Amid the largest military build-up since World War II, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is aggressively pursuing expanded military access for its forces abroad.
The below map tracks the PLA’s growing global footprint. It includes information regarding the PLA’s existing military installations, PLA projects currently underway, and reported scouted locations for future military outposts. The map will be updated with the latest available open-source information.
As part of a concerted counter-basing campaign, the United States and allied governments should pro-actively engage with countries that appear most at-risk of either hosting a permanent Chinese military presence or supporting the PLA’s global logistics architecture to undermine China’s basing pursuits.
In 2015, China and Tanzania broke ground on a ten-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative project to revitalize Tanzania’s Bagamoyo port. The project was halted in 2019 by former President John Magufuli following concerns about the deal’s opaque terms and commercial viability. Nevertheless, current Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan has expressed interest in reviving the project, which would build upon China’s other investments in several Tanzanian megaprojects, including the $2.9 billion Julius Nyerere hydropower power plant.
China’s strategy hinges, in part, on establishing an international network of “strategic strong points” (战略支点) that can provide support for overseas military operations or act as a forward base for deploying military forces overseas. The PLA’s expanding global footprint and corresponding ability to conduct a wider range of missions, including limited warfighting, carries major risks for the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific as well as other operational theaters.
Historically, the text of China’s “active defense” strategy emphasized the PLA’s role defending the country’s territorial integrity and winning localized wars in China’s “near seas.” Today, China’s growing emphasis on “far seas protection” necessitates that the PLA “adapt itself to tasks in different regions, develop the capacity of its combat forces for different purposes, and construct a combat force structure for joint operations.”
The PLA’s expanded mission prioritizes securing China’s major trade, energy, and resource routes along its principal sea line of communication (SLOC), which runs from mainland China through the Malacca Strait and into the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. China is also leveraging its civilian logistics systems and commercial infrastructure, including projects financed by Chinese companies and/or affiliated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, to support the PLA’s growing access needs.
At present, the PLA operates one declared overseas military base in Djibouti, which it established in 2017. Relatedly, the PLA maintains several man-made artificial islands in disputed parts of the South China Sea that it has fortified with missiles, runways, and advanced weapons systems. Beyond these naval outposts, the PLA's Strategic Support Force (SSF) also operates tracking, telemetry, and command (TT&C) stations in Pakistan, Namibia, Kenya, and Argentina that support China’s space and satellite operations.
After years of denials by Cambodian and Chinese officials, the PLA appears on-track to inaugurate its second overseas military base — and its first in the Indo-Pacific — at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base as early as 2023. The U.S. Defense Department contends the PLA may have also made basing overtures to three additional countries in recent years: Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and Namibia. The Defense Department has further identified at least 13 additional locations that the PLA has likely considered to support its overseas military logistics and basing infrastructure. The Biden administration dispatched delegations to two of them — the United Arab Emirates in 2021 and Equatorial Guinea in 2022 — in an attempt to dissuade both governments from hosting an official Chinese military presence.
To date, the U.S. government has provided scant details regarding how China’s expanding overseas military presence could potentially impact U.S. and allied force posture around the world, most notably in the Indo-Pacific. Similarly, Washington has not outlined specific plans aimed at undermining China’s basing pursuits, which depend almost entirely on Beijing’s ability to positively shape host-country receptivity to its basing overtures.
