China established a SIGINT intelligence gathering station on Great Coco Island in 1992 to monitor Indian naval activity in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The station is also said to allow China to monitor the movement of other navies and ships throughout the eastern Indian Ocean, especially in the crucial point in shipping routes between the Bay of Bengal and the Strait of Malacca. It may also be used to monitor activities at the launch site of the Indian Space Research Organization at Sriharikota and the Defence Research and Development Organization at Chandipur-on-sea. The were rumours that the Chinese Army is also building a maritime base on Little Coco Island, but as can be seen on by satellite pictures, there is no proven military activity nor a maritime base.
Geographically, the Coco Island group is a northern extension of the Andaman and Nicobar chain.
The group consists of three main islands and several small islets. They lieabout 250 kilometres south of burma’s Irrawaddy River delta and are separated from India’s North Andaman Island by the 20 kilometre wide Coco Channel. The Bay of Bengal lies to the west of the islands and the Andaman Sea to the east. The largest member of the group is Great Coco Island, which is about 10 kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide. A few kilometres to the north, across the Marshall Channel, lies the much smaller Table Island. Little Coco
Island is situated across the Alexandra Channel, approximately 15 kilometres to the southwest of Great Coco Island. Little Coco Island is about 5 kilometres long and one kilometre wide.3
The ‘Chinese Bases’ Claim:
The second development which attracted attention was the claim, first made by a Japanese wire service in 1992, that China was helping Burma to install radar or upgrade the base on Great Coco Island.24 It was later reported that China was building another base on Little Coco Island.25 As the years passed, stories about these ‘bases’ proliferated and grew in scale, with activists, journalists and popular pundits making increasingly dramatic claims. The small naval base on Great Coco Island was somehow transmogrified into a large
Chinese signals intelligence station, manned by 70 members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and hundreds of Burmese servicemen.26 Ten years after the first stories appeared in the news media, it was routinely being described as a comprehensive electronic intelligence collection facility, China’s largest base in Burma, and the PLA’s most important listening post outside China itself.27 At first, the main purpose of the Great Coco Island facility was reportedly to monitor regional military activities, especially air and naval movements in the Bay of Bengal.28 Before long, however, journalists and academics beganclaiming that the base was also established to conduct surveillance of India’s strategically important tri-service facilities at Port Blair, on South Andaman Island. Some suggested that the Chinese, and their Burmese allies, were monitoring submarine activity around the Indian Navy’s base at Visakhapatnam (Vizag) in eastern India.29 In an elaboration of this theme, a number of commentators claimed that the Great Coco Island base was built
and equipped by the Chinese to analyse telemetry from Indian missile tests. These included flights by ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles over the Bay of Bengal from ranges in eastern India. The electronic intelligence gathered, it was suggested, was shared with Pakistan to help it develop counter-measures against new Indian weapon systems.