On 12 September, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a ‘Proposal on supporting Fujian Province in exploring a new path for the integrated development across the Taiwan Strait’.

The PRC system produces a great many policy statements about Taiwan. In 2022, it released a white paper on the Taiwan question, only the third since 1992, and CCP Chairman Xi Jinping gave a major, and disastrously timed, Taiwan speech in 2019. Whether the new statement is consequential may only become clear in the months and years ahead, but it does contain some notable features.

The statement outlines institutional, social and governance integration between Taiwan and Fujian. It calls for relaxing Taiwanese residency rules in Fujian and proposes allowing Taiwanese to participate in non-government organisations concerned with issues like environmental protection and rural development, and even take up non-official roles in Fujian’s legal system.

The statement requires local governments to facilitate the operation of Taiwanese businesses by easing regulations and it describes the establishment of an ‘integrated development demonstration zone’.

It also emphasises Taiwan’s and Fujian’s shared cultural and historical connections, including the Minnan language, and notes the importance of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou as ancestral towns in Fujian for many Taiwanese.

In a broad sense, social and economic cross-strait convergence is a longstanding PRC theme. It is generally what Beijing means by ‘peaceful reunification’ and what it points to when it claims that ‘the tide of history’ is bringing Taiwan and China naturally together. Integrating Taiwan’s economy with Fujian’s has come up many times before, recently in the proposal for a Fujian export zone in 2009 and the trade zone established in 2015.

However, highlighting a shared Fujian and Taiwan identity is interesting coming from the very top of the PRC system.

Generally, Beijing places the status of Taiwan within historical national goals—what Xi calls the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation—and nationalist rhetoric about Taiwanese people as ‘flesh and blood’ Chinese.

The new statement focuses instead on the Minnan culture and ancestry of people who settled in Taiwan from the 17th century. These groups came mostly from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian with successive imperial regimes: the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then the exiled Ming loyalist kingdom of Koxinga and then the Qing empire. The Qing never had full control over Taiwan, and in 1895 ceded the whole island to Japan under the Treaty of Shimonseki. In the Japanese period, among many social and economic changes, Minnan cultural identities articulated into political and cultural movements for self-determination in the name of a singular Taiwanese identity.

The Republic of China, founded in 1912 under the Chinese Nationalists, or Kuomingtang (KMT), took over Taiwan in 1945 from Japan in the first attempt at national unification. This led to the anti–Chinese Nationalist uprising of 1947, crushed by Nationalist forces, followed by the arrival of the national government of the ROC and the flight of more than one million refugees from the advancing communists in 1949.

The establishment of the ROC created schisms in Taiwanese society between so-called mainlanders and the majority Taiwanese. Even though it’s no longer the febrile divide it once was, it can still be expressed in a north–south sentiment and in class identities. In the democracy era at the national level it is represented very approximately in the political bases of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the KMT.

Beijing has long considered party-to-party relations between the CCP and KMT as the only instrument of cross-strait dialogue; it has refused to engage with, or really even comprehend, Taiwan’s DPP government. Therefore, it is noteworthy that this statement speaks to the DPP indirectly through the party’s constituency.

But it does so in Beijing’s typically reductive and instrumental way and its policy measures are unlikely to mobilise authentic sentiment in Taiwan or Fujian. The questions of history, reconciliation and identity have been at the centre of Taiwan’s public life for decades. It is now 30 years since the newspaper United Daily News sent three well-known writers, Wang Hao-wei, Jian Zhen and Jiliang Hou, to Quanzhou and Zhangzhou to visit their lineage temple halls and record their experiences. They returned not with any commitment to the goals of the CCP but with thoughtful and varied reflections on ancestry, identity and the meaning of home.

Officially, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council dismissed the statement as ‘wishful thinking’ and in the week of its release, the People’s Liberation Army escalated its military activity around Taiwan, with 68 aircraft deployed at one point.

Ultimately, the statement shows that Taiwan policy work in Beijing consumes significant government resources and carries enormous political weight but is simultaneously constrained by the CCP’s ideological fixations. It matters that a statement comes from the very top of the PRC system that adjusts the boundaries of policy, but equally that it is a fractional shift beset by contradictory actions from other parts of the system. It goes nowhere near to addressing, or even understanding, Taiwan’s social and political reality and what would actually be required to achieve Beijing’s goals without tipping the region into a permanent crisis.

For Australia, continuing peace in the Taiwan Strait is a fundamental national interest, but Canberra has no means to effect any change to Beijing’s Taiwan policy. This is a very challenging foreign policy problem, but Australia but it can deepen its own Taiwan policy work to deliver more calibrated and agile responses to Beijing and communicate its interests from a more grounded and informed position.

Two weeks ago, it appeared that Vanuatu’s then prime minister, Ishmael Kalsakau, had survived a parliamentary no-confidence vote. It turned out to be simply a stay of execution.

Last week, the Pacific island nation’s parliament elected Sato Kilman as prime minister. It’s not clear yet whether this challenge was related to domestic issues, or whether it was another round in the competition for influence in the Pacific. Kalsakau had been heavily criticised for signing a security pact with Australia.

An immediate concern for Canberra is that during the political crisis, Beijing sent police personnel and equipment to train and build the capacity of Vanuatu’s police force. China’s ambassador, Li Minggang, stated that the Chinese police would ‘greatly enhance the ability of Vanuatu police to maintain social order’. But it’s likely that policing with ‘Chinese characteristics’—using police to defend a political regime—will prove difficult for the people of Vanuatu to stomach.

It does not align with the Pacific way of doing things. Neither does it align with decades of reform. It’s a setback for the quality of policing in Vanuatu. For Australia, with its long history of providing police capacity development, this represents a lost opportunity.

Policing in the Pacific is challenging. Large geographical areas, heterogeneous societies, violent crime, corruption and political instability can present logistic and policy issues. In many cases, police fill a hybrid role that merges law enforcement with national security, especially in nations like Vanuatu that lack a military or similar institutions. Police occupy a significant role with few counterbalances. Operational practices and organisational culture are therefore fundamental to producing just outcomes.

For Beijing, the solution to policing problems in Vanuatu and elsewhere in the region is relatively straightforward: increase the police force’s capacity to keep order and focus on protecting the state and its leaders. It’s a solution derived from China’s own experience and doctrines, superimposed this time on the Pacific island context. Such thinking is wrong-minded and doesn’t align with the historical development of the region’s police organisations.

Most of the Pacific’s police forces were established under colonial rule and were used by nations like the UK, France and Australia to control local populations. Police operations focused on dominating communities and being accountable to the regime, not the people. Sharp similarities can be drawn between these historical police organisations and those currently operating in China. Beijing’s approach could lead to a slide back towards unjust practices.

In the years since independence, police in some Pacific nations were involved in conflict and the suppression of democracy, which created deep multigenerational distrust between the people and the police. That legacy has been hard to shift.

Over recent decades, policing across the region has advanced significantly. Remnants of the old ways remain, but law enforcement in Pacific island countries has undergone substantial reform with a greater focus on democratic policing, prioritising protecting people rather than controlling them. Australian and New Zealand police have been on the front line of this reform.

Australia’s law enforcement community has deep and lasting multigenerational connections to policing in the Pacific, not just as donors but as partners. While we provide equipment, the relationship concerns more than a state’s security.

With such deep connections and alignment of purpose, why didn’t Australia offer to assist in Vanuatu? The answer is a lack of capacity. Already, federal, state and territory police services are heavily committed and the amount of reported crime far exceeds their capacity to respond. The world-leading organisation once used by the government for such missions, the Australian Federal Police’s International Deployment Group (IDG), no longer exists.

In 2004, the government created the group specifically for missions overseas. As the first of its kind  in the world, the IDG was tasked with helping to build policing capacity and respond to emergencies.

In March 2007, the IDG employed more than 600 people with approximately 250 Australia-based and 350 deployed overseas. Of the 350 on those operations, 100 officers were seconded from Australian state police and 13 came from Pacific island countries. The rest were AFP personnel. The 250 Australia-based personnel were primarily unsworn officers working in areas such as human resources, finance, contracts and logistics, capacity building and training.

Over the past decade, the IDG was reduced and then merged into the AFP’s international operations capability. This was largely in response to declining demand for peacekeeping contributions and was seen as a cost-saving measure.

With increased geopolitical competition in the region, Beijing is offering alternative policing capacity development to that provided by Australia and New Zealand. In addition to providing equipment to Vanuatu, China has provided equipment, policing advice and training to Solomon Islands.

Beijing offers a flawed policing model that Australia must contest.

To help the region avoid the securitisation or militarisation of police forces, a reinvigorated capacity is required. Australia needs a new IDG to respond to regional law enforcement issues and provide capacity development to support democratic policing. It needs to include officers from across the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. When not responding to regional crises, it could focus on ensuring that the region’s police reform continues towards democratic values and not authoritarian ones.

US President Joe Biden brought the leaders of allies Japan and South Korea to Camp David last month to discuss how to contain China and counter Russia’s influence—for example, in Africa’s Sahel region, which has recently experienced a string of coups d’état. Meanwhile, leaders from the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—gathered in Johannesburg to criticise the West’s dominance over the international institutions established after World War II. It was enough to give Cold War historians déjà vu.

The West’s main adversary today is China, not the Soviet Union, and the BRICS is no Warsaw Pact. But with the world entering a period of uncertainty following the demise of the post–Cold War order, the parallels are sufficient to convince many to turn to pre-1989 conceptual models to gain insight into what might come next. This includes the US and China, though each is betting on a different model.

Between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the two main forces defining the international order were ideological conflict, which split the world into two camps, and the quest for independence, which led to the proliferation of states, from 50 in 1945 to more than 150 in 1989–1991. While the two forces interacted, ideological conflict was dominant: struggles for independence often morphed into proxy wars, and countries were forced either to join a bloc or define themselves by their ‘non-alignment’.

The US seems to think a similar dynamic will dominate this time around. Faced with its first peer competitor since the fall of the Soviet Union, Washington has sought to rally its allies behind a strategy of ‘decoupling’ and ‘de-risking’—essentially an economic version of the Cold War policy of containment.

Whereas the US may be expecting Cold War II, shaped primarily by ideological polarisation, China seems to be betting on global fragmentation. Yes, it has tried to offer non-Western countries an alternative to Western-dominated institutions such as the G7 and the International Monetary Fund. But, in China’s view, the quest for sovereignty and independence is fundamentally incompatible with the formation of Cold War–style blocs.

Instead, Beijing expects a multipolar world. While China can’t win a battle against a US-led bloc, President Xi Jinping seems convinced that it can take its place as a great power in a fragmented global order.

Even America’s closest allies aren’t immune from the trend towards fragmentation, despite US leaders’ best efforts. Consider the recent Camp David summit. Though some media were quick to herald a ‘new cold war’, the participants’ interests diverged in several ways.

South Korea’s main focus remains North Korea, and the intelligence-sharing agreements and nuclear consultations announced after the summit were as much about signalling a resolve to push back against North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s regime as they were about countering China. Japan, for its part, is eager to avoid strategic escalation over Taiwan—a development that would threaten its economic model, which depends significantly on trade with China (including in semiconductor-related technology). And both South Korea and Japan are unhappy with the zeal with which America is pursuing its de-risking strategy.

As for the situation in the Sahel, it has all the features of a classic Cold War proxy standoff. Since Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali succumbed to military coups, the US and France have come to rely on Niger’s government as the last bastion of Western support in the region. Under the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary army Wagner Group gained substantial influence over Mali’s governance and practically ran the Central African Republic. The last thing the US and France want is for Wagner to gain another foothold in the region.

But now that Niger’s government, too, has been ousted by the military, American and French responses have diverged sharply, allowing the country’s new rulers to have their cake and eat it. The military junta has requested Wagner’s assistance to stave off the threat of intervention, but appears willing, at least for now, to allow the US to continue operating drone bases in the country.

Perhaps the biggest news, though, was the BRICS’ announcement that six countries—Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—would become full-fledged members by the beginning of next year. Pre-summit editorialising notwithstanding, China is under no illusion that countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE will join it in a bona fide anti-Western bloc; Beijing’s goals are more subtle.

Joining the BRICS increases countries’ freedom of action—for example, by increasing access to alternative sources of financing or, eventually, providing a genuine alternative to the US dollar for trade, investment and reserves. A world in which countries are not dependent on the West, but free to explore other options, serves China’s interests far better than a narrower, more loyal pro-China alliance ever could.

The picture that emerges is of a world in which the superpowers lack sufficient economic, military or ideological clout to force the rest of the world—in particular, the increasingly confident ‘middle powers’—to pick a side. From South Korea to Niger to the new BRICS members, countries can afford to advance their own goals and interests, rather than pledging fealty to the superpowers.

Contrary to how it may appear to many, not least in the US, the new cold war seems to be based not on the old logic of polarisation, but on a new logic of fragmentation. Judging by the growth of the BRICS, there’s no shortage of countries that find that new logic enticing.

Last week’s BRICS summit—bringing together the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—was touted as a pivotal event that could change the contours of international relations. Some compared it to the Bandung conference of 1955, which laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement, while others anticipated progress towards an alternate system of global governance fit for a multipolar world. But what the summit showed is that shared grievances don’t amount to a shared vision.

The bloc’s decision to admit six new members—Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—may seem to vindicate predictions that BRICS will remake the world order. After all, more than 40 countries were allegedly vying for membership, though a formal list was never disclosed.

But the decision to expand—like the push for de-dollarisation—amounts to picking low-hanging fruit. When it comes to the numerous thorny global challenges requiring urgent attention, the summit provided little in the way of solutions. And that can be expected to continue: ultimately, BRICS has always been more statement than substance, with each member using it as a platform to advance its own ends. A larger, even more heterogeneous membership will impede consensus on all matters of consequence.

Start with South Africa, the summit’s host. Not only was the country excluded from the G7 summit earlier this year, but it has also faced criticism for its supposedly neutral stance on the Ukraine war, and the United States has accused it of providing weapons and ammunition to Russia. In a recent speech, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa noted that ‘some of our detractors prefer overt support for their political and ideological choices’ and vowed not to be ‘drawn into a contest between global powers’.

Meanwhile, Ramaphosa has taken great pains to emphasise South Africa’s ties with China: the bilateral relationship, he recently noted, is ‘almost as old as our democracy’. But South Africa’s ‘largest trading partner’ isn’t China, as Ramaphosa claims, but the European Union, and South Africa trades more with the EU and the US than it does with the other BRICS members. For South Africa, BRICS is a convenient platform with which to boost its leadership in Africa and globally.

China has always had similar designs for BRICS: use it as a tool of geopolitical influence, including by advancing an alternative vision of global governance. To this end, this summit holds particular importance. Coming on the heels of the agreement among Japan, South Korea and the US to expand security and economic cooperation, the summit offered an opportunity for China to push its vision of BRICS as a full-scale alternative to the G7, with Chinese President Xi Jinping firmly in the driver’s seat.

BRICS members are likely to embrace some of China’s pet issues, such as countering ‘unilateral and protectionist measures’ like trade sanctions. And even in areas where they disagree, China might be able to use its economic weight—the country accounts for 70% of the bloc’s GDP—to sway them. It was, after all, the principal advocate for expanding the grouping, a move that the others, except Russia, resisted—until they didn’t.

The Kremlin, for its part, sees BRICS as a crucial means of countering Russia’s international isolation. Russian President Vladimir Putin—who participated virtually, in order to avoid being arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant—used his time in the spotlight to attempt to rally support for his Ukraine war narrative. More broadly, Russia—like China—hopes that BRICS can build alternatives to Western-led initiatives and alliances.

Not all BRICS members share that vision. India, which is locked in a prolonged border standoff with China, wants to represent the global south on the world stage, not least to bolster economic development. But it also wants to maintain an independent foreign policy. This is the same reason why India bristled at the notion of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—with Australia, Japan and the US—mimicking a military alliance. India’s fellow flawed democracy, Brazil, also seems to prefer genuine non-alignment and has ambitions to act as a diplomatic balancer.

Divergent visions and interests have impaired BRICS from the start. As Jim O’Neill—who coined the term (then BRICs) in 2001—wrote in 2021, beyond ‘creating the BRICS Bank, now known as the New Development Bank’ and meeting annually, ‘it is difficult to see what the group has done’. Not much has changed in the two years since, and a slew of new members will hardly contribute to the group’s coherence, let alone its effectiveness.

The latest summit might have featured important discussions on topics like the introduction of a common BRICS currency and the Black Sea grain deal, which Russia recently scuttled. But, as is customary with BRICS summits, the concluding communiqué offers plenty of aspirational rhetoric—including commitments to ‘inclusive multilateralism’ and ‘mutually accelerated growth’—but not much else. Criticising the global order is much easier than building a new one.

But even if this BRICS summit doesn’t sound the death knell of the current order, it does highlight just how widely shared grievances against it have become and how keen many countries are to challenge the status quo. The West must heed the warning signs.

Thousands of tonnes of grain stored in the Ukrainian port of Odessa were destined for some of the world’s hungriest people. But on 17 July, Russian President Vladimir Putin nixed Russia’s participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI), a UN- and Turkey-brokered agreement that promised safe passage of the grain through the Black Sea to global markets.

Russia may have a war interest in blocking Ukraine’s grain but its partner, China, is likely to push for a new grain deal. Russia’s actions clash with China’s longstanding practice of courting countries in the global south, and Beijing will hesitate to side with Russia in devastating their food security. How China brokers such a deal will reveal the limits of the Russia–China relationship.

Despite the war, Ukraine remains one of the world’s largest wheat suppliers. As of July, it provided 80% of the World Food Programme’s wheat, and the UN estimates that 64% of the grain Ukraine exported under the BSGI went to low- and middle-income countries. The International Monetary Fund forecasts a 10% to 15% increase in global grain prices from the deal’s cancellation, while wheat and corn futures have risen by 9% and 8%, respectively. Without a deal, the world’s poorest people will go hungry, increasing the risk of conflict, economic privation and disaster-driven migration.

There’s a clear incentive for China to involve itself in repairing the BSGI. Standing by Russia’s actions could destroy its decades-long diplomatic strategy of strengthening bilateral relations with developing countries. It has increased its engagement and leadership of the global south through forums such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the African Union, and promised infrastructure, aid and security through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Beijing has presented itself as a benevolent supporter of the global south’s rights to development, prosperity, peace and food security.

These efforts have been embedded in Chinese messaging for years. Every BRICS declaration for the last five years has referenced them as China has touted the grouping as an alternative to the Western-led multilateral system. Food security was further enshrined as a pillar of BRICS through the 2022 BRICS strategy on food security cooperation and the BRICS Forum on Agriculture and Rural Development.

China will also look for any opportunity to increase its influence and voice within the UN, a broker of the BSGI. Chinese state media has focused on China’s work in ‘establishing peace’ in Ukraine through the UN, through bilateral diplomacy and by reporting neutrally on the UN statement condemning the breakup of the deal. Qu Dongyu, a Chinese national, is director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and on 22 July, Geng Shuang, China’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, told a Security Council briefing that China wanted a resolution to the halting of the BSGI, noting that it was of great significance to ensuring global food supply. This suggests that China sees promoting food security as important to its international interests.

In China, Russia has a begrudging partner that seesaws between tacit support of the invasion and diplomatic messaging pitching itself as a peacemaker while noting how horrified it is at ‘NATO’s eastward expansion’. Its suspected direct support for Russia’s war is further enflaming tensions with the US but, more importantly for China, harming its reputation and economy. Several European countries that were previously strong BRI supporters have said they won’t attend China’s BRI forum later this year because Russian President Vladimir Putin will be there. China wants and needs friends, and Russia is making that tougher than it needs to be.

In addition, China knows that both the Western coalition and Russia’s proposed solutions to the impasse won’t adequately secure food supplies to the global south.

At its poorly attended Russia–Africa summit in late July , Moscow pledged free grain to a group of six African nations. This misses the point that the ability of poor countries to buy grain at reasonable prices is determined by supply, not the identity of the buyers and sellers. It also ignores that short-term deals with no promises of renewal are unlikely to calm markets. With only six nations offered the deal, Putin politicised a food security decision in a way that was unlikely to win him friends among economies that missed out.

NATO and Ukraine, on the other hand, favour a diplomatic solution to the problem and have proposed logistical workarounds to export Ukrainian grain west over land or south via the Danube delta. Although this would address grain supply, insurance premiums and the costs of transporting goods overland from zones under Russian shelling would limit its impact on prices—especially since the European Commission said in late July it has no budget to subsidise shipments.

Given all this, analysts should watch for increased Chinese messaging efforts bilaterally, multilaterally and through state media burnishing China’s credentials as a benevolent leader of the global south. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, announced at a BRICS ministerial meeting on national security on 25 July ‘four propositions’ for strengthening cooperation among the nations of the global south that could be a basis for this. There will likely be an uptick in bilateral meetings with affected countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as with Turkey to gain intelligence on, and perhaps shape, that country’s position on the BGSI. Crucially, analysts should watch for possible Chinese diplomatic efforts to convince Russia to sign back onto the deal or negotiate alternatives.

Ukraine’s grain harvest occurs in August and September, and a deal is needed urgently for this year’s grain to be exported. The BRICS summit in South Africa that begins on Tuesday would be an ideal opportunity for China to pressure Russia, and perhaps even to announce a deal. Its details will reveal the extent of China’s strength in its relationship with Russia and the health of its foreign affairs apparatus. Whatever happens, we should hope for the sake of the world’s poor that a deal is struck to let the grain flow.