China and Australia beef up their policing in the Pacific

A SMALL team of Chinese police have been stationed in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, since 2022, when the two countries signed a security deal that shocked the United States and its allies. The officers train local officers in riot control and shooting, and give their families kung fu lessons. Since their arrival, China’s law-and-order footprint in the Pacific has grown. Last year, it sent police advisers to Vanuatu, northeast of Australia. In February, officials in Kiribati, a neighbor of Hawaii, said Chinese police were now embedded in its forces. China’s efforts to set up police stations abroad were part of “transnational repression efforts,” a U.S. official said.

In addition to deploying police, China is hosting Pacific police officers for training and showering cash-strapped forces with equipment. Those developments have unsettled Australia, long considered the “security partner of choice” for Pacific nations by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. His Labor government has had to spend lavishly to remain the region’s go-to power. It scored a much-needed victory on Aug. 28, when Pacific leaders unanimously backed a plan for Australia to beef up regional policing.

Australia will build several new training centres for Pacific police, including one in Brisbane, and fund a multinational force of Pacific police who can be deployed during riots or natural disasters. Details are still being worked out, but Australia has committed A$400 million ($270 million) over five years to the “Pacific Policing Initiative”. This is in addition to A$1.4 billion over four years pledged last year for Pacific “peace and security”.

The security needs of island nations are dire. Their vast Pacific Ocean, covering an area larger than all the continents combined, is by one estimate the largest uncontrolled space in the world. Illegal fishing vessels plunder the rich tuna stocks. Drug trafficking is on the rise. Criminals use the Pacific as a transit route for methamphetamine and cocaine from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand. Gangs are establishing themselves in Fiji and Tonga, fueling local crime and addiction. Instead of cracking down, some police officers are making money off it.

But major powers also pay close attention to policing, since most Pacific nations don’t have armies. China’s interests in policing are both political and strategic, argues Graeme Smith of the Australian National University in Canberra. Chinese officers are expected to protect or police Chinese diaspora communities, he says. (A large settler community in the Solomons has been the target of riots in the past.) China may also hope to gain influence over national security decisions.

Against that backdrop, Australia’s new police deal is a strategic victory. “It was an explicit endorsement of Australia’s role as the primary security provider to Pacific island states,” said Mihai Sora, a former diplomat who now works for the Lowy Institute, a think tank in Sydney. But Australia has had to tread carefully. Pacific nations, unsurprisingly, do not want to be treated as pawns or bullied by their neighbours. They worry about the militarisation of their islands. Regional policing plans must be “designed to meet our objectives,” Charlot Salwai, the prime minister of Vanuatu, warned last month. For his part, Mr Albanese stressed that the plan was “led by” the Pacific police.

Australia has had a few other victories. In April, Mr Albanese’s government temporarily fended off the possibility of Papua New Guinea signing a major security deal with China, after also pledging A$200 million to the country. And Fiji has expelled Chinese officers who were formerly in its police force.

Yet China has more to offer. When it failed to push through a regional security deal with Pacific nations in 2022, it looked like it had overplayed its hand. But on Sept. 11, it hosted several Pacific ministers for a forum on policing and opened a police training facility in Fuzhou. China’s “strategy of picking countries one by one … seems to be working,” Mr. Sora says. As in other areas, many Pacific nations see the benefits of playing both sides. ■