BEIJING -- China announced Thursday that it would establish its first overseas military outpost and unveiled a plan to reorganize its military into a force capable of projecting power abroad.
The outpost, in the East African nation of Djibouti, breaks with Beijing's long-standing policy against emulating the United States in building military facilities abroad.
The Foreign Ministry refrained from describing the new installation as a military base, saying it would be used to resupply Chinese navy ships that have been participating in U.N. anti-piracy missions.
Yet by establishing an outpost in the Horn of Africa -- more than 4,800 miles from Beijing and near some of the world's most volatile regions -- President Xi Jinping is leading the military beyond its historical focus on protecting the nation's borders.
Together with the plan for new command systems to integrate and rebalance the armed forces, the two announcements highlight the breadth of change Xi is pushing on the People's Liberation Army, which for decades has served primarily as a lumbering guardian of Communist Party rule.
Xi told senior military officers this week that he wanted to "build a robust national defense and a strong military that corresponds to our country's international stature and is adapted to our national security and developmental interests," the official Xinhua news agency reported.
A presence in Djibouti would be China's first overseas logistics facility to service its military vessels since the Communists took power, said David Finkelstein, director of China studies at CNA, an independent research institute in Arlington, Va.
"In the grand sweep of post-1949 Chinese history, this announcement is yet another indicator that Chinese policy is trying to catch up with national interests that have expanded faster than the capacity of the People's Republic of China to service them," Finkelstein said.
The new facility would enable the navy to live up to a strategy laid down this year by the Communist Party in a major defense document, known as a white paper, that outlined its ambitions to become a global maritime power.
The United States maintains its only military base on the African continent in Djibouti, which it uses as a staging ground for counterterrorism operations in Africa and the Middle East. Last year, President Barack Obama renewed the lease on that base for 20 more years.
China has invested heavily in Djibouti's infrastructure, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent upgrading the country's undersize port. It has also financed a railroad extending from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to Djibouti, a project that cost billions of dollars. The country has a population of about 900,000, many of whom live in poverty.
Strategically, Djibouti offers an excellent place from which to protect oil imports from the Middle East that traverse the Indian Ocean on their way to China, military experts say. From Djibouti, China gains greater access to the Arabian Peninsula.
The news Thursday of broad changes to the Chinese military signaled a major step forward in Xi's program to shift its focus from traditional land armies to a more flexible, cohesive set of forces. China's military planning and spending have increasingly focused on territorial disputes in the South China Sea and in waters near Japan.
Xi told a gathering of more than 200 senior military officers that the planned changes would take years and were essential to ensuring that the People's Liberation Army could shoulder its increasingly complex and broad responsibilities, Xinhua said.
Despite Beijing's traditional rejection of what it calls U.S. imperialism and hegemony, some Chinese experts believe that it is time to reconsider the need for overseas military facilities.
Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, who has argued that China should develop bases commensurate with its growing military power, said Thursday that in doing so, China would only be doing what America had done.
"The United States has been expanding its business all around the world and sending its military away to protect those interests for 150 years," Shen said. "Now, what the United States has done in the past, China will do again."
A Section on 11/27/2015