A little history should help dampen some wild speculation about eavesdropping facilities in the Indian Ocean.
On 31 March, Chatham House published a report titled “Is Myanmar building a spy base on Great Coco Island?”. The tone of the report was measured and its conclusions sensible but, predictably perhaps, it has since given rise to a rash of speculative and tendentious articles about a supposed Chinese military facility on a remote island in the Andaman Sea.
It is worth looking at the history of this story, if only to provide some context and inject a little balance into the public debate.
Back in 1992, an article “Government said helping to build naval base in Burma” published by the Kyodo News Agency claimed that China was building a “radar facility” on Myanmar’s Great Coco Island, just north of India’s Andaman and Nicobar group. This item caught the attention of other journalists and commentators, who published a series of increasingly alarmist stories in the mainstream press. As they tried to outdo each other, the narrative became ever more bizarre.
Please click here to read the full “Chinese spy bases on Myanmar’s Great Coco Island? Here we go again” article published at The Interpreter, written by Griffith Asia Institute Adjunct Professor Andrew Selth.
