NEW DELHI—The Maldives is set to host a Chinese survey and research vessel with advanced surveillance capabilities. The planned port call of the Xiang Yang Hong 03 has triggered concerns in India, a giant neighbor to both the tiny archipelago nation and China.
Experts say it’s indicative of new-age geopolitics characterized by the ideological polarity between Beijing and New Delhi.
“If true, it would obviously be concerning for India in terms of the longer-term geostrategic situation,” British journalist Daniel Bosley, author of “Descent into Paradise: a Journalist’s Memoir of the Untold Maldives,” told The Epoch Times in an email. “In the short-term, if a Chinese research vessel does arrive in Malé at this particularly sensitive time, I'd say it indicates that neither China nor the Muizzu administration has any interest in easing tensions with India.”
The Chinese survey vessel is arriving just two weeks after Maldives signed 20 agreements with the regime in Beijing, including agreements to jointly accelerate cooperation on China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The two countries also signed an agreement for a $50 million project to set up an integrated tourism zone in the Maldives.
The agreements were signed during President Mohamed Muizzu’s five-day state visit to China. Mr. Muizzu also met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Jan. 10, and the two announced the elevation of their bilateral ties to a “comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.”
The visit occurred amid tensions with India, which were triggered after Mr. Muizzu’s three deputy ministers in the Ministry of Youth Affairs—Mariyam Shiuna, Malsha Shareef, and Mahzoom Majid—made derogatory remarks about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi after Mr. Modi visited Lakshadweep, a group of Indian islands near the Maldives.
The remarks were made just a day before Mr. Muizzu’s scheduled trip to China and triggered a backlash from Indian citizens, who canceled tourist bookings to the Maldives in large numbers.
While the three ministers were suspended and the Maldivian government distanced itself from the remarks, Mr. Muizzu’s tone changed after he returned from his China trip.
After landing at the Velana International Airport, the expansion of which was funded by the Export-Import Bank of China, Mr. Muizzu said at a news conference that the Indian Ocean doesn’t belong to any “specific country” and that Maldives is one of the nations with the “biggest share.”
“We may be small but this doesn’t give them the license to bully us,” he stated in a direct dig at India.
Incidentally, China’s Beijing Urban Construction Group signed the airport expansion project in 2014 after displacing India’s GMR Group.
In 2023, more than 200,000 Indian tourists and more than 187,000 Chinese tourists visited the Maldives, whose population is just over 500,000. Amid the spate of cancellations from India following the controversial remarks against Mr. Modi, Mr. Muizzu, addressing the Maldives Business Forum in Fujian Province, asked China to send more tourists to the islands.
“China is always in the equation between Maldives and India,” Akhil Ramesh, director of the India Program and Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum, told The Epoch Times in an email. “If India were to weaponize its tourism industry against Maldives, the only alternative tourism inflow is from China. Given that Muizzu campaigned on an ‘India out’ policy, his entire foreign policy focus will be Turkey and China.”
Mr. Muizzu, who was elected in September 2023, pivoted his election campaign on an “India Out” slogan against his opponent and predecessor, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who pitched his campaign on an “India-first policy.”
“We don’t want any foreign military boots on Maldivian soil ... I promised this to the people of the Maldives and I will live up to my promise from day one,” Mr. Muizzu said in an exclusive interview with the BBC after his victory. Upon returning from China, Mr. Muizzu set a deadline of March 15 for New Delhi to withdraw its 77 military personnel, as well as 12 medical staff from the Indian armed forces.
India has said it’s still discussing the matter with Maldives and has declined to comment on Mr. Muizzu’s deadline.
Strategic Value of Maldives
Central to the tug of war between India and China is the Maldives’ strategic location in the Indian Ocean, very near to the sea lines of communications (SLOCs), according to experts.“For example, nearly 90 percent of the oil Japan imports comes from the Middle East through these SLOCs,” Satoru Nagao, a nonresident fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Any great power that can deploy naval ships permanently in the Maldives, can show the capability to attack or defend these SLOCs, Mr. Nagao says.
“This means that the country will become the ‘Security Provider’ and leader of the Indian Ocean region. Small countries in the Indian Ocean will follow the ‘Security Provider.’ If China becomes the ‘Security Provider,’ India will lose its influence. Thus, [for] a long time, India and China have been competing,” he wrote.
Maldives is a good choice for China, the expert said, because its navy doesn’t have a major presence in the Indian Ocean. Djibouti is the only Chinese port in the region and Maldives, which consists of many islands, including uninhabited ones, can help the Chinese cause.
In addition, these SLOCs are crucial for China’s energy supplies. Maldives gains more significance because Xi has a plan for a Maritime Silk Route (MSR) that runs centrally through the Indian Ocean, according to Mimrah Abdul Ghafoor. Mr. Ghafoor is a Maldivian national who served as a speechwriter and later as the lead speechwriter at the Office of the President of the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.
“Thus in 2014, Yameen [former President Abdullah Yameen Abdul Gayoom] committed to the BRI, paving the way for Chinese enterprises to fund significant infrastructure projects in Maldives, such as the China–Maldives Friendship Bridge,” Mr. Ghafoor wrote.
Mr. Bosley noted that Mr. Yameen, who established a free trade agreement (FTA) with China in 2017 to increase trade and market access for Maldivian fish exports, also signed an agreement with China that same year to set up a research center on the island of Makunudhoo. This has fed rumors among analysts that the Chinese survey research vessel might be headed there.
Incidentally, another Chinese-constructed bridge, the “China–Maldives Friendship Bridge,” which is the first cross-sea bridge in the Maldives, was described by Chinese state news Xinhua as “an iconic project of the Maldives and China in co-building the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.”
The bridge was inaugurated in 2018.
India’s Security Calculus
The agreements between Maldives and China and the latter’s increasing investment and activities in the islands can be equated to the Beijing regime’s policies in the Solomon Islands, experts say. China’s growing footprints in the Solomon Islands threaten Australia and the United States, while its increasing influence in the Maldives threatens India.“India recognizes that Maldives has a very important strategic connotation, particularly with regard to [the] maritime security of India. This I say with regard to the Chinese endeavors, to somehow try and maintain a permanent naval presence in the Indian Ocean region particularly in the Arabian Sea and in the Bay of Bengal,” retired Capt. Kamlesh Kumar Agnihotri, an Indian Navy veteran and a senior fellow with India’s National Maritime Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
When Chinese ships come in large numbers, particularly when Beijing’s aircraft carriers come into the Arabian Sea, strategic operational space for the Indian navy will be constricted, according to Mr. Agnihotri. For Chinese ships to come so far from its own shores into the Indian Ocean will require support from other countries in the region, he said, and China may get this from African nations on the opposite shore.
“It will be a great situation for China, but it will not be any great situation for us. In that calculus, Maldives is so near to the Indian maritime,” Mr. Agnihotri said. “I would say [the] maritime area is of great concern. We do not want anybody in our immediate neighborhood to be siding with China because China then can affect our maritime.”
Maldives politics alternately favors India and China, and Mr. Agnihotri said India has witnessed such China-favoring dispensations in Maldives before. Mr. Muizzu, he said, has an electoral constituency to nurse.
“He is doing all that he can in the media, to clear [a] zero-sum game wherein he feels that if India’s influence in Maldives is reduced, consequently, China’s influence with his overtures to China will increase,” Mr. Agnihotri said. However, he added, actions such as taking more Chinese loans and using Chinese tourists to fill the vacuum left by Indian tourists are a balancing game with only short-term implications for Maldives.
The flip side of polarized local politics in the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago nation is that everything can change again in the next election, Mr. Bosley said. He cited the case of Mr. Yameen, who after five years of Chinese mega-projects, faced an electoral defeat in 2018.
Mr. Muizzu’s announcement of a joint strategic partnership with China would have been impossible earlier, he added.
“The Maldives’ traditionally fierce protection of its independence as well as a wise course of neutrality in recent decades would have previously made such a scenario impossible,” Mr. Bosley wrote in an email. “While the young democracy is experiencing a period of unprecedented instability, the geographical reality is that India will always be the Maldives’ biggest neighbour.”
