As China steps up humanitarian aid to the Pacific, can the US keep up?

The Chinese Navy hospital ship Daishan Dao, or “Peace Ark,” has 300 hospital beds, eight operating rooms and carries 416 personnel, 107 of them medical workers. Since 2008, it has traveled across the Pacific and Indian oceans, even as far as the Caribbean Sea, administering humanitarian medical services to local populations. Now in its 15th year of operations — after being at port for three years during the COVID-19 pandemic — the Peace Ark is back in the Pacific, beginning in Indonesia. It’s arguably become the most visible and symbolic centerpiece — “the envoy of light,” according to one patient in Vanuatu — of a broader strategy by the People’s Republic of China to win hearts and minds across Oceania while advancing China’s foreign policy objectives. “Humanitarian assistance and disaster relief [have been] an effective tool with which Beijing is trying to reshape external perceptions,” wrote scholar Gregory Coutaz in a 2019 journal article. “China, like many other countries,” Coutaz wrote, “seeks to advance its international agenda through humanitarian efforts.” The depths and strategy of these efforts — which began while the United States and its allies were heavily engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan — went largely unappreciated by the U.S. for many years. Now, the United States and its allies are playing catch up. “The U.S. and Australia have both significantly ramped up diplomatic engagement in the region in response to China,” said Jessica Collins, a research fellow at Australia’s Lowy Institute. “China’s engagement has certainly made development and defense agreements with Pacific nations an urgent priority for both Australia and the U.S.” This fiscal year, the U.S. Agency for International Development requested more than $770 million for East Asia and the Pacific, a 17% increase over the prior fiscal year. USAID has added new staff in Micronesia, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Solomon Islands, in addition to staff in Fiji and Papua New Guinea. USAID partners are also laying an undersea internet cable in Palau, in collaboration with Australia and Japan, to connect Palau to high-speed internet. The U.S. military is also expanding its Pacific Pathways joint exercises meant to reinforce U.S. presence in Oceania. In addition to military simulations, Pacific Pathways — which began in 2014 but was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic — leverages U.S. Army Civil Affairs battalions, also known as military diplomats, to perform humanitarian actions intended to foster partnerships and goodwill. It is an example of the U.S. “springing into action mainly to counter China’s influence,” Elina Noor, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Devex via email. Will it work? China’s strategy on humanitarian engagement has been more than 15 years in the making. According to Coutaz, the Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008 accelerated Beijing’s thinking on the importance of humanitarian assistance as a means to establish security. A Chinese government white paper issued after the quake made more mention of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief than any previous papers. As China’s economic and political influence grew, so, too, did its humanitarian efforts. China sent search-and-rescue teams to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake; deployed more than 1,000 personnel to Nepal after the 2015 earthquake; and the Peace Ark has now treated more than 230,000 people from 43 countries and regions worldwide. China has become one of the world’s largest donors, on par with the U.S., with some money given as aid and some as commercial loans. China has even launched its own USAID-equivalent entity, the China International Development Cooperation Agency, established in 2018. Much like the U.S., China’s humanitarian outreach has strategic objectives. Chinese aid aims to establish goodwill with nations with access to natural resources across the Indo-Pacific and Africa, as well as favorable relationships with governments that operate strategic ports and critical shipping lanes. It’s all connected to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the $1 trillion effort to expand China’s influence around the world. BRI includes plans for a 21st-century Maritime Silk Road along the Indian Ocean from Southeast Asia to East Africa. “Chinese aid cannot be assessed in isolation,” said retired United States Brig. Gen. Brian Davis, director of China Research for BluePath Labs LLC and a former U.S. defense attaché to China. “It is part of a broader, whole-of-government approach.” The acceleration of humanitarian assistance is also tied to the growth of China’s military, particularly its Navy. China now commands the world’s largest navy and the largest coast guard, an expansion meant to solidify Chinese presence in the Indo-Pacific. Many of the ships are outfitted with medical capabilities, making them useful for humanitarian missions and disaster relief. The Peace Ark is a navy vessel operated by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN. “Goodwill diplomacy through humanitarian and disaster relief has been a stalwart of U.S. foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific region,” wrote New America in 2020. “China has a growing capacity to conduct these missions worldwide, so it may well see the same gains.” Can the U.S. respond? While U.S. officials have been aware of these developments for many years, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan diverted policymakers’ attention during the previous decade. As the U.S. has drawn down its presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, the government has shifted its focus to the Indo-Pacific, including the State Department, Defense Department, and USAID. Still, China’s actions in the Pacific have, at times, caught U.S. officials by surprise. When China and the Solomon Islands signed a pact in the spring of 2022 to allow visits by Chinese warships to the island nation, USAID officials reacted in internal emails with “Yikes!” and “very troubling.” According to Carnegie’s Elina Noor, this may be partly because the U.S. has not articulated a grand strategy for the region. The Lowy Institute’s Jessica Collins noted that the U.S. did, in fact, announce a Pacific strategy last year, which included promises of more engagement, assistance, and cooperation under Partners in the Blue Pacific. “But,” Collins added, “it’s not the first time the U.S. has made grand promises to the Pacific nations, and memories run strong of promises unmet.” That sentiment was echoed by Johanna Gusman, a regional advisor on human rights and social development for The Pacific Community, or SPC, currently stationed in Fiji. “In the Pacific, there is a palpable legacy of colonialism that is part of the day-to-day context,” Gusman noted via Zoom. “Any outside power telling Pacific Islanders how to do things is going to experience a knee-jerk reaction.” U.S. lawmakers themselves have clamored for an overarching Indo-Pacific strategy. In 2019, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, members of Congress introduced the Southeast Asia Strategy Act. During the debate, Ann Wagner, a Republican representative from Missouri, said the U.S. needed a “proactive, coherent regional strategy” that addressed “all aspects of the relationship, from trade and humanitarian goals to diplomatic and security arrangements.” Sander Levin, a Democrat representative from Michigan, agreed. “If we are not engaged in the Indo-Pacific region … who is going to fill the void? The answer is easy. It is China.” One member of Congress lamented that the U.S. had “routinely underinvested” in both diplomatic and aid assistance in the region. In a speech last year, Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for the Indo-Pacific for the National Security Council, admitted that “in the past we have, perhaps, paid less attention to these critical places than we should have.” Some lawmakers and analysts have argued that the lack of U.S. attention to the Pacific has emboldened China’s ascendance. But one China specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Chinese authorities, cast the situation in a different light. “In their eyes, China has historically always owned the Pacific,” the analyst said. “Asia was always theirs and definitely not the United States’s.” China’s actions today are manifestations of a long-held view of regional supremacy rooted in a deep history independent of U.S. actions. For all the fanfare and propaganda, Chinese development projects in the Pacific do not always succeed. Gusman noted how in Fiji, the Navua Hospital, completed in 2014 with an $11 million contribution from China, today stands largely unused. There are not enough doctors and nurses to staff it, and rumors tell of shoddy construction. Its parking lot is primarily used as a speed trap by Fijian police, she said. For locals, what ultimately matters is not the geopolitics but who can make their lives better. “China does a much better job of winning the hearts and minds of other Asians,” the anonymous analyst conceded. “The Chinese reach out to their Chinese communities in those countries and ask how they can help their fellow citizens. They make themselves really noticeable that we, the Chinese, are here to help you. Their outreach is strategic,” the analyst said. “Because if the countries have to choose a side and a system, will they choose the U.S.-led world order, or what the Chinese are proposing?” That is shaping up to be the principal question facing American policymakers in the years ahead.