China pushes a package deal in the Pacific to counter U.S. containment

(Originally published May 27 in “What in the World“) China is moving rapidly to improve its strategic position in the Pacific against the United States.

Following U.S. President Joe Biden’s surprise remark that the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily from any invasion by the mainland, the Chinese military announced it would be conducting combat exercises in the waters and airspace near its “renegade province” as a “solemn warning to the recent collusion between the United States and Taiwan.”

Beijing is meanwhile pushing ahead with efforts to secure toeholds across the Pacific islands, where the U.S. military began its campaign to reverse Japanese control of the region in World War II. China has sent 10 Pacific nations a draft agreement for security and economic development that would not only see Beijing supervising their domestic security, internet communications, fisheries development and vocational education. The draft cooperation agreement—sent to the Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu—precedes a regional visit this week by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that culminates with a meeting with foreign ministers of several Pacific nations in Fiji.

On its face, China’s offer is just the kind of international developmental assistance any great economic power would offer—akin to anything that comes from the U.S. or Japan. And in terms of timing, it’s but a minor “tit” for the “tat” delivered this week by the U.S. President traveling to one of China’s closest neighbors and historic nemeses, Japan, to announce a new economic partnership with it and China’s other neighbors. That alliance is part of a broader policy of containing China’s growing regional influence outlined in a speech Thursday by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

“China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it,” Mr. Blinken said in a speech at George Washington University. “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years.”

But China’s overtures are part of its own effort to fashion an alternative global security order, which President Xi Jinping unveiled in April at its annual Boao Forum for Asia, that can supplant the U.S.-dominated one (what Russian President Vladimir Putin decried at the outset of the Ukraine invasion as Washington’s “empire of lies”).

For years, China’s neighbors complained that Beijing offered no global vision of prosperity and security to compete with America’s, and thus its diplomacy on trade and security seemed disingenuously self-interested. China’s new Global Security Initiative finally gives it the ideological fig leaf it needed. The GSI promises to reject that pesky U.S. insistence on its selective application of human rights, democracy and occasional regime change in favor of respecting territorial integrity and tolerating whatever “development path” other nations choose, whether it be an authoritarian dictatorship or a naked kleptocracy. Nations are left to decide which hypocrisy they’d prefer to live in, but China has been pushing hard in Latin America to counter Washington’s “pivot” in Asia.

Japan once held out the promise of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” to replace Europe’s colonial empires in Asia. But Tokyo was just replacing a mercantilist system centered in Europe for one based in Tokyo. It was all about access to markets and resources and to whom the benefits flowed.

It’s also difficult not to see echoes of Imperial Japan in China’s recent moves in the South Pacific. Japan also tried to establish an archipelagic defense against the U.S. and its European allies after winning Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Marianas, the Marshall Islands, and the Caroline Islands from Germany after World War I. Given the mounting tension between the U.S. in Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines to Japan’s rising power elsewhere in the Pacific, the U.S. devised a strategy called “leapfrogging” or “island-hopping” to cut through this necklace of island fortresses in the event of war.

Foreign Minister Wang’s Pacific tour begins with a ceremony signing China’s new security agreement with the Solomon Islands in Honiara, on the island of Guadalcanal.

The U.S. and its allies are already leaping to respond. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is in Washington to meet with Biden on the heels of his Tokyo summit with Australia, Japan and India. The Pentagon has just approved Australia’s $385 million purchase of U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) missile launchers.