Hi, China Watchers. This week we parse the implications of China’s diplomatic win in the Solomon Islands and pour cold water on a Chinese state media effort to link Covid origins to Moderna, the U.S. pharmaceutical firm. We’ll also look at the subversive power of a hijacked hashtag and — perfect for the harried Hill staffer — profile a Middle Kingdom history book that clocks in at just 252 pages. Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at [email protected].

Let’s get to it. — Phelim

The Solomon Islands government announced on Wednesday it had signed a controversial security pact with China that the U.S. and its allies fear may give Beijing a new beachhead for military operations across the Pacific.

The agreement — sealed despite objections from the U.S., Australia, Japan and New Zealand — constitutes a rebuke of U.S. diplomatic disengagement with Oceania in recent decades that has created an opportunity for China to boost its influence in the region.

The U.S. and its allies have good reason to be suspicious of Beijing’s intentions. China has a widening Indo-Pacific military footprint that has included the stealthy militarization of disputed islands in the South China Sea. Its naval base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa evolved from what Beijing initially insisted was a “logistics center.” And there are indications that Chinese-funded infrastructure upgrades of port facilities in Equatorial Guinea have laid the foundation for a People’s Liberation Army naval base in that country.

A furious, late effort by the Biden administration to pry the Solomon Islands away from a deal with China was in vain. That failure is heaping pressure on the White House to make sure more dominoes don’t fall.

“We have lost sight of the geostrategic importance of that region, and only in recent years have we realized that China is now organizing that region for diplomatic and economic and, now with Solomon Islands, security cooperation,” said DEREK GROSSMAN, senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. “The Chinese are students of history … and trying to prevent us from using any second island chain against them. For them to be able to use it first against us is at the forefront of their minds when it comes to Oceania.”

The timing of Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister MANASSEH SOGAVARE’s announcement of the signing wasn’t accidental. Solomon Islands opposition leader MATTHEW WALE said the government accelerated the agreement’s signing prior to the arrival in Solomon Islands this week of a U.S. government delegation led by KURT CAMPBELL, the National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, and DANIEL KRITENBRINK, assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

The delegation, which includes representatives from the Defense Department, National Security Council and USAID, is on a swing through Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea “to advance a free, open, and resilient Indo-Pacific,” the State Department said. The delegation is following last week’s Solomon Islands visit by ZED SESELJA, Australia’s minister for international development and the Pacific, who likewise failed to dissuade Sogavare from signing the security agreement.

China’s Foreign Ministry rubbed salt in the wound over the tardy diplomatic pile-on. “Several senior US officials now fancy a visit to some [Pacific island countries] all of a sudden after all these years … do they have ulterior motives?” spokesperson WANG WENBIN said Tuesday.

Devil in the details: The text of a leaked draft of the agreement doesn’t specifically allow for China to establish military facilities in the Solomon Islands. Instead, it provides its government the right to ask China for “police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces … to assist in maintaining social order, protecting people’s lives and property.”

The agreement makes Campbell’s warning in February of “certain kinds of strategic surprise, basing or certain kinds of agreements” in the Pacific within two years appear prophetic. Campbell called for the U.S., along with regional allies and France, “to step up our game” in the Pacific.

Sogavare insisted Wednesday that the agreement, which neither he nor the Chinese have publicly disclosed, is strictly designed to “protect all people, their property and critical national infrastructures.” The State Department is skeptical.

“Despite the Solomon Islands Government’s comments, the broad nature of the security agreement leaves open the door for the deployment of PRC military forces to the Solomon Islands,” State Department spokesperson NED PRICE said Monday. “We believe that signing such an agreement could increase destabilization within the Solomon Islands and will set a concerning precedent for the wider Pacific Island region.”

The deal has prompted blunter assessments elsewhere on Capitol Hill.

“Given the islands’ strategic location, the [Chinese Communist Party] obviously wants to use the Solomons as a strategic asset to upend the military stability of the Indo-Pacific,” said Rep. MICHAEL MCCAUL (R-Texas).

Those suspicions are echoed at the National Security Council.

“We are concerned by the lack of transparency and unspecified nature of this agreement, which follows a pattern of China offering shadowy, vague deals with little regional consultation in fishing, resource management, development assistance and now security practices,” an NSC spokesperson said in a statement. “The Prime Minister of Solomon Islands said he would like to release more details if the PRC agrees, so it’s up to the PRC to show if it can be transparent on security matters that have raised concerns throughout the region from many Pacific Island countries.”

Belt and Island: The security agreement rewards Beijing’s efforts to build influence in the region through economic assistance. China is second only to the Asian Development Bank in regional lending and has disbursed $1.3 billion in loans to Pacific island countries since 2009. China has also extended its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure development program for regional projects, including bridge and road construction. That largesse has been a powerful tool in picking off Taiwan’s diplomatic allies and reducing the self-governing island’s regional official relations to just Palau, Nauru, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu.

But Beijing has encountered pushback to its growing regional economic footprint. The government of Samoa canceled a $100 million Chinese-funded port project in August amid debt burden concerns. And in December, rioters in Solomon Islands destroyed Chinese-owned homes and businesses in a spasm of violence that Sogavare has blamed on Taiwan.

“Opinions on whether to welcome greater PRC engagement in the Pacific islands are mixed … the jury is still out on how much this [Solomon Islands] agreement will tip the scales for the PRC in terms of influencing the greater region,” said NAIMA GREEN-RILEY, Harvard-based China expert.

The Biden administration has been playing diplomatic catch-up. President JOE BIDEN in August became the first sitting U.S. president in history to attend and address a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum. Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN traveled to Fiji in February for a meeting with 18 Pacific island country leaders designed to “further our shared commitment to democracy, regional solidarity, and prosperity in the Pacific,” a State Department statement said. That trip made Blinken the first secretary of state to visit Fiji since 1985.

U.S. lawmakers have noted that historical neglect and are urging the administration to take steps to bolster relations with Pacific island states. “In the last decade, we closed embassies, we closed consulates, we closed down the Peace Corps, we reduced offices such as USAID and other nondefense presence in the Pacific islands,” Rep. ED CASE (D-Hawaii) told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser last week.

Case leads a bipartisan effort to push the Biden administration to negotiate extensions of soon-to-expire treaties with Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands that give the U.S. the right to deny access to those countries’ waters, airspace and land. In return, the U.S. provides them financial assistance and rights of visa-free migration. Micronesia’s President DAVID PANUELO urged the administration in February to accelerate those negotiations, prompting Kritenbrink to declare them “a top priority.”

Critics say that U.S. complacency in the face of China’s rising regional ambitions in the Pacific islands region threatens to upend the strategic order.

“We vacated key areas of competition — diplomatic, economic, financial, and technological — so now we have to reenter these arenas, but because we’ve been gone for so long, we’re in a position of significant disadvantage [compared to China],” H.R. MCMASTER, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. and national security adviser under former President DONALD TRUMP, told China Watcher. “We have to build relationships that are based on common interests in what is clearly a competition with a revanchist, authoritarian power that wants to create exclusionary areas of primacy and gain dominant influence across the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.”

TRANSLATING WASHINGTON

— STATE RIPS BEIJING’S PUTIN PROPAGANDA: State Department spokesperson NED PRICE on Monday slammed unnamed senior Chinese government officials who “parrot some of the worst, some of the most dangerous propaganda that is and has emanated from the Kremlin” about Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Price was responding to a question about Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns’ assertion last week that China is “a silent partner in Putin’s aggression.”

An op-ed by QIN GANG, Chinese ambassador to the U.S., published Monday helped make Burns’ case by failing to condemn Russian aggression or even use the word “invasion.” Instead, it railed against the U.S. for “wielding the stick of sanctions against China.” Vice Foreign Minister LE YUCHENG hammered home China’s embrace Monday by assuring Russian Ambassador to China ANDREY DENISOV that “No matter how the international storm changes, China will, as always, strengthen strategic cooperation with the Russian side.”

— EMBASSY ASSISTS SHANGHAI’S LOCKED DOWN AMERICANS: The U.S. Embassy in Beijing announced Monday that it has mobilized a team of 80 consular officers to assist the more than 40,000 U.S. citizens whose lives have been upended by the “zero-Covid” lockdown of Shanghai. The consular team is assisting Americans “experiencing challenges departing Shanghai and facing complications obtaining food and medical care under lockdown conditions,” an embassy statement said.

— LAWMAKERS’ TAIWAN TRIP TRIGGERS ‘MILITARY DRILLS’: A group of six U.S. senators made an unannounced two-day trip to Taiwan last week for what a Taiwan Foreign Ministry statement called “in-depth exchanges … on important issues in Taiwan-US relations.” The delegation included Sens. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.), BOB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.), RICHARD BURR (R-N.C.), ROB PORTMAN (R-Ohio), BEN SASSE (R-Neb.) and Rep. RONNY JACKSON (R-Texas). The visit prompted the People’s Liberation Army to launch military drills nearby the self-governing island to protest “wrong signals” from the U.S. In a televised press conference in Taipei on Friday, the delegation pledged U.S. support for Taiwan in the face of possible future Chinese aggression. “To abandon Taiwan would be to abandon democracy and freedom,” Graham said.

Hot from the China Watchersphere

— CHINA WARNS OF ASEAN ‘UKRAINE TRAGEDY’: Chinese Foreign Minister WANG YI warned his Vietnamese counterpart BUI THANH SON last week that the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy will “incite antagonism and confrontation” and risks a regional version of the “tragedy of Ukraine.” Wang’s comments reflect China’s concern that the May 12-13 U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit in Washington will produce a new regional consensus intended to counter China’s growing influence in the region. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang underscored that fear on Monday by calling on the U.S. to “reject attempts to create small, divisive circles in the Indo-Pacific.”

— REPORT: SANCTION HK OFFICIALS’ U.S. PROPERTY: The U.S. should consider sanctions against Hong Kong officials who own property overseas for their complicity in rights abuses in the territory, the nonprofit Hong Kong Watch said in a report released today. The report proposes targeted sanctions against 21 officials and elected representatives of the Legislative Council who own property in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia and France for “ongoing active culpability in the crackdown on human rights in Hong Kong.”

— DENVER APOLOGIZES FOR 1880 RACIST VIOLENCE: Denver Mayor MICHAEL HANCOCK issued an official apology Saturday for a racist attack on the city’s Chinese community on Oct. 31, 1880 that caused the lynching of one man and widespread destruction of Chinese-owned property. Wang of the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the move “laudable” but warned of unnamed U.S. politicians that “instigate racism and racial hatred.”

Translating China

— CHINA DAILY MARKETS MODERNA COVID CAPER: China’s efforts to deflect international pressure for a credible probe into the origins of Covid-19 generated an absurd allegation last week that U.S. pharmaceutical firm Moderna produced the coronavirus that has killed an estimated 15 million people worldwide.

“A piece of gene sequence in the new coronavirus matches a sequence patented by the U.S. company Moderna in 2016, which has a one in three trillion chance of occurring naturally,” state media China Daily posted on its Weibo account last week. “One of the company’s collaborators in the project with the U.S. government is [an] epidemiologist … who has been called the ‘father of the coronavirus’ by the U.S. media and has strong ties to the mysterious Fort Detrick biological laboratory.” The allegations recycle multiple conspiracy theories — disproved by fact-checkers — that Chinese state media has circulated and amplified over the past two years in a bid to divert attention from the government’s refusal to allow a serious probe of Covid’s emergence in Wuhan in late 2019.

Moderna — which has supplied more than 800 million doses of its mRNA Covid-19 vaccine worldwide over the past two years — didn’t respond to a request for comment. But the post also reflects official efforts to parry rising public concern over the lockdown of the majority of Shanghai’s 26 million people. There’s growing evidence the “zero-Covid” strategy can’t contain the highly contagious Omicron variant and that the lockdown is taking an economic toll. Despite Shanghai’s disgruntlement and the deepening international skepticism about the strategy’s utility, Beijing insists the policy will persist.

— NETIZENS HIJACK ANTI-U.S. HASHTAG: Chinese state media last week rolled out the catchy hashtag “America is the worst country in the world” to peddle criticism of the U.S. human rights record in response to the release of the State Department’s 2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. But Chinese online commentators quickly adopted the hashtag to note their own frustrations with Shanghai’s Covid lockdown, What’s On Weibo reported Saturday.

Voice of America reporter Wen Hao discovered that “a flood of angry comments started criticizing the Chinese government for their handling of the Covid crisis and other issues under this hashtag, instead of actually attacking the U.S. according to the state media’s narrative,” What’s On Weibo noted. Censors eventually caught on and removed the critical posts.

But netizens still rejoiced at their brief moment of rebellion: “Let’s commemorate tonight. … Maybe tomorrow it’s gonna be songs and dances again, but at least we know that we are awake,” said one online commentator.

HEADLINES

The Atlantic: "Chasing the King of Kowloon"

Financial Times: "Baby bust: Pandemic accelerates fall in China’s birth rate"

New York Times: "Star Ferry, ‘Emblem of Hong Kong,’ May Sail Into History After 142 Years"

HEADS UP

— BLINKEN’S LOOMING CHINA STRATEGY REVEAL: Word is that Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN will unveil the Biden administration’s long-awaited China strategy in the next week or two. The strategy — rumored to have been sitting on Biden’s desk since November — will be useful guidance for both the U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit next month as well as an upcoming Biden trip to Asia.

One Book, Three Questions

The Book: “The Shortest History of China: From the Ancient Dynasties to a Modern Superpower―A Retelling for Our Times”

The Author:LINDA JAIVIN is an Australian author, translator, essayist, novelist and writer on China.

What is the most important takeaway from your book?

Chinese history is full of clues as to how China came to be what it is today: an insistently diverse society with vibrant local cultures and plenty of eccentrics, independent thinkers and even dissidents, not to mention women of strength and sass — all of whom pose challenges to patriarchal, authoritarian rule. Even the core anxieties of the Communist Party’s latest ‘core leader,’ Xi Jinping, including how the Party can stamp out corruption before corruption stamps out the Party, have their roots in history.

What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this book?

Women’s history is underplayed in most general histories of China. I set out determined to redress that but hadn’t anticipated just how interesting and rich Chinese women’s history would be. I was able to write of ancient warrior-queens, court historians, early diplomats, inventors, poets, militant feminists of the late Qing and early Republican period and even the “mother of Chinese computer science.”

What does your book tell us about the trajectory and future of U.S.-China relations?

The U.S. has a long and not entirely glorious history of trying to “change China,” from efforts to convert “heathen souls” to Christianity in the 19th century, to supporting the corrupt and brutal but anti-communist government of Chiang Kai-shek to “engagement” designed to promote liberal democracy from the 1980s. Both Washington and Beijing would benefit from good relations, but there’s so much muddy water flowing under the bridge that the bridge itself might collapse. The future of relations depends on many things, but among them is Washington’s ability to understand that Beijing’s chronic suspicion of American motivations is rooted in history.

Thanks to: Ben Pauker, Matt Kaminski, digital producer Setota Hailemariam and editor John Yearwood.

Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week’s items? Email us at [email protected].

Follow Us