https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18041/china-south-pacific-takeover
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is accelerating its campaign to isolate Taiwan from the existing international order by offering bribes in some of these poor islands to leadership figures to break with Taipei. Presently, only 15 nations have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and four of them are in the South Pacific: the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, and Tuvalu.
Some of these states once had diplomatic links with Taiwan but were seemingly wooed away by Beijing’s offer of financial loans, investment, and corrupt practices. These at times included direct interference in these islands’ domestic political affairs, threatening the efficacy of their governmental institutions.
The intensity of Chinese Communist Party’s drive to inherit the US mantle of Pacific superiority — acquired by the US at great sacrifice in World War II — clearly shows that Beijing’s ambitions extend beyond reuniting Taiwan with the Chinese “Motherland.”
China’s aggressive and persistent diplomatic offensive to win over the entire constellation of the South Pacific’s once pro-Western mini-states in the South Pacific suggests once more a determined desire to emerge as the dominant global superpower in the Pacific region — supplanting the United States and its free and independent allies — along with annexing the rest of the world.
When will the West — public officials and private corporations — stop financing China’s hostile takeover?
This October, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) convened, via video link, the first foreign ministerial conference with nearly 20 Pacific Island states. On December 3, the Chinese quickly followed up this initiative by establishing “The China-Pacific Island Countries Reserve of Emergency Supplies.”
China’s diplomatic offensive in the South Pacific suggests yet another effort to replace the US as the world’s primary superpower and install its authoritarian values instead.