War in the South China Sea

Marines just seized a small island in the Pacific as training for a looming China fight

By Ryan Pickrell

Lance Cpl. Chris Pedroza, a rifleman with Alpha Company, Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, the "China Marines," firing an M240G medium machine gun during low-light live-fire machine-gun training at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam on March 11. 

Everything that is old may indeed be new again.
During World War II, U.S. Marines moved from island to island, famously fighting bloody battles against entrenched Japanese forces determined to dominate the Pacific. 

Now, as a potential conflict with China looms, the Marine Corps is dusting off this island-hopping strategy.
Last week, U.S. Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit led a series of simulated small island assaults in Japan, the Corps announced Thursday.

Marines with Charlie Company, Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, during a live-fire range as part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit's simulated Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations at Camp Schwab in Okinawa, Japan, on March 13.

The 31st MEU, supported by elements of the 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Marine Logistics Group and 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, members of the Air Force 353rd Special Operations Group, and Army soldiers with 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, practiced seizing Ie Shima Island.
After the Marines seized the island's airfield, U.S. troops quickly established a Forward Arming and Refueling Point. 

Additional force assets, such as Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters and C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft, then moved in to deliver extra firepower.
Rocket artillery units brought in aboard the C-130Js carried out simulated long-range precision fire missions while the stealth fighters conducted expeditionary strikes with precision guided munitions.
"This entire mission profile simulated the process of securing advanced footholds for follow-on forces to conduct further military operations, with rapid redeployment," the Corps said in a statement. The exercise was part of the Corps' ongoing efforts to refine the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept, which is the modern version of the WWII-era island-hopping strategy.

A Marine with Charlie Company, Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, bounding toward a defensive position during a live-fire range as part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit's simulated Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations at Camp Schwab.

"It is critical for us to be able to project power in the context of China, and one of the traditional missions of the Marine Corps is seizing advanced bases," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. 

"If you look at the island chains and so forth in the Pacific as platforms from which we can project power, that would be a historical mission for the Marine Corps and one that is very relevant in a China scenario."
As the National Defense Strategy makes clear, the U.S. military is facing greater challenges from near-peer threats in an age of renewed great power competition with rival powers. 

In the Pacific, China is establishing military outposts on occupied islands in the South China Sea while pursuing power projection capabilities designed to extend its reach beyond the first island chain.
With the U.S. and Chinese militaries operating in close proximity, often with conflicting objectives, there have been confrontations. 

A close U.S. ally recently expressed concern that the two powers might one day find themselves in a shooting war in the South China Sea.

Marines with Charlie Company, Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, engaging targets while assaulting a defensive position during a live-fire range as part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit's simulated Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations at Camp Schwab.

"We continue to seek areas to cooperate with China where we can, but where we can't we're prepared to certainly protect both U.S. and allied interest in the region," Director of the Joint Staff Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said at the Pentagon last May.
"The United States military has had a lot of experience in the Western Pacific taking down small islands," he said when asked if the U.S. has the ability to blow apart China's outposts in the South China Sea. 

"We had a lot of experience in the Second World War taking down small islands that are isolated, so that's a core competency of the U.S. military that we've done before."
It's just a "historical fact," he explained.

Rogue China

China using 'pay-day loan diplomacy' in the Pacific: U.S. diplomat

By Colin Packham

U.S. Ambassador to Australia Arthur Culvahouse

SYDNEY -- China’s is using “pay-day loan diplomacy” to exert influence in the Pacific, the new U.S. ambassador to Australia said on Wednesday.
The United States and its regional allies have been battling China for greater influence in the Pacific -- a region that has votes at international forums like the United Nations and controls vast swathes of a resource-rich ocean.
The geopolitical competition has seen both sides increase foreign aid to the region in recent months, which the West says is needed to prevent the Pacific falling into financial distress and becoming susceptible to diplomatic pressure from Beijing.
Late last year U.S. Vice President Mike Pence accused China of ensnaring tiny island nations in foreign aid “debt traps”.
New U.S. Ambassador to Australia Arthur Culvahouse said Pence’s criticism was not strong enough.
“I would use stronger language -- I would use payday loan diplomacy,” Culvahouse told reporters in Canberra after presenting his diplomatic credentials to Australia’s Governor-General.
“The money looks attractive and easy upfront, but you better read the fine print,” he said.
Lenders of pay-day loans typically charge a higher interest rate.
The Pacific is also a venue for diplomatic competition between China and self-ruled Taiwan, claimed by Beijing as "sacred" Chinese territory. 

Taiwan’s president will visit three of its diplomatic allies in the Pacific next week.
The arrival of Culvahouse, the first U.S. ambassador to Australia in more than two years, comes at time of bilateral tensions between Canberra and Beijing.
In 2017, then Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull accused China of meddling in domestic affairs. 

In 2018 Canberra banned foreign-government linked companies from investing in a nascent 5G network, effectively blocking China’s Huawei Technologies.

China denied the allegations and has called on Australia to shed its “Cold War” mentality.
Analysts believe Beijing may now be using trade to punish Canberra for its criticism.
Sources at Chinese ports told Reuters last month that Australian coal imports are facing longer waiting times to clear customs than other supplies, and the northern port of Dalian was halting Australian coal shipments.

Sina Delenda Est

With Ships and Missiles, China Is Ready to Challenge U.S. Navy in Pacific
By Steven Lee Myers

China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, at sea in April. First launched by the Soviet Union in 1988, it was sold for $20 million to a Chinese investor who said it would become a floating casino, though he was in reality acting on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

DALIAN, China — In April, on the 69th anniversary of the founding of China’s Navy, the country’s first domestically built aircraft carrier stirred from its berth in the port city of Dalian on the Bohai Sea, tethered to tugboats for a test of its seaworthiness.
“China’s first homegrown aircraft carrier just moved a bit, and the United States, Japan and India squirmed,” a military news website crowed, referring to the three nations China views as its main rivals.
Not long ago, such boasts would have been dismissed as the bravado of a second-string military. 

No longer.
A modernization program focused on naval and missile forces has shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in ways the United States and its allies are only beginning to digest.
While China lags in projecting firepower on a global scale, it can now challenge American military supremacy in the places that matter most to it: the waters around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.
That means a growing section of the Pacific Ocean — where the United States has operated unchallenged since the naval battles of World War II — is once again contested territory, with Chinese warships and aircraft regularly bumping up against those of the United States and its allies.
To prevail in these waters, according to officials and analysts who scrutinize Chinese military developments, China does not need a military that can defeat the United States outright but merely one that can make intervention in the region too costly for Washington to contemplate. 

Many analysts say Beijing has already achieved that goal.
To do so, it has developed “anti-access” capabilities that use radar, satellites and missiles to neutralize the decisive edge that America’s powerful aircraft carrier strike groups have enjoyed. 

It is also rapidly expanding its naval forces with the goal of deploying a “blue water” navy that would allow it to defend its growing interests beyond its coastal waters.
“China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States,” the new commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip S. Davidson, acknowledged in written remarks submitted during his Senate confirmation process in March.
He described China as a “peer competitor” gaining on the United States not by matching its forces weapon by weapon but by building critical “asymmetrical capabilities,” including with anti-ship missiles and in submarine warfare. 

“There is no guarantee that the United States would win a future conflict with China,” he concluded.
Last year, the Chinese Navy became the world’s largest, with more warships and submarines than the United States, and it continues to build new ships at a stunning rate. 

Though the American fleet remains superior qualitatively, it is spread much thinner.
“The task of building a powerful navy has never been as urgent as it is today,” Xi Jinping declared in April as he presided over a naval procession off the southern Chinese island of Hainan that opened exercises involving 48 ships and submarines. 

The Ministry of National Defense said they were the largest since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.
Even as the United States wages a trade war against China, Chinese warships and aircraft have picked up the pace of operations in the waters off Japan, Taiwan, and the islands, shoals and reefs it has claimed in the South China Sea over the objections of Vietnam and the Philippines.
When two American warships — the Higgins, a destroyer, and the Antietam, a cruiser — sailed within a few miles of disputed islands in the Paracels in May, Chinese vessels rushed to challenge what Beijing later denounced as “a provocative act.” 

China did the same to three Australian ships passing through the South China Sea in April.
Only three years ago, Xi stood beside President Barack Obama in the Rose Garden and promised not to militarize artificial islands it has built farther south in the Spratlys archipelago. 

Chinese officials have since acknowledged deploying missiles there, but argue that they are necessary because of American “incursions” in Chinese waters.
When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited Beijing in June, Xi bluntly warned him that China would not yield “even one inch” of territory it claims as its own.
Ballistic missiles designed to strike ships on display at a military parade in Beijing in 2015.

‘Anti-Access/Area Denial’
China’s naval expansion began in 2000 but accelerated sharply after Xi took command in 2013. 

He has drastically shifted the military’s focus to naval as well as air and strategic rocket forces, while purging commanders accused of corruption and cutting the traditional land forces.
The People’s Liberation Army — the bedrock of Communist power since the revolution — has actually shrunk in order to free up resources for a more modern fighting force. 

Since 2015, the army has cut 300,000 enlisted soldiers and officers, paring the military to two million personnel over all, compared with 1.4 million in the United States.
While every branch of China’s armed forces lags behind the United States’ in firepower and experience, China has made significant gains in asymmetrical weaponry to blunt America’s advantages. 

One focus has been in what American military planners call A2/AD, for “anti-access/area denial,” or what the Chinese call “counter-intervention.”
A centerpiece of this strategy is an arsenal of high-speed ballistic missiles designed to strike moving ships. 

The latest versions, the DF-21D and, since 2016, the DF-26, are popularly known as “carrier killers,” since they can threaten the most powerful vessels in the American fleet long before they get close to China.
The DF-26, which made its debut in a military parade in Beijing in 2015 and was tested in the Bohai Sea last year, has a range that would allow it to menace ships and bases as far away as Guam, according to the latest Pentagon report on the Chinese military, released this month. 

These missiles are almost impossible to detect and intercept, and are directed at moving targets by an increasingly sophisticated Chinese network of radar and satellites.
China announced in April that the DF-26 had entered service. 

State television showed rocket launchers carrying 22 of them, though the number deployed now is unknown. 

A brigade equipped with them is reported to be based in Henan Province, in central China.
Such missiles pose a particular challenge to American commanders because neutralizing them might require an attack deep inside Chinese territory, which would be a major escalation.
The American Navy has never faced such a threat before, the Congressional Research Office warned in a report in May, adding that some analysts consider the missiles “game changing.”
The “carrier killers” have been supplemented by the deployment this year of missiles in the South China Sea. 

The weaponry includes the new YJ-12B anti-ship cruise missile, which puts most of the waters between the Philippines and Vietnam in range.
The Chinese military is preparing for a limited military conflict from the sea, according to a 2013 paper in a journal called The Science of Military Strategy.
Lyle Morris, an analyst with the RAND Corporation, said that China’s deployment of missiles in the disputed Paracel and Spratly Islands “will dramatically change how the U.S. military operates” across Asia and the Pacific.
The best American response, he added, would be “to find new and innovative methods” of deploying ships outside their range. 

Given the longer range of the ballistic missiles, however, that is not possible “in most contingencies” the American Navy would be likely to face in Asia.

Soldiers with the People’s Liberation Army Navy patrolling Woody Island in the disputed Paracel archipelago in 2016.

Blue-Water Ambitions
The aircraft carrier that put to sea in April for its first trials is China’s second, but the first built domestically. 

It is the most prominent manifestation of a modernization project meant to propel the country into the upper tier of military powers. 

Only the United States, with 11 nuclear-powered carriers, operates more than one.
A third Chinese carrier is under construction in a port near Shanghai. 

Analysts believe China will eventually build five or six.
The Chinese military, traditionally focused on repelling a land invasion, increasingly aims to project power into the “blue waters” of the world to protect China’s expanding economic and diplomatic interests, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
The carriers attract the most attention but China’s naval expansion has been far broader. 

The Chinese Navy — officially the People’s Liberation Army Navy — has built more than 100 warships and submarines in the last decade alone, more than the entire naval fleets of all but a handful of nations.
Last year, China also introduced the first of a new class of a heavy cruisers — or “super destroyers” — that, according to the American Office of Naval Intelligence, “are comparable in many respects to most modern Western warships.” 

Two more were launched from dry dock in Dalian in July, the state media reported.
Last year, China counted 317 warships and submarines in active service, compared with 283 in the United States Navy, which has been essentially unrivaled in the open seas since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Unlike the Soviet Union, which drained its coffers during the Cold War arms race, military spending in China is a manageable percentage of a growing economy. 

Beijing’s defense budget now ranks second only to the United States: $228 billion to $610 billion, according to estimates by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
The roots of China’s focus on sea power and “area denial” can be traced to what many Chinese viewed as humiliation in 1995 and 1996. 

When Taiwan moved to hold its first democratic elections, China fired missiles near the island, prompting President Bill Clinton to dispatch two aircraft carriers to the region.
“We avoided the sea, took it as a moat and a joyful little pond to the Middle Kingdom,” a naval analyst, Chen Guoqiang, wrote recently in the official Navy newspaper. 

“So not only did we lose all the advantages of the sea but also our territories became the prey of the imperialist powers.”
China’s naval buildup since then has been remarkable. 

In 1995, China had only three submarines. 

It now has nearly 60 and plans to expand to nearly 80, according to a report last month by the United States Congressional Research Service.
As it has in its civilian economy, China has bought or absorbed technologies from the rest of the world, in some cases illicitly. 

Much of its military hardware is of Soviet origin or modeled on antiquated Soviet designs, but with each new wave of production, analysts say, China is deploying more advanced capabilities.
China’s first aircraft carrier was originally launched by the Soviet Union in 1988 and left to rust when the nation collapsed three years later. 

Newly independent Ukraine sold it for $20 million to a Chinese investor who claimed it would become a floating casino, though he was really acting on behalf of Beijing, which refurbished the vessel and named it the Liaoning.
The second aircraft carrier — as yet unnamed — is largely based on the Liaoning’s designs, but is reported to have enhanced technology. 

In February, the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation disclosed that it has plans to build nuclear-powered carriers, which have far greater endurance than ones that require refueling stops.
China’s military has encountered some growing pains. 

It is hampered by corruption, which Xi has vowed to wipe out, and a lack of combat experience. 

As a fighting force, it remains untested by combat.
In January, it was embarrassed when one of its most advanced submarines was detected as it neared Japanese islands known as the Senkaku. 

The attack submarine should never have been spotted.
The second aircraft carrier also appears to have experienced hiccups. 

Its first sea trials were announced in April and then inexplicably delayed. 

Not long after the trials went ahead in May, the general manager of China Shipbuilding was placed under investigation for “serious violation of laws and discipline,” the official Xinhua news agency reported, without elaborating.

Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea. The deployment of missiles on three man-made reefs in the disputed Spratly Islands — Subi, Mischief and Fiery Cross — has prompted protests from the White House.

Defending Its Claims
China’s military advances have nonetheless emboldened the country’s leadership.
The state media declared the carrier Liaoning “combat ready” in the summer after it moved with six other warships through the Miyako Strait that splits Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and conducted its first flight operations in the Pacific.
The Liaoning’s battle group now routinely circles Taiwan. 

So do Chinese fighter jets and bombers.
China’s new J-20 stealth fighter conducted its first training mission at sea in May, while its strategic bomber, the H-6, landed for the first time on Woody Island in the Paracels. 

From the airfield there or from those in the Spratly Islands, the bombers could strike all of Southeast Asia.
The recent Pentagon report noted that H-6 flights in the Pacific were intended to demonstrate the ability to strike American bases in Japan and South Korea, and as far away as Guam.
“Competition is the American way of seeing it,” said Li Jie, an analyst with the Chinese Naval Research Institute in Beijing. 

“China is simply protecting its rights and its interests in the Pacific.”
And China’s interests are expanding.
In 2017, it opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, saying that it will be used to support its participation in multinational antipiracy patrols off Somalia.
It now appears to be planning to acquire access to a network of ports and bases throughout the Indian Ocean. 

Though ostensibly commercial, these projects have laid the groundwork for a necklace of refueling and resupply arrangements that will “facilitate Beijing’s long-range naval operations,” according to a new report by C4ADS, a research organization in Washington.
“They soon will be able, for example, to send a squadron of ships to somewhere, say in Africa, and have all the capabilities to make a landing in force to protect Chinese assets,” said Vassily Kashin, an expert with the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
The need was driven home in 2015 when Chinese warships evacuated 629 Chinese and 279 foreigners from Yemen when the country’s civil war raged in Aden, a southern port city.
One of the frigates involved in the rescue, the Linyi, was featured in a patriotic blockbuster film, “Operation Red Sea.”
“The Chinese are going to be more present,” Mr. Kashin added, “and everyone has to get used to it.”

Fighter jets on the Liaoning in the East China Sea in April.

Chinese Aggressions

Chinese lasers targeting US aircraft over the Pacific
By Euan McKirdy

A US Navy FA-18 Super Hornet, seen from a KC-135 air refueling tanker during a 2010 US-Japan military exercise above the South China Sea.

Lasers have been used to target US aerial operations in the Pacific, with 20 incidents recorded since September of last year, according to a US military official.
The military spokeswoman, who requested not to be named, told CNN that lasers had been flashed at US aircraft, and that the sources of these flashes are suspected to be Chinese.
The latest incident occurred within the last two weeks, the official said.
None of the incidents have resulted in any medical complaints or injuries, the spokeswoman said. 

The attacks appear similar to incidents that occurred in the East African country of Djibouti earlier in the year, when US military airmen were injured by lasers which originated from a nearby Chinese military base.

The latest round of suspected laser attacks have all occurred in and around the East China Sea, which is home to Japanese island chains, the Senkakus.
The area's waters are near heavy-traffic shipping lanes, and are used regularly by both Japanese and Chinese military and civilian ships, as well as a semi-autonomous "maritime militia" which defends China's territorial interests in the region.
The Wall Street Journal reported that military officials don't necessarily believe the attacks were initiated by official Chinese military sources, but would not rule out that those responsible were acting on behalf of the Chinese government.
Aviation Week & Space Technology, an industry publication, quoted a spokeswoman for the US Marines who said that the attacks had originated "from a range of different sources, both ashore and from fishing vessels."
As with Chinese territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, tensions to the north have flashed numerous times in recent years over the Senkaku islands, including face-offs between Japanese and Chinese air and naval forces that have been termed dangerous by both sides.
In February this year, US Defense Secretary James Mattis reaffirmed the US' treaty commitment to defending Japan and its disputed islands.

Similar incidents
The incidents in the region over the past several months echo similar tactics the Pentagon says were carried out by the Chinese military earlier this year, when personnel at the country's first overseas military base in Djibouti used military-grade lasers to interfere with US military aircraft from a nearby American base.
The official CNN spoke to would not confirm that the lasers used in the Pacific were military- or commercial-grade, but even off-the-shelf laser pointers can cause a hazard to pilots. 

Aiming a laser beam at an aircraft in the US is a federal crime.
In the Djibouti incident, the activity resulted in injuries to US pilots, and prompted the US to launch a formal diplomatic protest with Beijing, military officials told CNN.
Chinese state media denied the original claims by US defense officials, accusing them of "cooking up phony laser stories."
Following the East Africa incident, a US defense official told CNN that the military also believed the Chinese were using similar lasers to interfere with US aircraft in the South China Sea.
A 2015 report in the official Chinese military newspaper the PLA Daily noted that "China has been updating its home-made blinding laser weapons in recent years to meet the needs of different combat operations."
According to the report, Chinese forces have access to at least four different types of portable blinding laser weapons, all of which look like oversized modified assault rifles.
Both China and the US are signatories to the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, which prohibits the use of blinding laser weapons as a means or method of warfare.

Sonic attacks
The purported laser attacks come just after a number of US government personnel in China were sent back to the United States for further health screenings after concerns over reports of mysterious acoustic incidents similar to "sonic attacks" first encountered by diplomats at the US' embassy in Cuba.
The screenings came after a US government employee in Guangzhou fell ill in early 2018 after reporting "abnormal sensations of sound and pressure" which resulted in a mild brain injury.

How China tried to shut down Australian media coverage of its debt-trap diplomacy in the Pacific

• A Chinese Embassy official yelled and made demands of an Australian producer to try and censor an episode of "60 Minutes" that would be critical of China.
• The Chinese Communist Party regularly interferes with foreign Chinese-language media, but targeting English-language media is rare.
• The "60 Minutes" report covered China's debt-trap diplomacy in the Pacific, including a loan to Vanuatu for a wharf which could be used by the Chinese military.
• Vanuatu's foreign minister said China expects support at the UN in return for financing.

By Tara Francis Chan

Five days before Australia's "60 Minutes" program aired a report on China's dept-trap diplomacy in the Pacific region, the show received an unusually aggressive phone call.
"Take this down and take it to your leaders!" the voice on the other end of the line shouted.
It was the voice of Saixian Cao, the head of media affairs at China's embassy in Canberra.
According to a report from "60 Minutes" journalist Charles Wooley, she was yelling at the show's executive producer, Kirsty Thomson, after failing to gain any traction with higher-ups at the network.
"You will listen," Cao reportedly shouted into the phone.
"There must be no more misconduct in the future."
Thomson and colleagues had been working on a story about China's growing influence over Pacific nations, by using exorbitant loans for infrastructure projects that leave countries indebted to Beijing, both politically and financially.
The story largely focused on China's projects in the island nation of Vanuatu — where the show's team had also recorded footage of the Chinese embassy — and the official was trying everything to kill the story.
"You will not use that footage," Cao demanded.
The incident highlights how China is used to dealing with — and controlling — the Australian media.
Chen Yonglin, a former diplomat at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney who defected in 2005, told Business Insider that this happens frequently with local Chinese language media in Australia and that, ultimately, the incident in Australia would have originated in Beijing.
"The instruction to pressure Channel 9 is from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry obviously believed it is necessary. The representation is to warn Channel 9 and other people not to act like that again," Chen said.
Chen also described how monitoring, and attempting to censor media coverage, is a regular occurrence.
"If it's a local Chinese-language media, the Chinese Embassy/Consulate official should call the Editor-in-Chief directly with serious warning and certain sanctions against this media may follow. For less serious cases, China may request to publish a statement from its Embassy."
Business Insider previously reported how diplomats at a Chinese consulate in Australia invited an advertiser in for an hours-long "tea chat" to convince them to stop funding independent Chinese-language journalism.
Another advertiser had Chinese intelligence and security agents physically camp out in his Beijing office to strip funds from critical media.
And last year, two South Korean journalists who followed President Moon Jae-in's trip to Beijing were physically beaten and severely injured by more than a dozen security guards.
Despite the lengths China often goes to influence and outright interfere with foreign media, Chen believes Cao could face repurcussions for crossing a line.
"All Chinese language media are very obedient. Shouting at local Chinese media is not a surprise, but [shouting] at one of the mainstream English media is rare. Saixian Cao could be punished for her behaviour such as being given an internal warning," Chen said.

China gave Vanuatu a loan 360% more expensive than other options

Part of the "60 Minutes" episode highlighted a Chinese-built wharf in Vanuatu that has gained international attention.
Earlier this year reports emerged that China discussed setting up a military presence in Vanuatu, a claim both countries denied but which Australian defense officials confirmed.
And the country's newly built Luganville wharf, which was funded by China and seems more suited to navy vessels than cruise ships, would be crucial to this.
The fear is that Vanuatu, like many countries before it, accepted a loan with exorbitant interest rates and may need to hand over the wharf to China if it defaults, a practice called debt-trap diplomacy.
The country can't even afford the cleaning or electricity bill for a $19 million, Chinese-built convention center.
Yet Vanuatu took an $85 million loan from the Export-Import Bank of China for the Luganville wharf, which is topped with a 2% interest rate, that needs to be repaid within 20 years. 
But a similar wharf project in Port Vila, which was funded with a Japanese loan only required a 0.55% interest rate and gave the country twice as long to repay it.
Business Insider contacted Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu with questions about these loans last week but has not yet received a response.
When Sri Lanka defaulted on its loan for a Chinese-built port, it gave state-owned China Merchants Group a 99-year lease which experts believe was a strategic acquisition in the region.
China expects supporting votes at the UN in return.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi speaks at a Security Council meeting during the 72nd United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly at U.N. headquarters on September 20, 2017 in New York City.

Not only are there concerns that China is trying buy access to facilities and sea routes throughout the Pacific, Vanuatu's foreign minister confirmed Beijing's influx of cash has very, and immediate, global consequences.
Asked by "60 Minutes" whether he thinks China is trying to buy votes at the UN, Regenvanu answered in the affirmative.
"What so you think if they can pump money in here, they'll get support at the UN?" the reporter asked.
"Yes," Regenvanu answered.
"I'm sorry, that's bribery."
"Uh, maybe, that's diplomacy," Regenvanu said.
Australia has been trying to counter China's attempts at foreign interference both locally and in the Pacific, with new and expanded laws currently before parliament.
Last month, an Australian MP and chair of parliament's intelligence and security committee publicly identified Chau Chak Wing, a Chinese-born, Australian billionaire and political donor as having funded a $200,000 bribe to a former UN General Assembly president in order to advance Chinese interests.





Beijing henchman Chau Chak Wing

Australia lashes out at China’s useless Pacific projects

Canberra accuses Beijing of building roads to nowhere in developing nations 
By Mark Wembridge

Chinese labourers work on a project in East Timor 

Australia has launched a scathing attack on China’s efforts to build influence in the Pacific, accusing Beijing of currying favour with the region’s smaller nations by funnelling cash into little-used infrastructure projects. 
 “You’ve got the Pacific full of these useless buildings which nobody maintains, which are basically white elephants,” Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Australia’s minister for international development and the Pacific, said on Wednesday.
 “We just don’t want to build a road that doesn’t go anywhere,” she told reporters.
“We want to ensure that the infrastructure that you do build is actually productive and is actually going to give some economic benefit or some sort of health benefit.”
 The comments threaten further strains in relations between the two countries, which deteriorated last month after Canberra proposed new laws designed to tackle growing espionage threats and Chinese interference in domestic politics.
 The laws — prompted by allegations of Chinese influence over MPs and fears of spying — would ban foreign political donations and force lobbyists to reveal when they are working for overseas entities.

 Ms Fierravanti-Wells, a Liberal party senator, on Wednesday also accused Beijing of providing loans to smaller Pacific countries on unfavourable terms. 
 “We encourage China to utilise its development assistance in a productive and effective manner. In other words, we just don’t want to build something for the heck of building it,” she said.
 China transferred $1.8bn in aid and loans to South Pacific nations between 2006 and 2016, according to research by the Lowy Institute, a think-tank.
Papua New Guinea, which has seen its relations with Australia strained over the problem of asylum seeker camps on Manus Island, is one of the region’s countries that has been drawn into the Chinese sphere of influence.
 In November the Pacific nation signed a series of infrastructure deals with China as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative, covering agriculture, transport and the delivery of utilities to the mountainous country’s remote areas.
 Fears of Chinese spying have also prompted Canberra to consider axing a deal under which China’s Huawei was to run a seabed cable 4,000km from Sydney to the Solomon Islands, instead proposing to bankroll the A$100m (US$78m) project itself.
 Concerns over Chinese political meddling have been raised by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who noted “disturbing reports about Chinese influence” in domestic politics.
 Such fears prompted the resignation of Sam Dastyari, an opposition Labor senator who received Chinese cash and then called for Australia to respect Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea — a position contrary to that of his party.

Sina Delenda Est

China Hasn't Won the Pacific
By Hal Brands

Is China destined to dominate the Asia-Pacific? 

Among U.S. allies and partners in the region, there seems to be a growing doubt that America can win the ongoing competition for influence with China, and that they must begin preparing for a regional order headed by Beijing. 

The challenge for America, then, is to ensure that this feeling of strategic fatalism doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is an undeniable fact that China has been making a concerted and accelerating push for regional supremacy in recent years -- and that the U.S. has struggled to respond effectively. 

The military balance of power has shifted considerably over the past two decades, as Beijing has undertaken a military buildup of historic proportions and America’s efforts to counter it were undercut first by a lengthy military involvement in the Middle East and then by budgetary austerity and defense cuts.
As a RAND Corporation study published in 2015 warned, the regional balance is reaching a series of "tipping points" at which the U.S. might find it increasingly difficult to defend allies and partners such as Taiwan from determined Chinese intervention at an acceptable price.
China has also been expanding its regional influence through incremental steps that have cumulatively had a major effect: coercing its neighbors in the East China Sea and South China Sea, building and militarizing artificial islands in contravention of international law, seeking to separate the U.S. from its allies through a mixture of coercion and economic inducement, and so forth. 

Such salami-slicing tactics are inherently difficult to counter, because they shift the status quo without escalating matters to a level that might set off a U.S. military response. 

During the Barack Obama presidency, U.S. officials were often stymied by this predicament, warning against Chinese expansionism but struggling to identify measures that might thwart or even significantly penalize that expansionism absent a full-on military showdown.
The result of all this has been a dramatic shift in perceptions of power and momentum in the region, raising the question of whether the U.S. can meet the Chinese challenge. 

While much of this concern is still being expressed privately, behind closed doors in the capitals of America’s allies, it is also seeping, gradually but unmistakably, into public debates.
Case in point is a recent essay by Hugh White, a former Australian defense official who turned heads in 2013 by arguing that America should “share power” with China as part of a new great-power concert in the Asia-Pacific. 

White has now re-entered the fray with a widely read essay arguing that it may be too late for even that type of compromise arrangement given China’s ongoing ascent.
China is determined to push the U.S. out of the region, White argues, and it is making great progress. 

Unless Washington is willing to fight a potentially catastrophic military conflict to thwart Beijing’s momentum, the long-term outcome of the competition is a foregone conclusion. 

The U.S. will slowly but surely be edged out of its role as arbiter of the balance of power. 

China will increasingly set the rules of the road across the Asia-Pacific. 

The task for U.S. allies is thus to begin adapting to a post-American regional order, one in which Washington can no longer protect its friends or otherwise play a decisive strategic role.
White’s essay is dangerous reading. 

It offers perhaps the most bracing demonstration yet of just how adversely the climate in the Asia-Pacific has shifted over the past several years, and how badly regional perceptions of U.S. leadership have eroded. 

China is no longer the threat of tomorrow: It is reshaping the regional order today, at the expense of the U.S. and its closest allies. 

And while most policymakers and elites in Australia and other allied countries are not ready to concede the outcome of that competition, their faith in Washington is increasingly being tested.
In Australia, for instance, White is hardly alone in publicly questioning his nation’s continuing reliance on the U.S. 

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has voiced similar ideas. 

And in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has ostentatiously repositioned his country between Beijing and Washington on the thesis -- exaggerated, no doubt, but nonetheless telling -- that “America has lost” its strategic duel with China.
It would be foolish, then, for U.S. policymakers to simply dismiss the concerns that are emanating from Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. 

But it would also be dangerous for U.S. and allied leaders to accept the thesis that China is destined to dominate the region and simply give up on countering Beijing’s ambitions.
China appears imposing today, but it is hardly 10 feet tall. 

As I discuss in my new book, “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump,” Beijing is still no match for the U.S. in aggregate national power: Its military budget is still less than half that of the Pentagon’s, and its per capita gross domestic product remains roughly a quarter of America’s, even as its overall GDP approaches parity.
Moreover, China is certain to encounter serious economic and political difficulties in the coming years because of the rapidly approaching limits of its existing growth model and the inherent instability of authoritarian rule. 

It is a fantasy to believe, as U.S. observers sometimes have, that China will collapse or democratize before it is able to make a serious bid for geopolitical supremacy in the Asia-Pacific. 

But it is hardly preordained that China will be able to maintain, over a period of decades, the impressive trajectory needed to decisively overtake America as the region’s leading power.
In fact, the U.S. and its allies can make it enormously difficult for China to accomplish that objective. 

For example, the same maritime geography that complicates U.S. efforts to project power into the areas along China’s coastline makes it hard for China to project power outward, toward its neighbors and beyond. 

The island chain running from Japan to the Ryukyus to Taiwan and the Philippines constitutes a series of natural barriers to Chinese expansion into the Pacific.
As Michael Beckley of Harvard’s Belfer Center has recently written, it should therefore be possible for U.S. allies and partners such as Japan and Taiwan to blunt Chinese expansionism by acquiring the same anti-access/area denial capabilities (anti-ship missiles and mines, for instance) that Beijing has deployed to good effect.
There is also much more the U.S. and its partners can do to impose greater costs on China’s destabilizing behavior, such as slapping sanctions on Chinese companies involved in activities like illegal land reclamation, helping friendly countries fortify their own holdings in the South China and East China Seas, and responding to Chinese advances by deploying additional U.S. military assets to the region.
These measures carry increased costs and risks in their own right, of course, and they offer no guarantee of success in what seems certain to be a decades-long geopolitical struggle with China. 

But the U.S. and its allies can still hold their own in that contest, so long as they don’t succumb to a misplaced fatalism. 

The only sure way to lose in the Asia-Pacific is to give up the game.