Is Chinese ship Yuan Wang 5 exploring a new sea route from China to Africa ?

The strategic ship has become a bone of contention between India and China after the former voiced its concerns over the vessel being allowed to berth at Hambantota port by the Ranil Wickremesinghe regime under pressure from Beijing.

Published on: Aug 30, 2022, 13:57:42 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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The Chinese marine research, satellite and ballistic missile vessel, Yuan Wang 5, is currently mapping Indian ocean bed 2000 kilometers (1100 nautical miles) south of Sri Lanka giving rise to the possibility of Beijing exploring a new sea route to Africa’s eastern seaboard by bypassing contested Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok Straits.

Yuan Wang 5, the 11000-ton vessel is moving deep into the Indian Ocean and will proceed towards its homeport Shanghai via the Ombai-Wetar Straits near East Timor and north of Australia. (HT_PRINT)

According to available information, the 11000-ton vessel is moving deep into the Indian Ocean and will proceed towards its homeport Shanghai via the Ombai-Wetar Straits near East Timor and north of Australia.

The strategic ship has become a bone of contention between India and China after the former voiced its concerns over the vessel being allowed to berth at Hambantota port by the Ranil Wickremesinghe regime.

The Hambantota Port was leased to China for 99 years in 2017 by the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in a debt for equity swap as Sri Lanka had defaulted on the Chinese loan. The vessel left Hambantota on August 22 after Sri Lankans replenished the ship with food, diesel, oil, and lubricants.

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With Malacca, Sunda and Lombok Straits of Indonesia all monitored by India through ships and Predator UAVs as they are in close proximity to Andamans and Nicobar Islands, naval experts believe that Yuan Wang 5 may be charting a new route to East Africa that does not allow the Indian Navy to exercise leverage on Chinese ships.

The new route will completely avoid the shortest sea lanes of communication from South China sea to Persian Gulf and Gulf of Aden and take a longer route through Ombai Wetar Straits.

The new route will allow Chinese ships unhindered access to eastern seaboard of Africa, where Beijing has heavily invested under the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) and has also established a base in Djibouti. The new route will be deep south of Sri Lanka and will allow easy access to Chinese ships to ports like Mombasa in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique.

The ocean bed mapping also helps in anti-submarine operations as the equatorial waters are tricky due to significant differences between the surface and sub-surface temperatures.

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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