China ‘Likely’ Ran Targeted Campaign to Align Pacific With Its Latest Five-Year Plan

This article was originally published in Radio Free Asia. Read the original article.

By Eugene Whong for RFA

China “very likely” coordinated a targeted campaign across the Pacific to demonstrate that local development strategies should align with Beijing’s latest five-year-plan, a recent report by The Alliance Futures Initiative says.

In the report, titled “China’s Model on the Offensive: Why China’s Five-Year Plan Promotion in the Pacific Matters,” the Washington-based think tank documented how in eight of the nine Pacific island countries where Beijing has an embassy, the heads of mission published op-eds in the local media touting the merits of China’s latest sweeping national policy framework proposed late last year and formally adopted in March.

“To international audiences, the PRC deliberately reframes the FYP from a domestic planning document into a predictable, scientific blueprint for global growth and cooperation,” the report said.

The campaign was not limited to media placement. Chinese diplomats also engaged in direct bilateral governance outreach, hosted diplomatic briefings – either open to the media or closed – with influential figures in business and government. The ultimate goal was to make the case that local development strategies were in line with the five-year plan, or that China was a more stable and reliable partner than its main rival with interests in the region, the United States.

The Alliance Futures Initiative, or TAFI, tracked the activities of Chinese Embassies since October 2025, finding more than 30 cases where ambassadors promoted the five-year plan.

“The frequency, similarity, and timing of output strongly imply MFA guidance,” the report said, referring to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Variance in message intensity, ideological depth, and host-country alignment claims tracks local conditions and individual ambassador style.”

The power of persuasion

A key aspect of the campaign is how China is using persuasion rather than coercion to influence the Pacific countries to fall in line, Jonah Bock, TAFI’s assistant director for research, who authored the report, told Radio Free Asia.

Bock highlighted key examples where China attempted to directly persuade key government officials. In Vanuatu, Ambassador Li Minggang extolled the virtues of China’s civil service oversight in a meeting with Ombudsman Hamilson Bulu and in Naoero, formerly Nauru, Ambassador Lyu Jin discussed judicial cooperation with Chief Justice Jay Udit.

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“An ombudsman audits the government and a judiciary constrains it,” he said. “So these are really helping shape how Pacific governments actually function in China’s own model. And the importance of this is really normalization.”

Successfully persuading these countries to peacefully adopt a Chinese model is the goal of the campaign, he said.

“Coercion is expensive and it generates resistance. But persuasion does not. It’s relatively cheap for China to do,” Bock said. “If they can get these countries already using China’s development strategies, its models, then these officials will start to think like China and be more willing of their own ideas to cooperate with China.”

Selling alignment

The TAFI report said that throughout the campaign, ambassadors focused on three topics when explaining why aligning with the five-year plan would benefit their host countries: green development, economic openness, and shared prosperity.

In Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, or FSM, and Tonga, the embassies pushed out messaging that touted China’s concern for the environment, saying Beijing had “contributed one-quarter of the world’s new green area” and built the “world’s largest clean power generation system.”

“Beijing tailored this message for climate-conscious Pacific audiences, with the FSM embassy noting that ‘green development has become a defining feature of contemporary China, where skies are bluer, waters are clearer, and lands are cleaner,’” the report said.

In Fiji and Papua New Guinea, or PNG, messaging also “championed” anti-protectionism, the report said.

“The Fiji embassy noted that China has ‘lifted all foreign investment restrictions in the manufacturing sector,’ and the PNG embassy opined that ‘while unilateralism and protectionism are on the rise… China remains firmly committed to opening up.’”

Messaging also focused on poverty alleviation and personal income increasing as a result of rapid economic growth, according to the report. In FSM, Ambassador Wu Wei’s op-ed said that due to China’s robust education and security systems, the “people’s sense of gain, happiness, and security have been significantly enhanced.”

“The themes Chinese ambassadors chose to emphasize … are not incidental,” the report said. “Each topic serves one or more of Beijing’s broader strategic objectives in the region, functioning simultaneously as a pitch for deeper cooperation, a contrast with Western alternatives, and a legitimization of the CCP’s political model.”

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Solidifying counter strategies

If China were to achieve all its objectives in the Pacific, the region would be hostile to the United States and the interests of Washington and its allies, especially Taiwan, Bock told RFA.

“We would have no more countries that recognize Taiwan. At the end of the day, that really is China’s first objective,” he said. “We would also start to see more economic dependencies, countries whose economic lifelines rely on China, which helps China again deepen their own influence.”

He said adoption of China’s governance models would sow the seeds of authoritarianism in the region. But the report outlined recommendations for the United States to counter the campaign.

It identified FSM, the Marshall Islands, Palau and PNG as a “strategic core” due to their “defense access and second-island-chain positioning” and suggested that efforts to shore up relationships with this core should take priority over symmetrical levels of engagement with the whole region.

It also suggested that Washington contest the same institutional grounds through judicial exchanges, legal-sector training, and civil service partnerships, noting that they “cost a fraction of infrastructure competition and defend exactly the ground now under cultivation.”

TAFI also recommended helping Pacific governments in areas that they are already requesting, and to use private capital in circumstances where government aid moves too slowly.

“These are things that are … already happening,” Bock told RFA. “For instance, for the Solomon Islands … five staff in their parliament just went to D.C. for a program, with the U.S. Congress on legislative processes.”

He said this was the type of exchange that the report recommends and that he would like to see more of these.

Additionally the report said that Washington could simply highlight Chinese actions in the Pacific to discredit Beijing’s claims of non-interference in the internal matters of other countries, a key part of China’s foreign policy that it often often invokes when deflecting criticism of its domestic policies.

“Beijing’s non-interference claim is falsifiable, and PRC embassies have falsified it in their own published material,” the report said. “The United States does not need to argue this case. It needs to document it and let Pacific audiences draw conclusions.”

[HP]

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