For the Pacific, freedom of choice remains paramount. Beyond that, it’s hard to generalise. China’s deepening institutionalisation of security engagement has elicited many responses.
Kiribati, Vanuatu, and Solomon Islands have drawn closer to China in some respects, but alignment is never unconditional; witness Kiribati’s sharp criticism of Beijing in the wake of its 2024 ICBM test over the Pacific. Meanwhile Fiji has hedged. Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s government reviewed Fiji’s longstanding police cooperation with China in 2023 and elected to keep some training links while no longer permitting Chinese officers to be stationed inside the Fiji Police Force. Tuvalu and Nauru have accepted unusually strong Australian-backed security arrangements that narrow the scope for future Chinese engagement. The Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union, signed in late 2023, combines climate cooperation, a migration pathway, and a security guarantee, while requiring Tuvalu to mutually agree with Australia on any new security or defence partnership with another state. The Nauru–Australia Treaty, signed a year later—after Nauru’s diplomatic switch from Taiwan to China—similarly commits both sides to agree before any engagement in Nauru’s security, banking, and telecommunications sectors.
Extra-regional efforts like this, which aim to ‘block’ further Chinese inroads through legal means, are characteristic of the condition of ‘permanent contest’ that Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has claimed to now exist in the Pacific. Another characteristic is traditional partners’ efforts to match Chinese engagement on its home ground. The Pacific-designed, Australian-funded Pacific Policing Initiative, spun up in 2024, presents a direct competitor to China’s policing cooperation activities.
Pacific states have no interest in letting their region become a theatre for the great games of great powers. Yet there are practical limits to what they can do about it, and the core challenge they face is how to maximise the benefits of strategic competition while keeping that competition contained. For many PICs, the question has in the past been as simple as whether Chinese engagement produced roads, stadiums, training, financing, and diplomatic attention that traditional partners like Australia, New Zealand, and the United States had not always provided. The step-change in political interest and resource commitment from these traditional partners seen since about 2018 has made the question far less simple.
