By Didi Kirsten Tatlow
China’s growing police presence in the vast Pacific region is reshaping the security landscape in ways that are both troubling and helpful and is part of Beijing’s sweeping vision of global security, according to a new report.
Officers from China’s Ministry of Public Security have been accompanied at joint policing cooperation events in Pacific Island states by people with alleged criminal connections or have engaged in intimidating behavior toward law enforcement advisors from Western countries who are also present on the ground, the report said.
But the small Pacific states were also benefitting from the growing Chinese police presence, especially in short-term ways such as getting new police academies, vehicles, technology, equipment, and uniforms, said the report’s lead author, Virginia Comolli, in an interview with Newsweek. And the states had exercised agency by refusing intrusive measures they did not want, such as fingerprinting or surveillance via CCTV, Comolli said.
The publication on Tuesday of Police Partnerships in the Pacific by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime comes against a backdrop of deepening geopolitical competition in the far-flung oceanic territories where the U.S was dominant for decades, having fought its way through the Pacific to defeat Japan in World War II.
But Newsweek has previously reported how China is challenging the U.S by building a complex network of physical and IT infrastructure that is “dual-use”, or mixed civilian and military in nature, expanding its influence in a region with enormous riches and deep strategic significance. Policing is another pillar of this growing footprint.
Chinese diplomats and the foreign ministry say that their outreach in the region is aimed at building friendship and assisting countries with poverty alleviation, agricultural and economic development, and law and order.
A Widespread Chinese Police Presence
China’s Ministry of Public Security’s activities now involve about a dozen countries in the Pacific, with only Taiwan’s three diplomatic allies among the 16-member Pacific Island Forum untouched – Tuvalu, Palau and the Marshall Islands, said Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who has studied the situation.
In one example cited in the report, by January of this year, about 60 police officers from the Solomon Islands had received training from China’s Ministry of Public Security at a special training centre in Fujian province for police officers from Pacific Island states that is part of the Fujian Police Academy. The centre was opened in Fuzhou, the provincial capital, in 2023.
Extending that, in 2024, an US$11 million, China-built police training academy opened in Samoa. Chinese diplomats present urged it to cooperate with the China-Pacific Island Countries Police Training Centre, describing the Fuzhou centre as the Samoan academy’s “counterpart.”
Special “Chinese Police Liaison Teams” operate across the region, including in Solomon Islands since 2022, where they have run at least 70 training programs, according to the report, which was based on months of on-the-ground reporting.
Solomon Islands is one of China’s closest partners in the region having struck a security agreement – the details have not been made public – with Beijing in 2022 after switching recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019, an act that provoked rioting in the capital, Honiara, in 2021.
Newsweek contacted the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force and the Chinese embassy in Honiara for comment.
China is not the only outside country offering policing support to Pacific Island states. In addition to Australia, the main partner, New Zealand is involved with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon signing a policing agreement in mid-March during a trip to Samoa that aims, among other things, to curb the drug trade from Latin America into the region.
Samoa lies just 45 miles away from the U.S territory of American Samoa. In a sign of the enormous scale of the region, Samoa is about 1,900 miles east of the Solomon Islands.
Concerns Over Geocriminality
The report also documented the presence of people with alleged ties to Chinese international crime rings who had participated in police activities in at least two countries, with photographs showing them occupying organisational or prominent roles at a launch event or wearing a police uniform.
That raised troubling questions, said Martin Thorley, Comolli’s co-author and a specialist in geocriminality, which is when states use organised crime to further domestic or foreign policy priorities.
“We’re currently at the stage where everyone is assessing what this increased Chinese presence in police cooperation and training means, and what the risks are and what the opportunities are, and it seems no one has considered that … alleged criminals are accepted at the periphery of this policing. They appear to be allowed in,” said Thorley in an interview.
Thorley said that Beijing had a track record of allowing allegedly criminal participation when it served the CCP state’s aims.
There were differences between cooperating with China’s Ministry of Public Security and with the police forces in democratic nations, said Brady.
China’s police – the Ministry of Public Security – was also China’s central authority responsible for counter-intelligence, dissident-suppression and counter-terrorism, with an external role to hunt opponents of the CCP as well as immigration and other duties, Brady said.
“So, if you’ve got Chinese police embedded in your country, you’ve got spies,” Brady said.
Brady cited a 2025 report on Samoa published by a Czech Republic-based research organisation, Sinopsis, which found that police cooperation had become “a central pillar of China’s expanding dual use presence in the Pacific,” with Beijing aiming to set up a cross-Pacific policing network in parallel to the existing order. Many interactions remained unpublicised, according to the report, where Brady was a co-author.
Efforts to contact the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing by telephone, through a number listed on the ministry’s website, failed, with the number apparently not operational.
Pacific states have agency
Like Comolli, Brady said that Pacific Island states, though small and in need of a variety of law-and-order support, were exercising agency to push back against China’s expanding police presence, albeit unevenly, and that there was a real need on the ground for assistance.
But across the region, she said, “the weakest links are the Solomons, Kiribati and Vanuatu. All the others have understood you can’t go too far with this.’
Newsweek contacted the Vanuatu government for comment. An email to Kiribati’s Ministry of Justice bounced back.
China’s efforts were bumping up established partners such as Australia, sometimes in tense ways, according to Comolli’s report.
“Interviews conducted for this report include accounts that Chinese Police Liaison Team personnel have, in some instances, sought to discourage or intimidate law enforcement advisers from other 4 countries from operating in the same environment,” the report said.
“While such behaviour is not uniform, it signals a willingness in certain contexts to compete directly at the operational level, rather than simply coexisting alongside traditional partners,” it said.
