorial Guinea as two of the very likely ports. There only 100 miles apart so th they are probably going to choose may be one of those or one of the other ports around west africa. From our point of view its e like they are going to have a base somewhere in that region. H where it might be, they are noty telling anyone. As you look at these wide range of years, you looked at 2005 through 2021. Any trends in constant dollars, perhaps . Are they spending more in recent days or is this a trend . Can you discern a trend there . I dont know about a trend. There has been an observable pause, we think, and Infrastructure Development generally, during the pandemic. So it looked like they might ha have hit pause during that t period. But really the Port Investments the entire rl period. We actually tended to sort of downplay a little bit some of the Port Investments that were very early on, and they were completed. Because we also tend to see sort of an increasing convergence of the economic and the geopolitical. From china. So what might have been t seen i a purely commercial venture 20 years ago, it seems like, in addition to the belt and red initiative, china has a number n of other initiatives that have h a little bit more clear strategic intent, so its very t possible that theyre sort of uniting a little bit more throughout the commercial and these other, a little bit harder sort of initiatives that sort of bring those two together. So we tended to favor a little e bit the more recent chinese investment. Maybe early on they were sprinkled in money over a wide place and now in more recent years theyve become a bit more strategic. I think thats definitely a possibility. They were looking to portray it themselves been very openhanded with their money, and the narrative throughout has been, we are like you, we were a veryt poor country not too long ago. We are not colonial, unlike the other sort of powers that are ua being active in these regions. So were presenting something completely different and we just want mutual cooperation and Mutual Benefit to be om generated through the bri. I think whats interesting as well, from our point of view, there is a fair amount of Public Events right now because the bri is turning 10 this year, by most peoples count, from 2013, which is roughly the same time that the u. S. Launched its asia pivot, as well. So looking at how, over the past 10 day 12 years, how thoseo two different movements have paralleled and differed, but i e think theres definitely a move more toward strategic intent to the economic investments. Very good. Or brentz, i want to go back to you and your book. Brents book, naval power in the 21st century, you advocate for this use and this tying together of u. S. Diplomatic and naval presence together to kind of create a synergistic effect. Can you talk about how that might address chinas pursuit of naval bases . I think its really a useful construct or framing for how to actually compete with china. China has actually emerged, the way they approached all this, the economic would lead military or political. Now we are seeing the geopolitical becoming increasingly backed by more explicit military or naval presence. Theyve been exercising what i would call naval statecraft ef already. So what the United States needs to look at is reframing the way that it does statecraft and es integrate the naval presence with Economic Development and also with more forceful diplomacy. But the key thing in the work that alex and aid data is doing, it helps so you can get t ahead, look at certain key factl theirs. And for example, Equatorial Guinea, focusing not on the elite sort of powerbrokers in es the country, which is the chinese favored approach. The United States and the naval statecraft construct takes a a counterinsurgency where the people, the population, the center of effort, still looking at helping small and Medium Enterprises in the waterfront fishing communities, helping the Maritime Police and the rake coast guard in these countries, help her safeguard the local communities, the larger, popular, money and capital it generation in each countrys gdp market. Thats where the u. S. Has an opportunity to kind of push back on some of this, and te thats one of the aspects of the book. I think thats one of the so what, what do you do with this data. Its to inform the where next. Right now and can video you see some things playing out right ut now with what looks to be a naval base for the chinese. We Solomon Islands is another place that there could be some room to apply a naval statecraft approach as well, backed by the work theyve done. I remember still to this day, it was at least a couple years ago that this report, at least to me, came out of ho nowhere, whirl of a sudden the chinese were expressing chinese were expressing and i remember, like why should i care about that, and you were very persuasive in your writing that this actually is a big deal. Can you just talk a little bit more about that . I think when you look at that whole area, the first question is there is a whole bunch of port chinese are investing in, they can go to any one of them. It has to align with the fact e that they are looking at the political alignment, the assurance that that regime in power is going to survive, itse going to be favorable to the chinese. Equatorial guinea stood out. Its obvious from that io perspective that would be a place theyre going to double down. They also had a footprint in there, economic footprint imports angiography. You cant avoid geography. If you have a deepwater port thats an asset and all those things are there. Why it matters, the first thing is the missile range is not too far away and if you wanted to be the chinese, you want to watch what we are doing with our Nuclear Submarine force, and what we are doing with our ballistic missiles, you want to park nearby. Thats also similar to what was playing in care of us in the South Pacific where we have another mistletoe strange as well, so theres an operationals piece to this, as well, the economics. Great, thank you very much. So a question i like to draw from sherlock holmes, the question of the dog that doesnt bark. Lets say despite your data and your forecast, china does nothing about a naval base for the next five years or so. Does that mean anything . Sho