China sets up "spy" station on Bonriki

China is playing a sophis ticated, if strange game, in Kiribati. On Bairiki Islet on Tarawa they have just build an extravagant embassy, easily overwhelming their Australian and New

Zealand neighbours.

While out east on Bonriki, near the air port, they have a discrete little place that they do not like people visiting - probably because it is little more than a spy station.

The “China Space TT & C” base appears to be under-going some expansion

with local contractors

building new paths

and foundations for a

new building.

Entry to the base is forbidden but when this reporter showed up, there appeared to be some domestic drama involving the Chinese staff and an employee of a local bar. Seemingly dis tracted the manager told this reporter to go in and have a look around.

It is unlike any thing else in the Pacific but it was not clear what its mission is.

A Chinese technician said the base was for helping in the launching, of rockets from mainland China but it is more likely to be spying on the US Army’s missile testing at Kwajalein, 1000 kilometres to the north-west in the Marshall Islands.

That is certainly the way the two satellite tracking dishes are aimed.

Most rockets launching satellites into geostationary orbit have to pass over here,

virtually right on the Equator.

Kiribati, home to 87,000 Micronesians, signed a deal with China in 1997 to set up the station.

It came at a time when it was also nego

dating with Japan’s National Space Development Agency for use of remote Kiritimati Atoll as a landing base for Japan’s Space Shuttle project. Three months ago Sea Launch Limited Partnership, a joint venture involving Boeing Commercial Space Company and companies from Russia, Ukraine and Norway, fired a rocket from a floating plat form in international waters near here.

An informed source said the size of the deal with China was not known but it was understood that the Kiribati government

was earning less than it expected. It became an issue in general elections earlier this year and in what was seen as a related move, the Chinese, a week before polling, tarsealed the road between the airport and its base.

The spy station is around 40 minutes drive from Betio where around 6000 Japanese and Americans were killed in 1943 in one of the worst battles of World War Two.

Ironically the last time these islands were used to spy on the neighbours, then Japanese, the 17 New Zealand coastwatch ers were taken prisoners and beheaded here.

The i-Kiribati sign at the front of the

station describes it as “China Space TT & C Station”.

Inside there is a substantial two storey

dormitory, currentlyoccupied by three

men but capable of many more. The sta tion has a large power station with four generators. There are two large satellite dishes mounted on military trailers with cables run into permanently parked buses in garages.

The system did not appear to be boot ed up and one bus, not connected to a dish, has surrendered to the creepers which has

taken over.

Tawara is, effectively, the closest point with an inter national airport outside the Marshalls to

Kwajalein and the deploy

ment of the dishes at the Chinese base suggests that

they are watching the

Americans from here. It is not clear what they do with the data because they have no transmitters visi ble and the local telephone system can barely handle

ordinary traffic.

The Americans are devel oping a theatre missile defence system at Kwajalein which has been causing concern in China

because they fear Taiwan will also acquire the system.

When Kiribati became independent from Britain in 1979 it was obliged to reach a settlement with the United States which had claimed a number of its atolls.

Under the deal Kiribati agreed to let the United States have right of veto over any naval base here. Signed at the height of the Cold War it was designed to prevent the Soviet Union establishing visiting

rights here.

American surveillance aircraft regular ly visit here although Kiribati is in the New Zealand surveillance zone. ■

The usually secure entrance la the secret Chinese satellite base on Kiribati's Tarawa