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The new Australian government has thought hard about the South Pacific and is already repairing the gap between Australian policy and South Pacific nations’ core issue of climate change. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has already provided this message and is about to do the other key thing Labor promised during the election campaign: turn up in person and engage with Pacific leaders.

The problem is that Beijing is moving faster and bigger in the South Pacific than Canberra may have expected and isn’t waiting to see what the Albanese government does.

The Sogavare–Beijing security pact has highly adverse strategic implications for Australia and the region, because it is set to bring the aggressive Chinese military—including its navy—into our near neighbourhood as a matter of routine. Making the South Pacific an arena of military tension like the South China Sea is a disturbing implication Solomons PM Manasseh Sogavare is bringing to everyone in our region.

But China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, has just put a much larger, nastier deal on the table for 10 Pacific states to sign up to on his visit to the region that’s happening in parallel to Wong’s. He’s using his unprecedented trip to the Pacific to put forward a region-wide deal with a five-year action plan. China’s plan gets right to the heart of how Pacific states are governed and controlled, and he would cement Chinese technologies and Chinese security agencies into the daily experiences of Pacific people.

It reportedly covers policing, security and communications cooperation, and involves China giving Pacific governments cybersecurity tools, police training and digital surveillance and communications systems to power their governments, economies and security regimes. As a further enticement, Beijing is also offering a China–Pacific islands free-trade agreement.

Wang’s eight-country Pacific visit and the proposed deal show the scale and speed of Beijing’s ambitions in the South Pacific. It’s a dystopian future the Chinese Communist Party is offering the people of the region. Backed by seemingly free but opaque concessional loans and packaged with lots of schmoozing and cash for Pacific political figures (as we’ve already seen in Solomon Islands), it’s got a gravitational attraction that audited investment and aid spending from Australia doesn’t.

The key judgement Pacific leaders must make is whether the highly intrusive authoritarian presence Beijing brings is worth the cash.

Leaders, like Sogavare, who sign their countries up to these deals risk separating themselves from their people. That’s what bringing Chinese state surveillance tools and Chinese authoritarian security practices and personnel into their communities will mean.

Hong Kong is a place leaders can look at to see security and surveillance assistance from Beijing in action. That once vibrant international city has become a silenced, controlled place just like any other city on the Chinese mainland. Sri Lanka shows the damage to an already vulnerable economy and political system from an over-indulgence in concessional loans.

Given the strategic ambition, speed and scale we are seeing from Beijing in our near neighbourhood, what Australia is offering in contrast is not enough. If we believe that, once we get the climate change policy right, just doing a bit more of what we’ve been doing for years will give us different results, we need to think again. What we have been doing has led us here.

And beyond climate change, the Labor government’s Pacific policy looks eerily similar to what former PM Scott Morrison was doing with his Pacific step-up—with close connections to the Gillard and Rudd government policies before that. In fact, for all the domestic noise about Morrison as an individual, he had invested a lot of personal time and political capital in his own engagement with Pacific leaders. Wong will be welcomed by Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama in Fiji. That’s because of who she is and what her government is offering, but it also builds on the relationship Morrison worked to develop in some important ways.

In both the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, we’ll see the limits of just doing a little more of the same—aid and engagement. Alignment with South Pacific governments and populations on climate change is a plus and is important given the rolling natural disasters we and our region are already facing. But we need a bigger imagination of a shared region with our Pacific neighbours, not incremental expansion of existing schemes like seasonal workers, limited extra numbers of permanent visas and student programs, and more defence training.

We don’t need to compete directly with Beijing on cash, corruption and schmoozing. We are already the largest aid provider to the Pacific and we can connect in a unique, invaluable way with our Pacific neighbours. That’s possible if our offer and ambition for our future with Pacific island states is a form of the hugely successful Closer Economic Relations and visa-free work and travel framework we have built between Australia and New Zealand.

The model between two proudly sovereign states of Australia and New Zealand is powerfully attractive. It has deepened economic, social, political and sporting connections between us and driven our prosperity and our security. Broadening this deal to the South Pacific can do the same for us and for our near neighbours.

Opening up Australia’s economy and labour market to South Pacific people through this big new deal will matter much more than any amount of aid money and any amount of rapidly built large infrastructure and debt from our friends in Beijing.

Developing, negotiating and delivering such an initiative will take all the skills Wong possesses and the buy-in of South Pacific leaders and people, along with the wider cabinet, parliament and public here in Australia. It’ll also take public clarity from our political leaders and parliament on the downsides for our near region from entanglement with an authoritarian Chinese state.

There is a strategic choice for Pacific leaders as they meet with State Councillor Wang and see lots more of Australian leaders. To say there’s not is dishonest. But the choice is between a dystopian future for their peoples by entangling their governments and societies into China’s overbearing and intrusive authoritarian security machinery, or forging a much more direct and integrated future with Australia and New Zealand that delivers prosperity and supports the freedoms that Pacific island peoples value.

The first step is our own government having the wisdom, ambition and urgency to build on—but go well beyond—the plan we have right now.

In this episode, Alex Bristow, deputy director of ASPI’s defence, strategy and national security program, speaks to Euan Graham, Shangri-La Dialogue senior fellow for Asia–Pacific security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies about the security pact between China and Solomon Islands. Their conversation considers China’s strategic objectives, the different responses to the agreement and its implications for security in the South Pacific.

In Solomon Islands and the Torres Strait and in every other state and territory of the Pacific, China’s government is sponsoring political interference activities that undermine democracy and weaken already fragile political systems. The Solomons’ signing of a security agreement with Beijing is the most public recent example.

A concerted response by Western democracies to deal with the challenges of the Chinese Communist Party’s increased grey-zone activities is underway, both in targeted Pacific nations and via external joint efforts. But, so far, local governments and civil society don’t appear to have been invited to join some of the most pertinent discussions on what to do about it.

In September 2018, the members of the Five Eyes intelligence-gathering network (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US) established a counter-foreign-interference group with France, Germany, Japan and other like-minded countries—essentially an informal expansion of Five Eyes, centred on foreign interference. The actions of China and, for some states, Russia are the main focus. In 2019, the Pacific Islands Forum states signed the Boe Declaration, which expanded the forum’s concept of security and highlighted foreign interference as a specific concern.

Identifying and countering foreign interference requires an internal, classified assessment by government agencies and a factual, public conversation on the activities and tactics involved. Yet Pacific island nations often lack the capacity to address these challenges. In some, notably Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, CCP political interference may have so weakened democracy that there appears to be next to no political will to examine China’s interference activities.

China’s broad approach to political interference makes extensive use of assets, disinformation, ‘useful idiots’ and proxies. Carried out by the united front system, a grouping of Chinese party and state agencies, the CCP’s official catch-all term for those activities is ‘united front work’. Such interference and influence work, however, is not limited to the united front; it can also involve entities from China’s propaganda, trade, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies. The CCP’s broad approach to espionage and foreign interference makes traditional counterintelligence difficult.

Targeting subnational entities is an effective way for the CCP to pursue foreign policy and military agendas that would be more readily thwarted at the national level, so united front work is often directed at local government and local authorities. The CCP calls this ‘using the local to surround the central; using the countryside to surround the cities’ (nongcun baowei chengshi; difang baowei zhongyang).

As a covert tool, the united front’s purpose and tactics are highly secret. Yet, because it requires coalition-building, many of its activities are quite visible and frequently involve public events where foreign economic and political elites endorse the CCP’s policies and agenda.

United front work is designed to corrode and corrupt democratic political systems, to weaken communities and divide them against each other, and to erode the critical voice of the media. It turns elites into clients of the CCP through financial and other inducements. It’s also used to develop asset relationships, to access sensitive technology and to promote the CCP’s foreign policy agenda.

The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (commonly known as the Friendship Association, or Youxie) manages subnational relationships and coordinates friendship associations and relations with pro-China elites in almost every country and territory. Even tiny Niue, population 1,644, has a China friendship association, with 15 members. It’s headed by a former premier and the secretary-general is Niue’s sole Chinese resident.

The Friendship Association is a hybrid party–state organisation with three ‘mothers-in-law’ (to use the argot of the CCP system): the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the CCP united front organisation, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; and the CCP’s International Liaison Department, which the party uses to conduct foreign policy discussions with foreign political parties.

The Friendship Association manages relations with countries that recognise Taiwan and encourages them to switch recognition. China currently has diplomatic relations with 12 of the 16 states in the Pacific Islands Forum. Only Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Tuvalu retain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and together they make up almost a third of its diplomatic partners. In August 2019, the Friendship Association hosted a delegation of Solomon Islands ministers and backbenchers to China, just weeks before the government suddenly switched recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

‘Friendship’ (youyi), ‘friendship relations’ (youhao guanxi) and ‘old friends of China’ (Zhongguo renmin de lao pengyou) are all CCP political terms. The terminology and approach come from the Soviet Union, which had a major influence on the CCP’s foreign affairs system.

The Pacific China Friendship Association connects 15 pro-China friendship associations in Pacific nations and territories. Some have only one or two members, but the organisation has high-level connections in China, and throughout the Pacific. Tonga’s Princess Royal Salote Mafile’o Pilolevu Tuita, the chair and 60% owner of satellite communications company Tongasat, is its patron. Tongasat controls six equatorial satellite slots and a single satellite. Several Chinese government corporations, and one linked to the Chinese military, use Tongasat slots.

The Pacific China Friendship Association’s founding president is Hiria Ottino, a China adviser to successive French Polynesian presidents. Anthony Leong is the association’s secretary-general while also leading the Australian association.

United front work is ‘all domain’ and involves a whole range of non-governmental groups from businesses to cultural groups in pursuit of CCP goals. So it’s essential to bring civil society, think tanks, academia and NGOs into the conversation about CCP political interference and grey-zone activities, to inform these sectors and to allow conversations to be held beyond the limitations of governmental bodies. An informed society is a resilient society.

Bringing the Pacific into the foreign interference conversation will be a visible demonstration that the US, and other partners in the Pacific, really are seeking to strengthen the region, and that their recent actions and policies are not a return to the exploitative patterns of the past.

In the Xi Jinping era, the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (commonly known as the Friendship Association, or Youxie) promotes the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic, political and economic vehicle driving towards a China-centred global order.

The Friendship Association is a hybrid party–state organisation with three ‘mothers-in-law’ (to use the argot of the Chinese Communist Party system): the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the CCP united front organisation, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; and the CCP’s International Liaison Department, which the party uses to conduct foreign policy discussions with foreign political parties.

The Pacific China Friendship Association is China’s main point of contact for rolling out the Belt and Road Initiative in the Southwest Pacific.

The Pacific ‘branch’ has been busy.

In 2018, at a meeting of friendship associations from the Americas and Oceania in Hainan, China, Tonga’s Princess Royal Salote Mafile’o Pilolevu Tuita proposed establishing a Pearl Maritime Road Initiative, extending the BRI into the Southwest Pacific.

Soon after that, all of Beijing’s Pacific island diplomatic partners signed agreements on the BRI, with infrastructure development the main theme. Some have already started BRI projects.

In 2019, Siamelie Latu, secretary-general of the Tonga China Friendship Association and a former Tongan ambassador to China, announced that the Pacific China Friendship Association was working on a feasibility study for a regional airline to connect all Pacific Islands Forum countries with China.

From Kiribati, to Vanuatu, to French Polynesia, China has repeatedly tried to gain access to militarily significant airfields and ports, all in the name of BRI. Beijing has established military cooperation relations with Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tonga, and provided police support to Vanuatu and Solomon Islands, frequently in combination with humanitarian aid activities. Just this week, China and Solomon Islands signed a security agreement, despite the protestations of the Australian and US governments.

China is rolling out the Digital Silk Road in the Pacific, using its Pacific embassies to set up ground stations for its Beidou satellite navigation system. Meanwhile, China makes use of commercial operations for Beidou-equipped reference stations in the Pacific. Ground stations and reference stations work together to provide centimetre-level accuracy for satellites. Beidou is China’s GPS equivalent, and it is now on a par with, if not better than, GPS. Like GPS, it’s a military technology, crucial for missile targeting and timing.

The CCP’s political interference and grey-zone activities aim to co-opt Oceanian political and economic elites and to access strategic information, sites and resources in the Southwest Pacific. The establishment of military installations in Oceania could substantially alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. It could cut off the Pacific island nations, Australia and New Zealand from the US and other partners, turning the region into a China-dominated vassal zone.

South Pacific leaders meet regularly to discuss collective security and geostrategic matters—in other words, joint concerns about China. However, their worries about this relationship are usually only hinted at and rarely made public, and their overriding priority tends to be development. China offers assistance with development projects but, unlike most donors, the loan must be paid back, with interest. The Cook Islands, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu all have crippling levels of debt to China.

Pacific island leaders tend to have a strong sense of history. Few would welcome dependency on China, or the Pacific turning into a Sinocentric order. Yet a degree of reactivity towards calls for vigilance about the CCP’s malign activities is usually couched in anti-European, anti-colonial rhetoric.

Given the continued presence of historic colonial powers in the region, it’s been easy for some to conflate concern about the real dangers of CCP political interference and grey-zone activities—when expressed by ‘Western’ actors—with neo-colonialism and calls of ‘whataboutism’.

This conflation plays into CCP narratives seeking to equate the party with the Chinese people, recasting any critique that it’s inherently racist. But imperial power and racism are by no means a monopoly of Western powers.

There’s real a danger that in their kneejerk response against Western colonialism, Pacific elites will embrace external domination in a new and more dangerous form. The air of schadenfreude that some segments of the Pacific elite display towards ‘traditional’ Pacific powers will be a short-lived pleasure if they can’t transcend this reactionism and recognise the need to plan a way forward in an era of dangerous strategic competition.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, the return of a more active role of the US, UK, Japan, India and the EU in the Pacific, and a resurgence of Australian, New Zealand and French presence and assistance, has been appreciated and welcomed by many Pacific governments. But Pacific leaders want to be treated as equals, not pawns in an international power play, and not as some nameless group of islands in a strategically important region. The US, EU and other partners need to take the time to better understand the individual countries of the Pacific, their histories and their concerns.

It’s especially important that Pacific nations not just be the subject of analysis about CCP political interference in the region. They should be drawn into the international conversation. Pacific civil society must be engaged in this work too, not just governments. In many of the Pacific states, elements within the government are already compromised, and they will not welcome discussions on CCP political interference. Further, CCP united front work is often comingled into corruption and organised crime, which has entangled many political and policy actors, making raising the issues even more difficult.

Pacific journalists also need more support so they can do the due diligence that will enable a factual, informed, depoliticised and public conversation about the CCP’s foreign interference activities in their respective states and territories.

Led by United Front Work Departments of Chinese Communist Party committees at each echelon of government, the united front system is a complex and opaque set of organisations designed to advance the CCP’s influence in industry and civil society. Within China, the united front system has several responsibilities, which range from repressing ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang to grooming members of China’s minor political parties to take up positions in government.

But in addition to its extensive activities inside the country, the united front system acts as a liaison and amplifier for many other official and unofficial Chinese organisations engaged in shaping international public opinion of China, monitoring and reporting on the activities of the Chinese diaspora, and serving as access points for foreign technology transfer.

Many Chinese government-affiliated agencies that are not directly part of the united front system also work to advance the CCP’s influence abroad. A recent study by Sinopsis demonstrates the involvement of entities from united front, propaganda, trade, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies in CCP influence work, indicating that it’s not centralised in one specific, dedicated organ.

This article, however, focuses narrowly on the united front system and its foreign-facing role, and highlights examples of its activities in Europe and North America.

One of the united front system’s most important tasks is to shape international public opinion of China—through both elite capture and public diplomacy. Sometimes, this influence is exercised overtly. In January 2022, for example, the United Kingdom’s security service warned that a solicitor affiliated with the united front system had donated £420,000 to a British MP. In other cases, united front affiliates have offered foreign politicians campaign contributions, engaged directly in lobbying and made significant investments in overseas media outlets.

More often, however, the united front system prefers to operate with some plausible deniability, by funding or co-opting interest groups designed to promote solidarity among members of the Chinese diaspora. In some cases, these organisations—such as trade guilds, student groups and ‘friendship associations’—engage in political activity designed to shield the CCP from criticism, or to protest policies unfavourable to the Chinese government. In the US and UK, for example, Chinese student and scholar associations have pressured university administrators to cancel visits from the Dalai Lama, counter-protest the CCP’s annexation of Hong Kong and censor artwork criticising the party’s actions in Xinjiang.

Public records confirm that, in some cases like that of the Hunan Overseas Friendship Association, these organisations are simply run and paid for by United Front Work Departments of the CCP; more often, however, the party acts to co-opt and politicise groups that operate independently, by offering media promotion and financial or logistical support from the local Chinese embassy or consulate.

Although many organisations affiliated with the united front system are not directly controlled by the CCP or Chinese government, they are best viewed as government-organised non-governmental organisations (GONGOs). These groups also aid in the united front system’s second major overseas mission—monitoring the activities of the Chinese diaspora and silencing dissidents based abroad. In 2020 and 2021, for example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Canadian Security Intelligence Service both warned that the Chinese government was using ‘state entities and non-state proxies’ to ‘threaten and intimidate’ activists and Chinese dissidents in the US and Canada. Under the guise of a global anti-corruption campaign called ‘Operation Fox Hunt’, Chinese authorities have succeeded in repatriating 680 individuals back to China, including by threatening their family members.

Not all the united front system’s overseas activities are concerned with the above-mentioned forms of malign influence. Perhaps least appreciated is its role in China’s quest to absorb foreign technology. Local budget documents clarify that the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology coordinates with united front–affiliated GONGOs to promote ‘scientific and technological cooperation and talent development’.

Moreover, as my colleagues and I wrote last year for the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, China’s ‘science and technology diplomats’ (科技外交官)—staff based in the science and technology directorates of Chinese embassies and consulates worldwide—often interface with elements of the united front system in the countries where they are stationed, and rely on their references to identify technology projects of strategic consequence to the Chinese government. Some group members consult remotely for state-owned tech companies in China, while others act as talent scouts and encourage Chinese living abroad to apply for state-run talent recruitment plans. Prior research identified such united front–affiliated groups operating in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the UK and across Scandinavia, though the number of target countries and active organisations increases each year.

On balance, the united front system represents a formidable tool to advance Chinese influence, power and access to technology abroad. Many of its activities are best described as extralegal or ‘grey zone’ operations and are difficult to mitigate at scale. Liberal democracies should coordinate and think of novel ways to blunt the impact of China’s influence operations and stymie unwanted technology outflows.