The Foreign Service Journal, November 2006

more than 100,000 people live on 700 square kilometers of land—but it is strategically located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Another target is Vanuatu. Here the Chinese agreed in August 2005 to finance various police projects worth more than $300,000. The deals include uniforms and equip- ment for the Vanuatu Mobile Force, a 28-seat Toyota bus to transport VMF members to their external activities, three double-cabin Hilux vehicles for police patrols and a sedan for the police traffic control section. China is com- mitted to assisting Vanuatu with military and defense training in response to its request. Further, Beijing will provide two boats, as requested by the Ministry of Police, to be used for coastal surveillance operations that the only national patrol boat, RVS Tukoro , cannot undertake because of the high cost of its operation. A third example is Kiribati, which straddles the equa- tor, making it an ideal place for satellite surveillance. There, in 1997, the PRC built a civilian space launch tracking facility on Tarawa Island, the only one of its kind outside China. Defense experts long suspected that China’s Tarawa station also monitored American missile tests at nearby Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. When Kiribati recognized Taiwan in 2003, the station was dismantled. It was a significant loss for the PRC, accord- ing to Professor Des Ball, an expert on signals intelligence from Australian National University. It deprived Beijing of a land base in the Pacific, where the movements and activities of the Chinese Yuan Wang space tracking ships could be coordinated. China is now believed to be look- ing for a new base near the equator: of the Pacific coun- tries, only Nauru has an equally favorable location. Beijing has two major interests in the Pacific, accord- ing to Mohan Malik, a China analyst at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu: “In the short term it wants to isolate Taiwan in the international com- munity. But in the medium and longer term, the goal is to challenge and eventually displace the U.S. as the guardian and protector of the Pacific. Under the cover of a China-Taiwan contest for diplomatic recognition, F O C U S N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 43