How China Is Building a Backdoor Military Network in the Pacific
Dual‑use ports, runways, and telecom lines in 10 Pacific nations could help the PLA threaten or even leapfrog U.S. defenses and sink shipping between Hawaii and Australia.
Don’t miss our Deep Dive “The Illusion of Chinese Strength: Power, Paranoia, and the Temptation of War”. It’s one of the most important things we’ve ever published.
NOTE: As outlined in my Deep Dive “The Illusion of Chinese Strength: Power, Paranoia, and the Temptation of War”, China’s unfolding demographic catastrophe makes it uniquely dangerous over the next decade: it has to grab whatever it wants while it still can. Perhaps America and its allies can contain the CCP war machine. Perhaps not. — RDM
by Sean Tseng
April 26, 2025
A terse emergency radio broadcast picked up by a commercial flight was the first warning that the Chinese regime was about to start live-fire drills under its flight path between Australia and New Zealand.
Within hours, Australian authorities had been notified and air traffic controllers had rerouted 49 commercial flights between Australia and New Zealand to keep them out of harm’s way.
The incident on Feb. 21 — which rattled officials in Canberra and Wellington — offers just a glimpse into Beijing’s far-reaching plans in the Pacific, according to China watchers and recent analysis.
An April report from the Prague‑based research group Sinopsis warns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is quietly bankrolling a dense web of “dual‑use” seaports, airstrips, and telecom networks in at least 10 Pacific Island nations, covering roughly 3,000 miles and forming a network of strategic nodes between Australia and the U.S. territory of American Samoa in Polynesia, just 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii.