Next generation SOSUS?
China builds huge underwater spy network in disputed seas
Beijing is building a vast £230 million underwater spying network across the sea bed of disputed territory in the East China Sea and South China Sea raising fears that President Xi is plotting to seize new land and expand his military presence.
China will create a huge surveillance hub with underwater cameras, sensors and radars that will feed information back to Shanghai. It is suspected that Beijing will use the information to monitor shipping traffic and scrutinise any attempts by its neighbours who dispute China’s territorial claims in the region to grab back land. Beijing has said that the spying hub will give “round-the-clock, real-time, high-definition, multiple interface, and three-dimensional observations”.
While the ruling party initially said that the hub would advance oceanic studies, CCTV, the state-owned broadcaster, later said that it would also “meet the needs in other areas such as national defence and disaster warning.”......
The new underwater development is expected to take five years to complete. Jian Zhimin, dean of the School of Ocean and Earth Science at Tongji University in Shanghai, said: “Devices will be placed down on the sea bed through optical cables; in other words we’ll build a laboratory undersea to collect and send data back to us.” He added: “China is an ocean power . . . An ocean power must be able to go to the high seas and go global.”
Zhou Huaiyang, a professor at Tongji University, said he too believed that the underwater initiative could be used to endorse China’s territorial claims. “After its establishment, this system can also have some effects in other sectors, such as mining, mapping or ocean rights protection and national defence in addition to scientific research,” he said......