While China’s security pact with the Solomon Islands has grabbed the headlines, the South Pacific has actually seen more of its island nations tilting towards Beijing diplomatically and for trade in recent years. The Solomons simply marks the most advanced relationship in a region that Australia and the United States have long, if tacitly, claimed to be their joint sphere of influence. The years of neglect by Washington and contempt from Canberra for the Solomons led first to the island nation’s switch of recognition from Taiwan to China, and now the security pact. And while Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea attracts most media attention, no less significant is its expanding trade and diplomatic relations with island countries and littoral nations in the Indian Ocean. The ocean’s sea lanes supply three-quarters of China’s crude oil, as well as other important commodities and food. It’s often said that Beijing has no allies like the United States. That’s true. But to compensate, it has been building on its decades-long credibility as a leader of non-alignment during the Cold War to renew partnerships and trade deals. These relationships add up when it comes to, for example, crucial United Nations votes that China needs to gain a majority over the Washington-led Western alliance. Its lack of formal alliances also indicates that it has neither the capacities nor the will to project global power and military dominance, unlike the US. The China-Solomon Islands security pact and why it has raised alarm Much postcolonial resentment lingers among the small states in the Indian Ocean. This has long offered an opening to China’s diplomacy and trade. Comoros and Madagascar in the Western Indian Ocean have long-standing disputes with France over the control of many small islands. Britain has insisted on control over the Chagos Archipelago against Mauritius. But in 2019, at the request of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice in The Hague handed down a judgment advising Britain to return the territories to Mauritius. So far, it has refused. While the legal advisory has no enforcement power, it is part of international law. Britain’s refusal has less to do with post-imperial pretensions than Washington’s pressure to retain Diego Garcia, the largest island of the archipelago, for its military base, with stationing facilities for nuclear weapons. That, incidentally, breaches the Pelindaba Treaty, which establishes Africa as a nuclear weapon-free zone. Britain is a treaty signatory, but the US, for obvious reasons, has refused to ratify it. Next time US leaders such as Joe Biden and Antony Blinken and officials from Britain, including Liz Truss and Tony Radakin, warn nations such as China for not following or undermining the “rules-based international order”, just remember Chagos, Mauritius and nuclear weapons. In October 2019, China and Mauritius officially signed a free-trade agreement, the first of its kind with an African country. Madagascar joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2017. Comoros achieved independence in 1975, and China was the first country to recognise it. Since then, there have been multiple trade and bilateral partnerships, including under the belt and road plan. There is the spurious claim that Beijing could build a military base on the Solomons. Well, you could make the same argument with Comoros, as it is strategically located at the mouth of the Mozambique Channel. It’s highly unlikely that China would make such militarily provocative moves, in the former case against Australia and, in the latter, against the US vis-à-vis Diego Garcia. Again, when Western powers treat such small nations like dirt, you can hardly blame China for moving in. In any case, its presence in the South Pacific may be less a provocation against Australia than against Taiwan. The Solomon Islands is the latest – after Fiji, Tonga, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Micronesia and Samoa – in the region to recognise mainland China instead of Taiwan. That has left Taiwan with just Palau, Nauru, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu. Quite simply, Beijing has a far bigger chequebook, as the second biggest lender in the region only after the Asian Development Bank. It will take a while, if at all, for Australia and the US to catch up with development aid, now that they have belatedly recognised an own goal after a long period of neglect. It’s worth remembering that long before China’s rise it had posed itself as a champion of developing countries, so it is building on long-standing relations rather than, as some Western critics claim, jockeying for power and influence only now in competition with the West.