Chinese missile tracker ship prospecting Indian Ocean bed south of Sri Lanka

The Chinese made a strong political statement to a weak Ranil Wickremesinghe government by insisting that Yuan Wang 5 be allowed to berth at Hambantota Port after India's reported concerns with Colombo.

Published on: Aug 26, 2022, 15:14:27 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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After leaving Hambantota Port on August 22, the Chinese satellite and ballistic missile tracking ship Yuan Wang 5 is currently mapping ocean bed 400 nautical miles (741 kilometers) south-southeast of Dondra Head, the southernmost tip of Sri Lanka.

Chinese satellite and ballistic missile tracker ship Yuan Wang 5 leaves leased Hambantota port on August 22.

According to available information, the military ship is expected to head towards its home port Jiangyin near Shanghai as per details provided at Hambantota. However, it is not clear whether the ship will make another port call while on the way back to China.

Although classified as a Chinese Research Vessel, the ballistic missile tracker ship became a bone of contention with Sri Lankan authorities allowing the ship to berth at Hambantota on August 16 after initially deferring the port call on August 11. The Hambantota port is on a 99 year lease with the Chinese after Sri Lanka under the Beijing friendly Rajapaksa regime did a debt-equity swap with the Xi Jinping regime in 2017.

According to China watchers, the berthing of Yuan Wang 5 at Hambantota was a political statement of assertion by the Xi Jinping regime on the weak Ranil Wickremesinghe government after India quietly conveyed its concerns about the military ship.

Thanks to the economic profligacy by the Rajapaksa regime, a bankrupt Sri Lanka owes as much as 10 percent of its external debt to China and Colombo needs support from Beijing to get much needed credit from IMF and World Bank to run the country. The total external and internal debt of Sri Lanka is around USD 97-98 billion, way beyond its gross domestic product.

Since 2020, as many as 53 such ships have been monitored operating in the Indian Ocean Region with as many as 3-5 so-called research vessels operating in the area at any given time. While China on the face of it is trying to help the Indian Ocean littorals exploit resources in their respective EEZ, the whole purpose is to monitor Indian missile activity in Bay of Bengal as well as mapping of ocean beds, which is critical to anti -submarine operations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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