Inside China’s plan to conquer the Pacific
Rugby League is a fast-moving, sometimes physically brutal game born in the working-class communities of northern England.
Now it is at the centre of an even higher-stakes geopolitical competition on the other side of the world.
Anthony Albanese and James Marape, the prime ministers of Australia and Papua New Guinea, this month announced Australia would spend A$600 million (£298 million) over 10 years to set up a Papua New Guinea team to play in the Australian league.
But it comes hand in hand with another pact that makes clear Australia will remain Papua New Guinea’s main security partner. In other words, China will not be.
The “rugby diplomacy” deal is, after all, about far more than just sport. For Australia and its Western allies, it is part of an ongoing scrum over China’s plans to conquer the Pacific.
Competing for influence
For more than a decade, China and the West – particularly Australia and the US – have been in an escalating competition for influence in the region.
From Washington and Canberra, Beijing’s ambitions for ever greater control is an alarming prospect.
Many of these new diplomatic battlegrounds – New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines – loom large in national memories of the Second World War.
The prospect of a potentially hostile power once again building air and naval bases on the islands and atolls of the region fills Australians in particular with unease.
American allies, in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, have equal reason for concern.
The view from Beijing – or from the Yulin naval base on Hainan island, the home of the Chinese navy – is quite different.
“They look out at the Pacific, and they see tens of thousands of US military personnel in South Korea, tens more thousands in Japan. They see Taiwan, and they see America not faithfully living up to its commitment – from their point of view – to respect the status quo there,” says Philip Shetler-Jones, an expert on Indo-Pacific security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK-based think-tank.
That arc of American allies extends down through the Philippines to Singapore and Australia.
It is something that many Chinese experts see as an unwelcome relic of the previous century of American global dominance.
“In a slightly Marxist way, they [the Chinese] see themselves giving a helping hand to history and the sort of natural tendency for America to be in decline. And so they want America out. They want America to be isolated from alliances like Japan and South Korea,” says Shetler Jones.
The Taiwan issue
But beyond pushing back the US, what is China’s big Pacific idea?
“There are three elements here,” says Yu Jie, senior research fellow on China at Chatham House, a British foreign affairs think-tank.
“First, the big idea for Taiwan, of course, is a national reunification project that China is very keen to complete. It’s not only [President] Xi Jinping, but several successive generations of Chinese leaders have talked about the need to complete [this].”
Xi has cast “reunification” with Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as a central part of his wider push for “rejuvenation” of China. Sometimes referred to as “the Chinese dream”, it is a broad agenda the president has pursued since he took power in 2012 – one which is aimed at boosting development and restoring the country’s place at the top of the global order, harkening back to its historic position as the “Middle Kingdom”.
“Secondly, the Taiwan issue is part of the root cause for China’s military modernisation, and this also includes building its own military capability and competitive capability around the South China Sea,” says Yu.
“The third purpose is a sense of global influence; Beijing wants to show that it is on a par with the United States as being a global military power.”
China’s ambitions extend deep into the Western and Southern Pacific, but talk about the possibility of war is concentrated along an imaginary line called the “first island chain”.
Linking Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo and Vietnam, the string of archipelagos effectively separates the East and South China Seas from the wider Pacific.
In a 2022 paper, Marco J. Lyons, the assistant chief of staff for plans at US Army Pacific in Hawaii, identified four potential flashpoints in the Pacific, all of them in or on that line: Taiwan; Japan, with whom Beijing has a long-running dispute over the Daiyo islands; the South China Sea, where China is confronting the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam for control of disputed islands and shoals; and the Korean peninsula, where a war between North and South could easily draw in China and the US.
Of the four, Taiwan is the most potentially explosive. It is certainly generating the most anxiety.
One recent paper, by Maj Kyle Amonson and Dane Egli for the US Department of Defence, argued that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would be ready for war with Taiwan in 2027, and that Xi would want to act before 2030 because of demographic and political considerations.
The notion of a window of opportunity around 2027 is a driving assumption in American and Western thinking about a near-term Chinese assault on the island.
The idea has been dubbed the “Davidson window”, after Admiral Phil Davidson, the retiring head of US Indo-Pacific Command who when asked at a 2021 congressional hearing about the risk of an invasion of Taiwan remarked that: “The threat is manifest during this decade…in fact, in the next six years.”
The origin of the claim seems to come from a US intelligence assessment that Xi had asked the Chinese army to be ready – or capable – of carrying out such an operation.
Sceptics have pointed out that there is a difference between being capable of doing something, and planning to do it.
Nor does the plan fit with known Chinese doctrine.
A ‘war of necessity’
China’s 2005 anti-secession law outlines three conditions for launching a “war of necessity” on Taiwan: a Taiwanese declaration of independence; unification of Taiwan with another country; or unification being irrevocably impossible by any other means.
We are a long way from any of those conditions being met.
“The closer we get to 2027, the less relevant the date becomes,” Admiral Samuel Paparo, the current commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, said at an event at the Brookings Institute in November.
“It was never a sell-by date. It was never a date where the PRC [People’s Republic of China] had declared, ‘we’re going on this date’. And I think maybe they