This story is the fourth in Newsweek's "Covert China" series exploring how China is working to expand its influence in order to achieve global preeminence by 2049.
China's ambassador to Vanuatu was exceptionally busy in December as the tiny Pacific Island nation signed a security deal with America's key ally Australia.
Starting on December 13, when Vanuatu and Australia sealed the agreement, Ambassador Li Minggang hosted three events over three days in Vanuatu - including at the massive Chinese embassy in the capital Port Vila. Li was at pains to highlight China's extensive involvement in the region with aid and infrastructure and its 40 years of diplomatic ties to a country where the U.S. has no embassy on the ground.
Beijing's message was clear: China was there for the long haul—and it was bringing gifts.
China was willing to work with Vanuatu "to advance our strategic alignment," Li told about 200 top government officials and other dignitaries on Dec. 14, as they enjoyed Chinese delicacies and tried their hand at calligraphy, according to the embassy.
The day after signing the formal security deal with Australia, Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau, who had once voiced criticism of his predecessor's good relationship with Beijing, was pictured getting a Chinese massage.
Li's flurry of activity starkly underscored his country's determined push for economic and political influence in the South Pacific, where growing competition between China and the United States—joined by allies such as Australia and Japan and closely watched by India—swirls across thousands of miles of ocean in a region with sea lanes that are important for world trade, that is crossed by underwater cables carrying global communications, and is dotted with islands that offer excellent ports and airfields of potential strategic importance for whichever military can count on them.
China's diplomatic offensive to win hearts, minds and pocketbooks in the South Pacific is just a part of a wider strategy, highlighted by Newsweek's reporting, to deepen its influence around the world. That includes building out a network of what China's rivals believe could be future bases for rapidly expanding armed forces as China becomes a greater challenge to the United States. Demonstrating Beijing's growing assertiveness, in late December, Chinese warships including the aircraft carrier Liaoning edged "close to Guam for the first time," according to the Communist Party's Global Times newspaper, citing "strategic threats" from the U.S.
While Beijing dismisses suggestions it wants overseas bases for its armed forces, the U.S. and its allies fear those are the real prize as it intensifies diplomacy with some countries: whether such bases are full blown operations run by the People's Liberation Army, looser, hidden policing or security arrangements with foreign governments, welcoming ports or airstrips often with next-door investment zones that are always ready to accommodate Chinese forces including the PLA navy, or commercial satellite monitoring and weather stations that could have dual uses.
Such facilities would help China project military power in a way that is currently only possible for the United States, which has a far larger network of foreign bases than any other country.
Suggestions that China seeks overseas bases are a "false accusation", foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a briefing in June.
Global Military Plans
But China's own military doctrine makes clear how central the ability to project power globally is to its future.
China's leaders say it will have a "world-class" military by 2049. Its national defense concept spells out that the world's second biggest economy must "safeguard China's overseas interests."
"China is at a critical stage of moving from big to great," Yan Wenhu, a strategist at the Institute of War Research at China's Academy of Military Science, wrote in 2019 on 81.cn, a media belonging to China's military. The numbers refer to August 1, the official founding day of the People's Liberation Army.
"In recent years, China's national interests have been expanding and extending overseas," Yan wrote. "The People's Army must closely follow the process of expanding the country's overseas interest and enhance its ability to perform diversified military tasks in a wider space."
China already has the world's biggest navy by some measures as well as its biggest army.
A recent U.S. Department of Defense report assessed that China had "probably already made overtures" to gain a "military logistics facility" in Vanuatu as well as the neighbouring Solomon Islands, with the overall goal "to support naval, air, and ground forces projection."
China will "likely use all means available to conduct influence operations to gain political favor among elites in host nations, while obfuscating the scale and scope of PRC political and military interests," the report says.
Vanuatu's government, which was hit for weeks starting in November by a cyberattack, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. China's embassy in Vanuatu and the Foreign Ministry in Beijing did not respond to requests for comment. The Solomon Islands has said there will never be a Chinese military base there – though China has confirmed the signing of a security agreement.
Strategic South Pacific
By some measures, Vanuatu is on the world's margins. It has about 65 inhabited islands, outcrops of volcanic rock and coral strung out hundreds of miles from neighbours such as Fiji, the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia that are scarcely less remote themselves. Its population of just over 300,000 is only two-thirds that of Staten Island. Most of Vanuatu's people earn a modest living from the land or sea.
But its strategic significance within the Pacific is not in doubt, as became plain during World War II.
Vanuatu's island of Espiritu Santo was home to the biggest American military base in the Pacific outside of Pearl Harbor.
It was from "Santo" that the U.S. pushed back against the Imperial Japanese Army in Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands to the northwest, fighting some of the most ferocious and decisive battles of the Pacific war. Tens of thousands of American, allied and Japanese soldiers died.
When peace came in 1945, the Allies set up a new security architecture for the Pacific consisting of three "island chains" with ports and airfields running north to south through the Pacific. The first includes Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, while the third takes in Hawaii. Many Pacific Island nations lie just outside the second.
A rising China feels constrained by those chains. In recent years, it has sought not only to break them—its claim over Taiwan is part of that effort—but to secure its place anywhere in the world that it sees fit.
"The Chinese look at the whole map and are thinking globally," said Grant Newsham, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. and a former U.S. diplomat and reserve head of intelligence for Marine Forces Pacific.
"They are building ports and airfields in Latin America on both sides, in Africa on both sides, and on the west side of the Indian Ocean. They've been looking around the Azores and Greenland and a bunch of other places," Newsham told Newsweek in an interview.
"The idea is to have a network of ports and airfields to which they have access, and some actual bases as well. In other words, they'll have the same infrastructure as the Americans and a military with global reach as well," Newsham said.
China's Overseas Base
Beijing opened its first—and hitherto only known—overseas People's Liberation Army military base by the port of Doraleh near Djibouti city, the capital of the Republic of Djibouti in east Africa, in August 2017.
Initially said by Beijing to be merely a "logistics facility" for sailors engaging in anti-piracy missions at the Horn of Africa, today it can house thousands of Chinese Marines and has underground facilities measuring over 27,000 square yards, according to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Other countries, including theU.S., France and Japan, have bases in Djibouti too.
"In the world of overseas basing, minor military facilities like communications posts or logistics facilities are relatively common," said Stephen Watts, a co-author with Cristina Garafola of a recent report on China's overseas base plans by Rand Corporation, a defence think tank headquartered in Santa Monica, California.
Major bases—like in Djibouti—with thousands of foreign uniformed military personnel are much more rare, Watts said.
"Today, only the United States operates many such bases. If China gets into the overseas basing game in a major way it is going to have significant ripple effects," Watts said. "In these circumstances, establishing new foreign military bases runs the risk of touching off conflicts that neither China nor the United States wants."
In the report, "China's Global Basing Ambitions," the Rand authors identify 24 possible locations for bases around the world, predicting that a "growing overseas PLA presence is not a matter of if, but when".
They said the most likely candidates to become China's next overseas base include Ream in Cambodia and Gwadar in Pakistan. Both countries are de facto allies of China and core parts of China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI), Beijing's geo-economic influence push. Both locations neighbour "investment zones" also built by China.
The situation of Cambodia's Ream naval base is instructive.
When news first broke in 2019 of an alleged agreement for China to use the facilities, both Cambodia and China denied any such deal and the Cambodians put on a press tour to show there were no Chinese there.
Both countries continue to deny that Ream will serve as a Chinese military base, but the Chinese cooperation is no longer any secret.
Chinese and Cambodian officials, including senior officers, posed for pictures at a groundbreaking ceremony there in June. Dredging has begun so that bigger naval vessels can use the port. A small facility built for the Cambodians by the U.S. was removed early on.
"China's leaders seek to fulfil the 'China Dream' of prosperity under the Communist Party of China (CCP) by securing markets and access to ensure China's continued economic growth," Garafola said by email. They are "shaping the security environment to China's advantage," Garafola said. "These goals are driving requirements for the PLA to increase its overseas presence."
Newsweek has reported how China's growing commercial global port acquisitions have led to visits by its naval ships, and how China fuses military and civilian use—something easily done when major parts of the economy are controlled by state-owned companies that must obey the CCP.
In the British colonial era, a well-known saying was that "trade follows the flag"—arguably China is turning that around with the flag following trade.
In its recently released 2022 China Military Power Report the U.S. Department of Defence reaches similar conclusions to the Rand authors, outlining 17 possible locations and stating baldly, "The PRC's military facility at Ream Naval Base in Cambodia will be the first PRC overseas base in the Indo-Pacific." Most locations were in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, but some were in the South Pacific, it said.
Indo-Pacific Tensions
Not just the U.S. but also Japan is intensely interested in China's overseas military activities.
In mid-December, it published a new National Defence Strategy outlining plans to double military spending in response to China's rise and sharply deepen its presence in the Western and South Pacific, throughout the Indo-Pacific and in Africa including at its own base in Djibouti.
Japan has territorial disputes with China in the East China Sea that have led to standoffs between PLA forces and Chinese coast guard vessels and Japan's military, the Self Defence Force. PLA ships now sail between Japanese islands to access the broader ocean beyond, in a development seen by Japanese authorities as provocative.
"The document reflects our actual recognition of the security issues surrounding Japan," a Japanese diplomat said, speaking with customary anonymity.
India is also watching closely. It too has contested borders with China, in the Himalayas, where deadly clashes take place. India has long-standing ties throughout the Indo-Pacific including in the South Pacific where people of Indian origin have lived for generations.
With a similarly sized population of about 1.4 billion, "India is the only country that can give China a run for its money on the ground in the South Pacific," said Cleo Paskal, a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. where she focuses on the Indo-Pacific region.
In August, the Yuan Wang 5, a Chinese navy satellite monitoring ship bristling with radar and high-tech monitoring equipment, docked in China-owned Hambantota port in Sri Lanka off the southern tip of India. The move sparked speculation that Hambantota, which was leased for 99 years to a Chinese state-owned company after Sri Lanka failed to repay its debt to China, may become a military or at least dual-use base of the PRC on India's doorstep.
A second visit to the Indo-Pacific by another PLA navy spy ship, the Yuan Wang 6, in November, at the same time as Indian military manoeuvres, renewed questions about China's intentions. However, the Yuan Wang 6 did not dock at Hambantota.
Retired Sri Lankan admiral Jayanath Colombage dismissed the suspicions that Hambantota could become a Chinese military base, but he nonetheless characterised the Yuan Wang 5's visit as "a message" from China to Sri Lanka and India.
"We tell the Chinese they may not antagonise the Indians. The visit of the space surveillance ship was symbolic, they could gather that information from the sea but India increasingly is dominating Sri Lankan security so they wanted to push back," Colombage said.
Indian military analysts are also watching what they suspect could become another potential Chinese foothold—the joint British-U.S. military base in Diego Garcia, the biggest island of the Chagos Archipelago, 1,000 miles south of India and part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.
In 2019, the United Nations' highest court, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, ruled that aspects of British administration of the territory were "unlawful". In November the British government said it would discuss its future with Mauritius, which claims the islands – and which in 2019 struck wide-ranging financial and trade agreements with China.
"The fear among those who keep an eye on the future threat posed by Chinese expansionism is a military base coming up in one of these islands, once the UK relinquishes its hold and the Archipelago comes under the control of the Mauritius government," commentator Abhinandan Mishra wrote in India's Sunday Guardian. "The reason for this fear is the economic dependence that Mauritius has on China."
Competing Interests
For sure, China is not alone in seeking influence in the vast South Pacific.
Other nations have an older interest and presence, including the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Stung by China's challenge, they are renewing influence efforts after years of relative neglect.
That is evidenced by the security agreement signed by Penny Wong, Australia's foreign minister, and Kalsakau, the Vanuatu prime minister. Announcing it, Wong pointedly said the agreement had been made public—in contrast to the one between the Solomon Islands and China.
U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris made a rare high-level visit to the region in July and told regional leaders that the islands "may not have received the diplomatic attention and support" that they deserve and that "we are going to change that".
This fall, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken hosted South Pacific Island leaders aiming to "build greater resilience" on an array of issues – crucially climate change which threatens the low-lying nations.
Some say the effort is too little, too late, and that a condescending, even colonial-style attitude, hampers efforts.
"Both Australia as well as New Zealand consider themselves to be the tutors and nannies of the island countries in the southeastern Indo-Pacific," Madhav Nalapat, professor of geopolitics at Manipal University in India and the editorial director of Sunday Guardian wrote, continuing, "Yet neither seems to have shown much concern about the way in which Communist China has displaced them in a majority of the island nations scattered throughout the region."
In an interview, Nalapat pointed out that over the last decade China had militarized the South China Sea, which it claims as do about half a dozen other Asian countries. Engaging in a slow-moving tactic known as "salami-slicing," it has won effective control there but was "given a pass" by other nations, Nalapat said. "Now they are moving into the lower reaches of the Pacific," Nalapat told Newsweek.
China's security agreement with the Solomon Islands has not been made public, but in April Chinese government spokesman Wang Wenbin confirmed it, saying it was a "normal exchange and cooperation between two sovereign and independent countries".
According to a leaked text of the draft the Solomons can "request" the PLA to send in police, armed police, military forces and navy ships. Beijing would have access to Solomons intelligence and the PLA would enjoy legal immunity on the ground.
A Chinese Visit
Back in Vanuatu in Chinese ambassador Li Minggang's whirlwind of meetings in mid-December, Li promised the new minister of youth and sports development Tomker Netvunei that China would support Vanuatu's youth: 60 percent of its population. He offered state-sponsored exchanges with young Chinese.
The next day, Li promised "new vigor" in the two countries' "strategic alignment".
Vanuatu has denied reaching a security agreement with China, but according to the Foreign Ministry in Beijing agreements were signed during a visit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in June, including in technology, the economy, oceans and healthcare, while the two countries "reached a broad consensus to increase mutual political trust and deepen strategic cooperation."
Wang's visit was one of 10 with Pacific nations—eight in person and two online—in another sign of how seriously Beijing is taking the region.
Areas for cooperation in the agreement with Vanuatu included a seabed survey and construction of a communication systems for internal security, according to Nalapat, the Indian geopolitics professor, who conducts granular research on security issues.
Full details of what has been agreed by Vanuatu and China have not been disclosed but China is making every effort to highlight its projects in Vanuatu, such as the highway that one of its state-owned companies is building on the second biggest island, Malekula.
"Want to be rich? First build a road!" Li said as he launched a new section on December 15.
China has cast a wide net in the region, leveraging extensive commercial investments and loans into security agreements which could act as a precursor for bases, said Newsham of the Center for Security Policy.
"The Chinese tend to put down a marker in a lot of places at once looking to see where they make some progress. Sort of like a guy who goes to the horse races and bets on every horse," Newsham said.
"The commercial comes first, and that builds political influence, and then the military is the third thing to happen. They'll often do things like provide 'police' equipment, training, and 'courses in the PRC' for local officials, sometimes security officials too, as a way to insinuate themselves," he said by email, adding: "The PRC has gone slowly but that's the long-term objective, though they swear it isn't."
In one demonstration of how China is gaining ground, at the end of November, police officials of six of the South Pacific Island countries visited by Wang Yi met online with one of China's most senior politicians—Wang Xiaohong, a leading member of the powerful Secretariat of the CCP who also serves as the Public Security minister, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
Called the "First China-Some Pacific Island Nations Ministerial Dialogue on Law Enforcement Capacity and Police Cooperation," it was co-hosted by security minister Wang and Anthony Veke, the police minister of Solomon Islands. In attendance were officials from Fiji, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tonga and Papua New Guinea, photographs showed. China hoped to "form more efficient ways of cooperation and enhance more professional law enforcement capacity so as to jointly protect the economic and social development of the region," Xinhua said.
Vanuatu is unlikely to be placing all its bets on China. Australian media cited Prime Minister Kalsakau—elected in November—as calling the new bilateral security agreement with Australia the "embodiment" of his country's relationship with Australia.
Yet for Nalapat, the professor of geopolitics, while a formal agreement like that "pleases the lawyers" it may not decide who runs things on the ground. Westerners often miss the full range of China's activities which tend to be "sub-critical" or under the radar, creating hard-to-spot but often comprehensive control, he said.
Illustrating that, China has spent years building up a local network of United Front organizations—including in Vanuatu, according to Geoff Wade, an Australian researcher. These have been accused of influence and interference operations elsewhere in the world and can serve as conduits for overseas policing by China's Public Security Bureau, as reported by Newsweek, as well as clandestine operations by China's Ministry of State Security, according to authors Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil.
While there is no U.S. embassy in Vanuatu itself—the accredited U.S. ambassador handles relations from Papua New Guinea—the Peace Corps has an office in the capital Port Vila.
Before his election, Kalsakau had expressed concern about Beijing's activities in his country. Those included an offer of a free laptop computer to every member of parliament—China built the Vanuatu parliament building—and an alleged lack of transparency around a $114 million loan to develop Luganville port on the island of Santo, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Luganville was the site of U.S. bases in World War II.
Kalsakau said at the time that Vanuatu's parliament had not been given access to the loan agreement to assess whether there were clauses that would let Beijing take over the port if Vanuatu defaulted. Kalsakau described that as "extraordinary."
Kalsakau also criticised how his predecessor, Charlot Salwai, had handled the relationship: "No one's questioning what the Chinese are getting out of this," he said.
Other infrastructure investments by China include a convention center, the national parliament and a sports stadium, and the prime minister's own office, according to China Daily. The China state-owned media added there were "no political strings attached" to its assistance.
On Dec. 21, China's ambassador Li undertook his fourth high-profile public engagement in a little over a week, further underlining China's support for Vanuatu with a medical supplies donation. China-Vanuatu relations "are better than ever before in history," Li said, according to the embassy.
References
Governments of Vanuatu and Australia: Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the Republic of Vanuatu Concerning Closer Security Relations
Ministry of National Defense of the People's Republic of China: China's National Defense in the New Era
Garafola, Cristina L., Stephen Watts, and Kristin J. Leuschner, China's Global Basing Ambitions: Defense Implications for the United States. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022.
U.S. Department of Defense: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
Peter Mattis, Matthew Brazil, "Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer"
Update 01/08/23, 8:34 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include the presence of the Chinese aircraft carrier near Guam
