China’s Ongoing Warfare to Dominate the Pacific

Promoting division and buying off elites are part of the CCP's unrestricted warfare playbook

Cleo Paskal, nonresident senior fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (Matthew Pearson/Cpi Studios For The Epoch Times)

“Each country has a comprehensive national power numerical value,” says Cleo Paskal, a leading expert on China and the Indo-Pacific region, “and the overt goal of China is to be No. 1 in the world in comprehensive national power—economically and militarily.”

In this episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek discusses the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategy in the Pacific with Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Paskal breaks down the CCP’s moves in the region, from promoting division, and buying off the elites of small island nations, to its ultimate ambition of taking control of Taiwan.

Jan Jekielek: You wrote a fascinating article, “China Winning Entropic Warfare in the Pacific Islands.” What’s going on there?

Cleo Paskal: First, let’s define the term entropic. A state of entropy is when things start to fall apart, or fragment and become chaotic. If you look at how the Chinese Communist Party conducts its political warfare and targets countries, part of it involves entropic warfare. A core component of that foreign policy, as we see in the Chinese think tanks, is comprehensive national power.

It’s a term that the Chinese use to rank countries; an empirical metric. Each country has a comprehensive national power numerical value, and China’s overt goal is to be No. 1 in the world in comprehensive national power—economically and militarily. If you have a rare earth mineral mine in your country and a Chinese company is mining it, they count that toward their comprehensive national power, not yours, because it’s feeding into their systems.

It’s very empirical, and it’s a little bit insane. The Chinese Communist Party thinks it can break everything, even humanity, down into numbers. But it’s an important driving force. According to this view of comprehensive national power, there are two ways of improving your relative ranking. One is the typical American way, where you work hard and get better. The other is you knock everybody else down. If you’ve knocked them down, you’re doing better than they are.

From a comprehensive national power perspective, this explains why it is beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party to pump fentanyl into middle America, because it destroys communities and families. Entropic warfare creates this disintegration within a target country.

Unrestricted warfare is another Chinese term. It’s the name of a 1999 book by two PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Air Force colonels about methods of warfare against enemies like the United States. They listed 24 different types of warfare, including drug warfare.

So, we’ve got two Chinese terms: comprehensive national power and unrestricted warfare. They look at a country and if they can do elite capture, they prefer to do that. They get the country through the elite leaders. If they can’t do that, then they use unrestricted warfare to wage entropic warfare to disintegrate and weaken those societies, so that resistance to Chinese coercion is lessened.

They tend to identify authoritarian leaders and then back them. In the case of entropy or civil war, an authoritarian leader has an advantage, especially if they’re backed with PRC assets and intel. This is exactly what happened in the Solomon Islands during a three-year period. In 2019, the Solomons switched from recognizing Taiwan as China to recognizing the People’s Republic of China [PRC].

Mr. Jekielek: How did that happen?

Ms. Paskal: The usual elite capture. And we’ve forgotten how important the Pacific Islands are strategically. The Solomon Islands are the home of the Battle of Guadalcanal, which was just over 80 years ago this past summer. This was a highly strategic location that the Japanese needed to control if they were to control Australian access into the region. And the Americans needed to control it if they were going to push back the Japanese.

That movement was very closely studied by the Chinese. They learn a lot from history. They’re trying to do with political warfare what was bought in blood by the Americans during the liberation of the region.

This time, China got the Solomons by buying off the right people. At that 80th commemoration of Guadalcanal, all these high-level people came for this commemoration. There were Japanese and American representatives. But the prime minister of the Solomon Islands didn’t show up, because he’s so deep in China’s pocket.

The Solomons switched in 2019 from Taiwan to China, and also signed a security agreement with the PRC allowing the deployment of Chinese military personnel to protect Chinese citizens and assets in the Solomon Islands at the request of the Solomon Islands’ government.

They also bought off 39 of the 50 members of Parliament, which was enough to change the constitution to delay elections. This is what happens. A pro-PRC authoritarian leader sets the groundwork to delay elections, and if there’s a civil war because of it, that’s fine with him, because his Chinese backers will keep him in power. That’s entropic warfare.

Mr. Jekielek: So there is this whole idea of wanting to establish the rest of the world as vassal states to the CCP. Is that how you see it?

Ms. Paskal: Yes. There is the imperial vassal state, and you pay your tribute. And the advantage of doing this in the Pacific islands is that they are very small. The Solomons are 350,000, 400,000 people, something like that. You can see the mechanisms a lot more clearly. You can see who China is targeting, and what they’re going after. You can see them going after democracy and the judiciary and the media.

Three countries—Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia—through the voluntary Compact of Free Association have given over their defense and security to the United States. They literally trust their lives to the United States. These Pacific Islands are small, but when you look at the zone they cover, they are as large as the continental United States.

If you have that zone and Guam and the Marianas, which are part of the United States, the security perimeter of our country goes from Hawaii all the way to just behind the Philippines. It’s very important strategically. Those countries are independent countries, and they have these Compacts of Free Association with the United States.

Mr. Jekielek: So this is of much greater importance to the United States than many people realize. Let’s jump to Taiwan because this is the critical question.

Ms. Paskal: If you want to take Taiwan—and we know that the Chinese want to take Taiwan—and you plan on holding Taiwan, you need to have functional control in at least that band of Pacific Islands. And if you go down the map and you’ve got the Solomons and PNG and maybe Vanuatu, then you can cut off the Australians and the New Zealanders. It’s also a lot more difficult for Japan to come down from the north.

If they take Taiwan, then what will the American allies in the region think? Will the Philippines think the United States is going to back them? What will the Japanese do? What will the Malaysians and Indonesians do? You’d get a whole band of failure in the U.S. ability to protect allies and partners in the region.

Mr. Jekielek: Some people might be thinking that the United States is already way over-extended. Why are Taiwan and that whole region so important at this stage?

Ms. Paskal: This is a battle of systems. So you have a choice. You have a choice of a system that’s happening in the Solomons, where you accept the Chinese Communist Party. Or you live a free life in the faith of your choosing with the people you care about.

And the Chinese Communist Party is fundamentally expansionist. They don’t know how to not expand. And if China takes Taiwan, the United States will have demonstrably failed at defending a successful democratic society. That is a key component of the strategic architecture of the Indo-Pacific. It’s a very, very big win. Taiwan is incredibly important strategically, philosophically, economically, and any way you can imagine. That’s why China wants it.

Mr. Jekielek: And not to mention chip manufacturing.

Ms. Paskal: Yes. The chip manufacturing is important, but when you get back to comprehensive national power, it’s like COVID. Wherever COVID came from, China knew it had a problem, and what did they do? They blocked internal flights and allowed external flights, so it was allowed to spread.

They turned a domestic epidemic into a global pandemic. Because if your mentality is comprehensive national power, you’re going to take a hit when you know you’ve got a problem. But if everybody else takes a hit, and you use that moment to position yourself, you can come out relatively ahead, which they did. The same thing with the chips. If the chip manufacturing is destroyed, it hurts China, but it also hurts everybody else. If they can be in a position where they’re hurt relatively less, they come out ahead.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.