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.

Puerto Rico triggers historic default as austerity spiral deepens

America’s home-grown “Greece” is trapped in a vicious circle as a shrinking economy and an exodus of workers pushes the debt ratio through the roof

Puerto Rico has triggered the biggest municipal default in US history, risking years of bitter legal warfare with creditors and an austerity “death spiral” with echoes of Greece.

The island Commonwealth finally ran out of money on Monday after a desperate effort to stay afloat, and missed a final deadline for a $58m payment – handing over just $628,000.

It implies a sweeping default on much of its $72bn debt burden, equal to 100pc of Puerto Rico’s gross national product (GNP) and more than five times the debt ratio of California or Texas.