Since 2016, China’s foreign policy toward the island nations of the South-West Pacific has evolved from a relationship led by diplomacy and development finance into a broader strategic posture in which policing cooperation plays a leading role. This doesn't reflect a change in China’s underlying interests in the region, which have remained broadly consistent. It reflects instead how the ways and means China uses to pursue its interests have become more ambitious, more visible, and more sophisticated during Xi Jinping's presidency.
China's regional interests
With specific exceptions—the resources sector in Papua New Guinea, distant-water tuna fishing inside Pacific EEZs, and emerging opportunities in seabed mining such as in Cook Islands—the Pacific is of little economic importance to Beijing, constituting a small fraction of its bilateral trade, outbound investment, and development aid. Yet precisely because Pacific economies are small in absolute terms, the potential for relatively small resource commitments to deliver outsize strategic returns is important—and for Beijing, there are two important returns to be had.
One is diplomatically isolating Taiwan and shoring up international support for Beijing’s interpretation of One China, as well as for Beijing’s policy positions in multilateral fora more generally. This has a long pedigree. China and Taiwan have historically used development financing to compete for diplomatic recognition from Pacific Island countries (PICs), and while concerns over ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ and dual-use infrastructure became prominent abroad in the period since 2016—anxieties over the Chinese-financed upgrade to Luganville Wharf in Vanuatu, completed 2017, are a representative example—Chinese development financing to the Pacific in fact peaked in 2016. It has since recalibrated away from large and risky infrastructure loans to smaller, more cautious grant-led activities and budget support to a select set of partners. Kiribati and Solomon Islands switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019, Nauru in 2024; millions in state-backed grants, loans, and infrastructure projects were quick to follow.
The second strategic aim is to problematise if not deny US and allied access to the south-west Pacific. Chinese strategists, drawing on the lessons of the Second World War, have long recognised the importance of PICs to American power projection in Asia. Chinese perceptions of maritime encirclement by the US create a strong incentive to build countervailing access and presence in PICs, with the intent to reduce or compromise their potential utility to US forces in the event of a major conflict in the western Pacific.
The role of the PLA Navy (PLA-N)
China has undertaken to regularise and normalise the presence of PLA vessels in Pacific states. These efforts have until recently foregrounded soft power and non-combat force elements. Goodwill visits by PLA-N hospital ships under the annual Harmonious Mission engagement and training ships such as the Qi Jiguang are characteristic of this approach. Yuan Wang-class telemetry vessels have made regular refuelling and resupply stops at Fiji and French Polynesia since the early 2010s to support the test and evaluation of China's space-based capabilities. Since an unusual and (so far) one-off ICBM test over Polynesia in 2024, regional access also has clear albeit limited relevance to China's nuclear force modernisation.
Only in the last few years has hard power become a visible part of the PLA’s regional footprint. In late 2024, Vanuatu was visited by a PLA-N destroyer and guided missile frigate—the first deployment of such surface combatants to the Pacific. 2025 saw unprecedented PLA-N live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea and the simultaneous passage of China’s two operational aircraft carriers beyond the First Island Chain.
The PLA-N’s role in regional engagement remains largely demonstrative. Because only three regional states (Fiji, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea) possess standing armed forces, the scope for direct military-to-military engagement is inherently limited, and in practice amounts mostly to donations of infrastructure and equipment. These have become sophisticated: the 2018 donation of a hydrographic vessel to the Republic of Fiji Navy, with crew training delivered by the PLA-N, is indicative. But they remain modest in the broader context of Chinese security engagement.
Policing cooperation at the centre
That broader context is one in which policing cooperation has taken centre-stage. Understandably so. With limited resources and, in many cases, chronic internal security problems, PICs have proven receptive to generous Chinese offers of police training, materiel, and infrastructure. A 2011 police-cooperation MoU with Fiji, signed while the military government was in power, enabled short-term attachments by Chinese officers in Fiji and Fijian officer training in China. This agreement set the tone for future arrangements with other regional states.
Many Pacific police forces now train in Chinese-built colleges (as in Samoa), operate Chinese-donated vehicles and equipment, and work alongside Chinese police liaison teams in Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Vanuatu. The China-Pacific Island Training Centre at Fujian Police College, opened 2024, represents the latest high-water mark in capacity-building. There is also an operational aspect to China’s engagement, which generally works through low-key, regular, embedded Chinese participation in ordinary community policing. Dramatic incidents like the joint Fijian-Chinese arrests of 77 Chinese nationals in Nadi in 2017, and their return to China under police guard, set a high-profile precedent for extraterritorial enforcement, but are relatively uncommon.
This pattern of deepening and regularising police cooperation has had significant new institutional architecture built around it in the post-COVID period. 2022 was a pivotal year: it saw the establishment of the Ministerial Dialogue on Police Capacity Building and Cooperation Between China and Pacific Island Countries, which has seen broad annual participation from across the region. 2022 also saw China’s flagship Global Security Initiative announced—a new overarching policy framework for engagement, aligning China’s pursuit of its regional interests with a worldwide effort to export Chinese norms of public security practice. While China’s bid for a region-wide multilateral ‘Common Development Vision’—including integrated security partnerships across multiple PICs—was rejected by Pacific states in 2022, key bilateral arrangements brokered around the same time continue to deliver results. Most notable here is the China-Solomon Islands security agreement--the full text of which remains undisclosed to the public--brokered in the wake of China’s provision of assistance to domestic security forces during the 2021 Honiara riots.
Here, at the vanguard of policing cooperation, hard-power strategy filters back in. The Solomon Islands deal, premised on Honiara's internal security needs, is understood to contain wording which would allow PLA-N warships to conduct ‘logistical replenishment’ in Solomon Islands subject to Honiara’s consent. Policing cooperation stands at the centre of an increasingly integrated approach to embedding Chinese presence and access across the Pacific.
