China’s Long March to Global Preeminence: Increasing Region-by-Region Influence and Reshaping International Organizations
China’s quest for preeminence — powered by economic might, cutting-edge technology, and an increasingly powerful military — proceeds outward through the Indo-Pacific to encompass the globe. It includes the reshaping of international organizations, a domain critical to the CCP’s efforts to remake the norms and standards of global governance.
The Indo-Pacific
After World War II, the United States helped to develop the Indo-Pacific’s free and open order. The PRC seeks to diminish U.S. influence by fostering a sense in the region’s nations that China’s dominance is inevitable. Prime targets include U.S. treaty-based allies — Japan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines — as well as emerging strategic partners such as India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Taiwan. The PRC is also undermining the security, autonomy, and economic interests of many others in the region — such as member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including those in the vital Mekong Region, as well as the nations of the Pacific Islands. Moreover, China perceives rising India as a rival and seeks to impel it to accommodate Beijing’s ambitions by engaging economically while constraining New Delhi’s strategic partnership with the United States, Japan, Australia, and its relations with other democracies.
Beijing provides digital technology and physical infrastructure to advance the CCP’s authoritarian objectives throughout the region, including Northeast Asia, the South China Sea, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. In addition to efforts to become the region’s 5G vendor of choice, China pursues deals on airports and seaports and other infrastructure for strategic purposes — for example, a 99-year lease on Australia’s Port Darwin, a $10-billion deal to build the Philippines’s Sangley Point International Airport outside Manila, and a $1.3-billion project to construct Burma’s Kyaukphyu deep-sea port.66
China has employed campaigns of disinformation, and even interference and malign influence, against in democracies across the Indo-Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan.
