BEIJING  >> China said Thursday that it planned to establish a military facility in Djibouti, a strategically important country on the Horn of Africa, which would apparently be the first permanent presence overseas for China’s military and a sign of the growing reach of its navy.

Announcing that China was in talks to build what it called a "logistical facility" in Djibouti, the Foreign Ministry said that the installation would serve to resupply Chinese navy ships that had been participating in United Nations anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden since 2008.

The ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, appeared to go out of his way not to refer to the facility as a military base. He did not say when construction would begin or when it would be completed.

The United States maintains its only military base on the African continent in Djibouti, which it uses as a staging ground for counterterrorism operations in Africa and the Middle East. Last year, President Barack Obama renewed the lease on that base for another 20 years.

China’s announcement comes after a visit to Djibouti this month by the chief of the People’s Liberation Army’s general staff, Gen. Fang Fenghui, which appears to have brought the discussions about the base to fruition. This year, China issued a major defense document, known as a white paper, that outlined its ambitions to become a global maritime power.

China has invested heavily in Djibouti’s infrastructure, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent upgrading the country’s undersized port. It has also financed a railroad extending from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to Djibouti, a project that cost billions of dollars.

Strategically, Djibouti offers an excellent place from which to protect oil imports from the Middle East that traverse the Indian Ocean on their way to China, military experts say. From Djibouti, China gains greater access to the Arabian Peninsula.

China, despite its growing economic and geopolitical might, has long said that it would not emulate the United States in building bases around the world, on the grounds that it does not believe in interfering in the affairs of other countries.

But the head of the United States Africa Command, Gen. David M. Rodriguez, said in Washington last week that China planned "to build a base in Djibouti" and had reached a 10-year agreement with the country’s government to do so. He said the installation would serve as a logistics hub and would enable the Chinese to "extend their reach."

The U.S. military has praised China’s participation in the international anti-piracy operations, which protect vital commercial shipping in a volatile part of the world. But some U.S. military experts, concerned about Beijing’s growing military capacity, have expressed unease about China having a land facility for its military in Djibouti so close to a major American base, Camp Lemonnier, where 4,000 service members, including Special Forces, and civilians train and carry out counterterrorism operations.

Chinese military experts have been divided on whether China should establish bases overseas.

Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, who has argued vigorously that China should develop bases commensurate with its growing military power, said Thursday that in doing so, China would only be doing what America had done.

"The United States has been expanding its business all around the world and sending its military away to protect those interests for 150 years," Shen said. "Now, what the United States has done in the past, China will do again."

Shen, who referred to the planned facility in Djibouti as a "base," said it was necessary because "we need to safeguard our own navigational freedom," adding that "if whoever — pirates, ISIS or the U.S. — wants to shut down the passage, we need to be able to reopen it."

Hong of the Foreign Ministry offered few details about the Djibouti facility, but he said it would provide Chinese ships with access to reliable supplies and enable its crew members to rest. "These facilities will help Chinese vessels to better carry out Chinese missions like escort and humanitarian operations," he said.

Such statements suggest a far more modest facility than the sprawling U.S. base at Camp Lemonnier, which the United States has used since 2003 for weapons as varied as drones and F-15 fighter jets. Washington announced in 2013 that $1.4 billion would be spent on expanding the base, from which drone operations over Somalia and Yemen are conducted.

France also maintains a base in Djibouti, which is a former French colony. Japan, which also participates in the United Nations anti-piracy operations, keeps surveillance aircraft and several hundred personnel there.

Whatever the scope of the Chinese facility, and regardless of whether China calls it a base, there is little doubt that it reflects the country’s extended interests and investments in Africa and the Middle East.

A former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, David H. Shinn, said there were many reasons for China to want an installation in Djibouti. "I have argued over the past year that China will make every effort to establish some kind of facility in Djibouti that China plausibly can describe as something less than a military base," he said.

Among those reasons, he said, is the need to protect 1 to 2 million Chinese citizens living in Africa. This year, China’s navy evacuated several hundred Chinese citizens and foreign nationals from war-torn Yemen, routing them through Djibouti for their journeys home.

In a recent paper for the National Defense University in Washington, Christopher D. Yung, an expert on China’s military, argued that the country was intent on shouldering more international responsibilities involving its military and in turn would need "dual-use facilities" that could accommodate commercial and military operations.

Until now, he wrote, China had relied on commercial aircraft and ships to maintain its anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden, but they were expensive and inadequate for the Chinese navy. "China needs to expand beyond its current temporary bases," Yung wrote.

© 2015 The New York Times Company