China’s ship Yuan Wang 5 now docked close to India’s southern coast

The Yuan Wang 5 was allowed to dock on the condition it will not carry out any research while in Sri Lankan waters

China’s satellite and ballistic missile tracking ship Yuan Wang 5 arrived at the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka on Tuesday, as the island nation’s government granted it permission to dock for about a week, brushing aside the security concerns of India.

As the ship docked at the Hambantota Port, which Sri Lanka leased out to a state-owned company of China in 2016, early on Tuesday, Beijing’s envoy to Colombo, Qi Zhenhong, called its visit to the island nation “a normal procedure”. He said that a similar survey and research ship of China had visited the Colombo Port of Sri Lanka in 2014.

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe sent parliamentarian Mahinda Wijesekera as his representative to the ceremony that took place at the Hambantota Port to welcome the ship on Tuesday. Wickremesinghe, himself, had on Monday attended a ceremony that marked the hand-over of the Dornier 228 maritime patrol aircraft, which India gifted to Sri Lanka.

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The ‘Yuan Wang 5’ has multiple high-accuracy, long-range, amplitude-comparison monopulse radar systems, which are capable of manual or automatic acquisition and tracking objects that are either in flight or in orbit. It has a crew of over 400 personnel, mostly from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China. The ship is used by the Strategic Support Force of the Chinese PLA to track satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The arrival of ‘Yuan Wang 5’ in the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka triggered concerns in New Delhi because its dual-use tracking capabilities could also be used for snooping.

Sri Lanka has been one of the Indian Ocean theatres of strategic rivalry between India and China.

New Delhi has been concerned over the Chinese PLA Navy’s increasing forays in the Indian Ocean region as well as the communist country’s bid to build “String of Pearls” strategic assets around India.

The Yuan Wang 5 operated more than 80 tasks ever since entering service in September 2007, including tracking China’s crewed spacecraft Shenzhou, Chang'e Lunar Exploration Missions and the BeiDou satellites. The ship sailed for a total of 256 days in 2021. It went through a technical upgrade earlier this year to improve the navigation power, safety performance, reliability and operability of its “specialized equipment”.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government in Colombo had on July 12 accepted Beijing’s request to allow the Yuan Wang 5 to dock at the Hambantota Port. A day later, Rajapaksa had fled from Colombo to Malé in the wake of the widespread protest against his government over its failure to deal with the severe economic crisis, which had hit Sri Lanka early this year. He later flew to Singapore and resigned as President of Sri Lanka.

The Yuan Wang 5 was initially scheduled to arrive at the Hambantota Port on August 11 on a port call till August 17. But after New Delhi conveyed to Colombo its concerns, Rajapaksa’s successor Wickremesinghe’s government on August 5 requested China to defer the visit of the ship till further consultation between the two sides. The Sri Lankan government, however, finally buckled under pressure from China last week and granted permission to the ship to visit the port for a week beginning Tuesday.

Though Colombo brushed aside New Delhi’s concerns and decided to allow China to station its satellite and ballistic missile tracking ship so close to the southern coast of India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government went ahead to give the neighbouring Indian Ocean island nation a Dornier 228 maritime patrol aircraft. The aircraft was ceremonially handed over Monday, even as the Sri Lankan Navy deployed one of its advanced offshore patrol vessels, SLNS Sindurala, for a Passage Exercise with Pakistani Navy ship PNS Taimur, which left the Colombo Port after a four-day port call that began on August 12.