Beijing’s great game to win over Pacific’s small island states

Micronesia’s President Peter Christian, center, reviews an honor guard with Xi Jinping outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in March 2017. Photo: AFP/ Greg Baker

 

Deploying classic tactics – leverage via investment, tourism, diplomacy and political funding – Beijing is winning the strategic competition with Washington across the west and northern Pacific

While the South China Sea is East Asia’s strategic center stage as China expands its military presence and control over that critical seascape, Beijing is quietly and successfully upping its presence in Pacific territories that have traditionally fallen under US influence.

But unlike in the South China Sea, it is not capturing influence with hard power. Instead, it is deploying a range of big-picture, long-game asymmetric tactics that will be familiar to anyone who has studied Beijing’s Belt and Road initiatives in other regions.

While the US fought its now-legendary, trans-Pacific “island hopping” campaign against Japan in many of these territories in World War II, China is today winning a new, non-kinetic war by default – for, beyond East Asian shores, the Pacific suffers from benign neglect in Washington.

Japan to grant patrol boats to Malaysia to counter China

VIENTIANE — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will promise to give Malaysia patrol boats during Wednesday’s leaders summit between Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Laos.

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The Southeast Asian nation is locked in a territorial dispute with China over waters in the South China Sea. Tokyo and the Malaysian government are negotiating a pact in which Japan will transfer military hardware and provide technical support.

Pentagon Confirms Unsafe Chinese Aerial Encounter

Congress criticizes Beijing’s aerial harassment of RC-135

After initially refusing to provide details, the Pentagon on Tuesday confirmed that a Chinese jet made an unsafe pass near a U.S. RC-135 surveillance jet last week.

“I can confirm for you that the department’s reviewing a report that came in from [U.S. Pacific Command] regarding a Sept. 15 intercept of a U.S. RC-135 by an aircraft from the People’s Republic of China,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters.

US preparing for potential conflict in South China Sea: report

During the Air & Space Conference and Technology Exposition held by the Air Force Association in National Harbor, Maryland on Sep. 16, the US secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, said Washington was already moving ahead to prepare for a potential conflict with China in the disputed South China Sea region, Russia’s Tass news agency reports.