By Professor Anne-Marie Brady
On Monday this week, a Chinese People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Naval submarine launched a long-range nuclear-capable ballistic missile with a dummy warhead into the South Pacific.
The missile appears to have landed in international waters near the EEZ of Taiwan ally Tuvalu. The United States recorded a path of space debris from Japan to the central Pacific.
China’s missile test is a display of military force, signalling that the PLA now has a second-strike nuclear deterrent. The splashdown was in the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, established by the Treaty of Rarotonga, which China signed in 1987.
China’s provocative act is a message in a missile to the countries of the wider Pacific. Beijing is asserting sea power across the Pacific and normalising a visible PLA presence there. China wants to rule the waves in the Pacific, and to force Pacific nations to accept the new normal.
The Chinese foreign ministry said the test was a ”routine arrangement” of the PLA military training. The launch had been planned for some time. Three PLA-N missile-tracking vessels were positioned weeks before the test, two in waters near the Federated States of Micronesia, one in Fiji.
The timing of the launch was highly sensitive, occurring within minutes before Australia and Fiji announced their new mutual-defense partnership. China informed Australia, Fiji, Japan, and New Zealand that it would launch the test a few hours before.
It is not known whether China informed Tuvalu, Nauru or Kiribati, whose waters were closest to the splashdown. Australia, Japan, and New Zealand governments have made strong statements opposing the missile test.
So far, other Pacific states have been silent (NB: Prime Minister Matthew Wale and Prime Minister James Marabe yesterday condemned the test).
Minutes after the launch, Prime Minister Rabuka of Fiji stood alongside Australian Prime Minister Albanese promoting the security agreement but has refused to respond to requests from journalists for comment on the ICBM test.
In February last year, a PLA air force and navy flotilla, which included a submarine, conducted live-fire “blue-water drills” in the Tasman Sea, without any warning to the Australian or New Zealand governments who are joined by this sea.
The exercises were directly under the flight path of one of the busiest routes across the Tasman. Chinese media sources said that the live fire exercises were intended to signal the beginning of the “normalisation of the deployment” of PLA forces in the South Pacific.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal on land and sea. Over the last 10 years, China has built up hydrographic data on the Arctic, Antarctic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans to facilitate submarine transits.
China has also been developing a web of undersea surveillance detectors to monitor the passage of other nation’s submarines in the Pacific and Indian oceans. There is no international law that regulates submarines conducting missile launches in international waters.
As with the live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea in February last year, China is using international rules, or lack of them, as a shield for an act of intimidation and show of force. China has the world’s largest navy, with 234 vessels to the U.S. Navy’s 219. China operates six SSBNs.
It now has the capacity to rival U.S. military supremacy in the Pacific. China is preparing to station a permanent presence in the South West Pacific and wants the other military powers of the Pacific to know there is nothing they can do about it.
China has built dual-use port and airport facilities across the Pacific.
The 18 members of the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) will meet next month in Palau.
The current chair of the forum, Prime Minister Mathew Wale, has proposed a new security agreement which would link all the Pacific nations.
In the last two years, Australia and New Zealand have signed a series of bilateral security agreements with Pacific partners, but a single-region wide agreement has long been considered too difficult.
PIF leaders were warned about the risks of China’s expanding military presence in the Pacific in a recent report circulated ahead of the PIF meeting.
Will China’s latest provocative action be the tipping point that convinces Pacific leaders to stand together to protect collective security?
Whatever they decide, the message has been received: China’s military presence in the Pacific is not going away.
Professor Anne-Marie Brady is a specialist on Chinese, Pacific, and polar politics and New Zealand foreign policy at the University of Canterbury in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand
