These and other undertakings erode democratic institutions and norms, not least through intimidation designed to compel the adoption of policies that advance China’s interests.67
In South and Central Asia, the PRC invests heavily in transportation infrastructure to expand trade routes to Eurasia and Europe and to secure the flow of energy, raw materials, and other resources. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) serves as the Belt and Road Initiative’s Central Asia flagship. CPEC also connects to the BRI’s “21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” greatly enhancing China’s access to the Middle East through Pakistan’s Gwadar port and linking to PRC projects at Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port, Bangladesh’s Chittagong port, and the Maldives’s Feydhoo Finolhu Port.68 Through Chinese companies that are often untrustworthy vendors, the CCP offers public-security solutions — featuring “command centers, CCTV cameras, intelligent video surveillance, facial and license plate recognition technology, crowd monitoring, situational awareness detection, noise monitoring or detection, abandoned object detection, and social media monitoring”69 — to countries across the region.
China supplements economic power in the Indo-Pacific with demonstrations of military capability. The PLA Air Force regularly conducts long-range bomber patrols out to the second island chain70 (stretching from Japan through the Mariana Islands and Micronesia) while the PLA Navy operates surface and sub-surface naval forces from Southeast Asia to the Indian Ocean, and challenges naval and law enforcement vessels in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The PLA recently provoked skirmishes along its disputed border with India, which killed dozens on both sides, and remains in a tense standoff with India’s military. Beijing menaces democratic Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, intending to reunify Taiwan with the Mainland — by force if necessary.71 And the PLA Navy and Chinese Coast Guard increasingly challenge Japan’s administrative control of the Senkaku Islands.72
China flexes its muscles in the Indo-Pacific in open defiance of international law. For example, since seizing administrative control of the Scarborough Shoal following a 2012 standoff with the Philippines, China has used PLA naval and civilian patrols to assert sovereignty over the shoal. Beijing dismissed the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 ruling, which rejects the PRC’s so-called “nine-dash line” historical claims to the South China Sea and upholds the Philippines’s claim to the shoal.73 The PRC also ignored the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 ruling that the Mischief Reef in the South China Sea belongs to the
