China and Australia are beefing up their Pacific policing
A SMALL team of Chinese police has been stationed in Honiara, the Solomon Islands’ capital, since 2022, when the two countries signed a security agreement that shocked America and its allies. The cops train local officers in riot control and shooting, and give their families lessons in kung fu. Since their arrival, China’s law-and-order footprint in the Pacific region has grown. Last year it sent police advisers to Vanuatu, north-east of Australia. In February officials in Kiribati, a neighbour of Hawaii, said that Chinese police were now embedded with its forces. China’s attempts to establish police stations abroad were part of “transnational repression efforts”, said an American official.
As well as deploying police, China hosts Pacific officers for training and is showering cash-strapped forces with equipment. Those advances have caused jitters in Australia, which has long been what Anthony Albanese, its prime minister, calls the “security partner of choice” for Pacific nations. His Labor government is having to spend lavishly to remain the region’s go-to power. It scored a much-needed win on August 28th, when Pacific leaders unanimously endorsed a plan for Australia to beef up regional policing.
Australia will build several new training centres for Pacific police, including one in Brisbane, and finance a multinational unit of Pacific officers to be deployed during riots or natural disasters. The details are being thrashed out, but Australia has allocated A$400m ($270m) over five years to the “Pacific Policing Initiative”. This is in addition to A$1.4bn over four years promised last year for Pacific “peace and security”.
The security needs of island states are glaring. Their vast Pacific Ocean, covering an area bigger than every continent combined, is by one estimate the world’s largest unpoliced space. Illegal fishing boats pillage its rich stocks of tuna. Drug-trafficking is growing. Criminals use the Pacific as a transit route for methamphetamine and cocaine headed from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand. Gangs are putting down roots in Fiji and Tonga, fuelling local crime and addiction. Rather than cracking down, some police are cashing in.
But big powers are also lavishing attention on police because most Pacific countries do not have armies. China’s interests in policing co-operation are political as well as strategic, argues Graeme Smith of the Australian National University in Canberra. Chinese officers are expected to protect or control Chinese diaspora communities, he says. (A big settler community in the Solomons has been targeted in past riots.) China may also hope to gain influence over national-security decisions.
Against that backdrop, Australia’s new policing deal is a strategic win. “It was an explicit endorsement of Australia’s role as the main security provider for Pacific island countries,” says Mihai Sora, a former diplomat now working for the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney. But Australia has had to tread carefully. Unsurprisingly, Pacific countries do not want to be treated like pawns or bullied by their neighbours. They are concerned about the militarisation of their islands. Regional policing plans should be “framed to fit our purposes”, warned Charlot Salwai, Vanuatu’s prime minister, last month. For his part, Mr Albanese was at pains to stress that the plan was being “led by” Pacific police.
Australia has had some other wins. In April Mr Albanese’s government managed to fend off, for now, the possibility of Papua New Guinea signing a sweeping security agreement with China, after it also promised A$200m to the country. And Fiji has ejected Chinese officers formerly embedded with its police.
Even so, China still has more to offer. When it failed to push through a regional security deal with Pacific countries in 2022 it seemed it might have overplayed its hand. But on September 11th it hosted several Pacific ministers for a forum on policing, and opened a facility for training Pacific police forces in Fuzhou. China’s “strategy of picking countries off one by one…seems to be working”, says Mr Sora. As in other areas, many Pacific nations see the benefits of playing both sides. ■