Will China Stand up a 4th Fleet for Indian Ocean?

Despite reports that China is planning a fourth fleet for the Indian Ocean, India doesn't appear to be losing any sleep over it.

Unconfirmed reports from Chinese-language articles and Western defense industry reports suggest China would build a fleet command headquarters at Sanya on Hainan Island.

Yet the main obstacles to such a strategy include diplomacy, logistics, and reliability, despite conducting successful, but limited, anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia, experts say.

The reports of the fourth fleet are "overstated speculation" and lack "credibility," said Ching Chang, a research fellow at Taiwan's ROC Society for Strategic Studies and a former Taiwan naval officer.

"Without any diplomatically credible, militarily reliable, and logistically functional forward base in the Indian Ocean area, it is impossible for the [Chinese Navy] to establish any long-lasting military organization there, though certain ad hoc arrangements such as dispatch forces, task forces and exercise maneuvering units may appear in the Indian Ocean from time to time," he said.

The Chinese Navy has three fleet commands: the North Sea Fleet in the Yellow Sea, East Sea Fleet in the East China Sea, and the South Sea Fleet in the South China Sea.

Hainan Island, the would-be headquarters for the fourth fleet, is only 200 nautical direct miles from the South Sea Fleet's base at Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province.

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