The first sign that something unusual was unfolding in the Solomon Islands was when the Chinese police showed up at Fighter One, a quiet village ringed with banana trees.
The Chinese officers gathered villagers on a grassy patch and proposed a system they said would help keep them safe. They suggested that the residents fill out cards providing the names, addresses and dates of birth for each household member. They recommended collecting fingerprints and palm prints — both highly unusual and legally dubious in a country lacking laws governing personal data collection.
Under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, Beijing has tried to export its ideas about security to the world in countries like the Solomon Islands, a Pacific nation 3,000 miles away. Where Washington offers treaties that commit American troops to defend U.S. allies against external threats, Beijing offers something different: equipment and tactics for governments to keep order at home.
That pitch has appealed to many authoritarian and weak democratic states in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia that view domestic threats to regime security as an equal, if not bigger, priority than fielding an army.
But the Solomon Islands, which had signed a security pact with China in 2022, is also emerging as an early test of the limits of China’s efforts.
China’s policing in the Solomon Islands has gone hand in hand with the growth of its mining and other businesses, and the need for Beijing to protect its interests overseas.
The effort is more than just about technology and policing tactics, it is as much about spreading an ideology centered on state control.
When they visited Fighter One, the Chinese police were responding to a request from the community to help keep rowdy young men and boys from coming to their village at night and getting buzzed on betel nut and a potent moonshine called kwaso.
Their solution was to introduce an obscure Mao-era community surveillance system: the Fengqiao Experience.
Named after Fengqiao, a town in eastern China, the system encouraged neighbors to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies. The system has been revived under Mr. Xi as part of a push to snuff out any challenges to the Chinese Communist Party.
In China, the system calls for the police to monitor individual households in sprawling apartment complexes, in one example assigning each unit a color code that denoted whether occupants presented a security risk. The police have also visited the homes of minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to promote party policies. Government workers have visited churches to give “anti-cult” lectures. And companies are required to register their employees in police databases.
The idea of introducing such a heavy-handed style of state surveillance in the Solomon Islands alarmed local politicians and observers in nearby countries like Australia, who worried it could give the government the tools to stifle freedoms.
The Fengqiao pilot was suspended after an outcry. And the election this month of Matthew Wale, a prime minister who has historically been skeptical of Beijing, raises questions about China’s foothold in the country, and whether its ideas travel as easily as the party hopes.
A Model Police State
China has cast itself as a model of policing for other countries to emulate, pointing to low rates of violent crime as proof of its success.
But the vast security apparatus that keeps citizens safe is frequently deployed to crush political dissent.
From the start, each citizen is assigned a household registration card that restricts where that person can live. Movement within the country is monitored by a growing network of surveillance cameras, many of which are equipped with artificial intelligence software that can recognize not only faces but also the way a person walks.
In once-restive areas of China like the western region of Xinjiang, millions of Uyghurs have been subjected to biometric data harvesting that included giving DNA samples, iris scans and voice pattern samples.
All of this is necessary in the eyes of the party, which sees its legitimacy as tied to its ability to preserve social order.
Countries with like-minded governments have been welcoming the opportunity to use China’s assistance to entrench their power.
When Vietnam’s leader, To Lam, visited Beijing this year, the governments pledged to work closely to safeguard “political security.” Mr. Xi told Mr. Lam that they shared an interest in defending the “the ruling position of the Communist Party.” With Cambodia, China pledged in April to work on “jointly resisting external infiltration and preventing ‘color revolutions’,” — code for pro-democracy movements or popular uprisings that Beijing views as Western-backed plots to destabilize one-party rule.
China is training police forces in many developing countries. Since 2000, it has held nearly 900 training sessions including on counterterrorism, riot control and border control, for at least 138 countries, according to a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“China is trying to rewrite the standards of what global security is and which countries are the best at providing it,” said Sheena Chestnut Greitens, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of the Carnegie report.
It has embedded its officers in police forces in the Central African Republic and the Pacific island nations of Vanuatu and Kiribati. It provided thousands of surveillance cameras to Ecuador in 2011 that enabled the country’s domestic intelligence agency to better monitor political opponents.
And it trained a unit of South African police in 2016 that was later deployed to intimidate and assassinate political rivals of then-President Jacob Zuma, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Washington-based organization that is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.
China may be seeking to improve the global public image of its authoritarian model by exporting its police training.
“It allows China to portray their system as a public safety success rather than a human rights failure,” Prof. Greitens said.
A Pacific Laboratory
China scored its biggest victory in the Solomon Islands in 2019 when the government there severed decades of diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of recognizing Beijing. That opened the floodgates for Chinese financial support, trade and investment.
The switch, as the change is referred to by residents, raised concerns in Australia, the United States and other Western allies about Beijing encroaching on their traditional sphere of influence.
It also inflamed longstanding tensions between residents of the more developed island of Guadalcanal, the site of the capital, Honiara, and those from the poorer island of Malaita, which had maintained closer ties to Taiwan through farming and medical programs.
Those tensions erupted into deadly riots in 2021 that targeted Honiara’s more than century-old Chinese community, who represent less than 2 percent of the city’s population of about 170,000, but dominate storefronts selling household goods, groceries and alcohol and also control lucrative logging and mining interests.
Protesters, mainly migrants from Malaita, tried to storm the personal residence of the prime minister at the time, Manasseh Sogavare. The unrest prompted Mr. Sogavare to sign the security pact with Beijing the following year, justifying it as a way to combat “hard internal threats.” He also dismissed his country’s traditional security partner, Australia, as “inadequate.”
A copy of the pact has never been publicly released. But excerpts leaked online show that the agreement allows the Solomon Islands to request that China send “police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces” to restore social order and protect Chinese personnel and projects in the country. (Australia also has a security agreement with the Solomon Islands, though its focus has shifted in recent years from maintaining law and order toward providing police training.)
Beijing embedded its first batch of police in the Royal Solomon Island Police Force in 2022. Around the same time, China donated riot gear worth $1.5 million that included bulletproof vests, shields, helmets and stab-resistant suits and gloves. Photographs on the Solomon Islands government website show Chinese police training local police how to wield batons and anti-riot forks, a tool commonly seen in China that is about the length of a pitchfork with a U-shaped prong to pin down a suspect.
The presence of the Chinese police is just another example of how Beijing is advancing its interests in a country that lacks the power and clout to say “no,” says Peter Kenilorea Jr., who was a longtime opposition politician when we interviewed him late last year in Honiara, and is now in the new prime minister’s cabinet, overseeing national planning.
He argued that the power imbalance has also allowed Chinese firms in mining and timber, two of the Solomon Island’s biggest industries, to raze forests and pollute rivers with mining runoff while using illegal ports to evade government fees, with little consequence.
The Chinese “come and they do their own thing,” said Mr. Kenilorea, who opposed the switch from Taiwan to Beijing and whose father was the Solomon Islands’s first leader after gaining independence. “It’s like open season.”
Are You Fengqiao Experienced?
The China Police Liaison Team, as they are formally called, operate out of the Rove Police Headquarters in Honiara, a humid, weather-beaten capital city where diesel fumes from the vehicles that clog the lone highway hang heavy in the air.
Beijing’s presence stands out among the rows of low-slung concrete and corrugated-steel buildings. There’s a Chinese-built sports stadium and a hospital. Chinese foremen working for Chinese state-owned construction companies are supervising the paving of roads. Chinese people run hair salons, massage parlors and restaurants serving dim sum and hot pot.
The 10 or so members of the Chinese police team are seconded in the Solomon Islands for months on end before being rotated out. They seemed to keep largely to themselves. Members of the Chinese community who spoke to The Times said they did not recall seeing the police around much.
The police team has been held up by Chinese state propaganda as an example of the country’s benevolence toward its neighbors as a regional power. The People’s Public Security University of China, a national police university, published an article in 2024 describing the officers as roughing it so that poor villagers could benefit from the wisdom of the Fengqiao Experience.
Team members suffered from infections because of a lack of medical care in remote areas. Their rooms were infested with “mosquitoes, centipedes, rats, and cockroaches.” They ate mostly “bread, biscuits, and locally produced cassava.”
At the same time, the Solomon Islands government website has been filled with news releases showing Chinese police shaking hands with local officials, donating clothes and sports equipment to villagers, serving tea to university students, putting on drone shows and kung fu demonstrations and holding PowerPoint presentations.
Analysts say the support helps address a shortage of resources, but it was unclear if China’s influx of aid would benefit the Solomon Islands over the long term.
Virginia Comolli, head of the Pacific Program at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, who coauthored a recent report on Chinese policing and interviewed residents of Fighter One, found instances in which donated Chinese police vehicles had sat idle because there was not enough money for fuel, or there were no spare parts to repair them.
“They’re getting lots of donations, but the crux of the matter is always, is this sustainable?” Ms. Comolli said.
Other donations from China include two police speedboats valued at over $400,000, an anti-riot vehicle equipped with a water cannon, and equipment to open a forensic autopsy laboratory.
Some residents say they are willing to give China a chance. Anything, they say, is better than the status quo in the Solomon Islands, which the United Nations has named one of the 44 least developed countries in the world.
“We’ve been depending on different countries for so long,” yet nothing has improved, said Jacqueline Maeli, 43, a resident of Tasahe B, a hilltop community of makeshift homes in Guadalcanal that was visited by the Chinese police team last summer.
Ms. Maeli, who wore a secondhand T-shirt that read “China Fantastic,” is agnostic about what flag the police fly.
“Whichever government that helps and makes this country work better, I’ll go with it,” she said.
The Backlash
When the news emerged that the Chinese police team had visited Fighter One and proposed collecting fingerprints and other data, some Solomon Islanders expressed concerns.
Celsus Talifilu, who is now serving as special secretary to the new prime minister, wrote a blog post arguing that the police had no authority to collect vast amounts of personal information, register individual biometric data, or conduct neighborhood surveillance.
Mr. Talifilu wrote that the Fengqiao model’s emphasis on monitoring and coercion threatened social harmony and local customs such as having village chiefs resolve conflicts and disputes.
“This is against our norms,” he said in an interview in Honiara. “People will not take lightly to being spied on by their neighbors.”
In Australia, a newspaper ran an editorial criticizing the Chinese police team’s actions in the Solomon Islands. Security analysts at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute wrote that “the risk is that the Solomon Islands becomes a proving ground for authoritarian practices under the guise of community service.”
China’s propaganda organs pushed back. The Global Times described Western reactions as “the discomfort of former colonial powers whose exclusive influence in the Pacific is no longer assured.” It also said China was not imposing the Fengqiao model on the Solomon Islands; it was merely offering it up as something to consider.
The Solomon Islands police issued a statement on Facebook asserting that the Fengqiao pilot program was locally led and not introduced at the behest of China. It denied that the program was about “surveillance or coercion” and said no data would be transferred to any “foreign authority.”
The Solomon Islands police and the Chinese Embassy in Honiara did not respond to requests for interviews.
Following the furor, the Fengqiao pilot program at Fighter One was suspended. No biometric data was ever shared. The noisy youth remain a problem.
Some residents said they would still welcome having the Chinese police play a role in their community, which houses some of Honiara’s professional elite, including lawyers, judges and doctors.
“We are open minded,” said Pedical Togamae, 42, an emergency room doctor, who built his two-story home shaded with trees from scratch after purchasing a plot of land in Fighter One in 2013, when there were no roads leading to the village.
Mr. Togamae said the local police are so short on staff that they cannot be relied upon to show up. If giving his fingerprints to the Chinese police team would help end the nightly nuisance, he would gladly oblige.
“We just want a peaceful community,” Mr. Togamae said.
