Crime and Cooperation

Transnational Crime in Southeast Asia, Germany in Southeast Asia, Germany in Southeast Asia, How China is Winning the Solomon Islands,

May 26, 2024

Transnational Crime in Southeast Asia

By USIP

Organised crime is a significant driver of conflict globally. It preys on weak governance, slack law enforcement, and inadequate regulation. It tears at the fabric of societies by empowering and enriching armed actors and fueling violent conflict. In Asia, criminal groups prop up corrupt and dangerous regimes from Myanmar to North Korea, posing a direct threat to regional stability.

Concerned by the impact of organised crime on governance, local conflict, and global security, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) formed a study group to explore the dimensions and nature of Southeast Asia’s China-origin criminal networks and the scourge of online scamming they are now spreading globally. Since 2021, the power, reach, and influence of these criminal networks have expanded to the point that they now directly threaten human security globally while posing a growing threat to the national security of the United States and many of its allies and partners around the world.

Equipped with a series of case studies by experts on the key Southeast Asian countries involved with these networks and on the particular methodology and advanced technology employed in scamming, the study group developed a clearer understanding of the interconnections that facilitate the criminal networks’ operations and endow them with the flexibility to remain one step ahead of law enforcement.

The resulting study illustrates how these networks have used their power and influence to develop a web of scam compounds within the region, centered primarily in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, but involving most other countries of the region in the management of their operations and fraudulent proceeds. It analyzes in detail the nature of the online scams, how the criminal groups utilize advanced technology, how they gain control over weak and corrupt governments, how they traffic labor and deploy torture to engage victims in forced criminality, how they launder stolen funds, and how they attempt to whitewash their criminal activity.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspects of this spreading regional—and increasingly global—criminal phenomenon are the extent and character of the networks supporting it. They operate in both licit and illicit business spheres, gaining access to regional government and business elites through apparently legitimate connections and creating lucrative incentives for local elites to associate with and provide material support to their criminal activity, which is often hidden by a veneer of apparent legitimacy, such as casinos, resorts, hotels, and special economic zones (SEZs). The dispersal of these networks into the region is strongly correlated with the areas of weakest governance and the most profound state-embedded criminality. The melding of these groups with corrupt local elites has generated a malign ecosystem that is rapidly evolving into the most powerful criminal network of the modern era.

The only hope of destabilizing and disrupting this complex and entrenched criminal network in Southeast Asia is a dedicated and coordinated international effort.

Key Takeaways

Over the past decade, Southeast Asia has become a major breeding ground for transnational criminal networks emanating predominantly from China. These organizations target millions of victims around the world with illegal and unregulated online gambling and sophisticated scamming operations. As of the end of 2023, a conservative estimate of the annual value of funds stolen worldwide by these syndicates approached $64 billion.

The scamming operations proliferating in the region today have their roots in a regional network of loosely regulated casinos and online gambling that, beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the 2000s, some governments promoted as a legitimate contribution to economic development. Chinese nationals were the main target of the overseas gambling business due to a complete ban on gambling in China, where the annual market for gaming is estimated at $40 billion to $80 billion.

A range of forces have led this malign activity to take on new characteristics and, propelled by advances in digital technology, to reach beyond the region to target a global audience. These forces include the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; expanding pockets of lax government regulation and law enforcement in the region; the spread of conflict in Myanmar; and the co-option of the state apparatus by gambling-related criminal interests in various countries, Cambodia and Laos in particular.

While Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos form the epicenter of the regional scamming industry, most countries in the region contribute in some form to the operations of the criminal networks, facilitating illegal trafficking of forced labor into scam centers, providing a financial base for laundering the proceeds from the illicit activity, and assisting the development of advanced digital technology essential to the sophisticated gambling, scamming, and financial fraud carried out by the criminal networks.

The scamming operations are powered by hundreds of thousands of people, many duped by fraudulent online ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds, where they are held by armed gangs in prisonlike conditions and forced to run online scams. These victims of forced labor (along with a small number of workers who willingly participate) come from more than 60 countries around the world. The scam compounds in Myanmar have an additional perimeter of armed protection provided by border guard forces under the authority of the Myanmar military or its proxies. In Cambodia, speculative real estate investments—casinos and hotels left empty by the COVID pandemic’s suppression of tourism—have been fortified and repurposed for online scamming in a vast web of elite-protected criminality spread across the country. In Laos, SEZs such as Zhao Wei’s notorious Golden Triangle SEZ are the dominant mode of criminal operation.

Interconnected both within and between countries, the networks are able to evade occasional crackdowns by law enforcement by transferring their scamming operations between compounds within a country or between countries, depending on the circumstances. A move by China’s law enforcement in late 2023 to close down the scam compounds on Myanmar’s border with China led many of them to relocate to the south in Myanmar’s Karen State, on the border with Thailand, as well as to Cambodia and Laos.

The extensive scamming operations in Myanmar along the Chinese and Thai borders have become a key driver of the country’s internal conflict.

Inasmuch as the scam compounds have been protected and run by affiliates of the military junta government in Myanmar, they have also become a factor in the ongoing rebellion against the country’s military coup. In the Kokang area in the northeast of Myanmar, along the Chinese border, the border guard force that operated a large array of scam centers was attacked by a coalition of armed ethnic organizations seeking to wrest control of Kokang from the Myanmar military and its border guard and close down the scam centers.

In Karen State on the Thai border, the scam compounds have become surrounded by open conflict between anti-junta Karen armed forces and military forces supported by the Karen Border Guard Force hosting the criminal compounds. Widespread conflict between the Myanmar military and anti-junta resistance forces in Myanmar not only makes the military and its associated forces—as well as some of the militia groups involved in the criminal activity—more reliant on the revenue from the criminal operations, but also contributes to the militarized fortification of their compounds.

Ample evidence suggests that protection of the scamming industry is now of strategic interest to the ruling elites in Myanmar, Cambodia, and other countries in the region due to the industry’s profitability and the nature of state involvement.

In Cambodia, the return on cyber scamming is estimated to exceed $12.5 billion annually—half the country’s formal GDP—with many compounds owned by local elites. More broadly, the study group calculates that the funds stolen by these criminal syndicates based in Mekong countries likely exceeds $43.8 billion a year—nearly 40 percent of the combined formal GDP of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar. A significant share of these profits is reported to flow to the Myanmar military and to ruling elites in Cambodia and Laos.

The criminal groups masterminding these scams have set up complex money-laundering operations to move funds into the formal economy, risking corruption of major international financial institutions.

The criminal networks’ methods have evolved over the past decade as they have sought to launder deposits made to online gambling accounts from China. Such industrial-scale laundering is prolific throughout Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam and in financial hubs such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, where criminal groups take advantage of strategic vulnerabilities in financial systems and invest heavily in cutting-edge financial technologies that are not well understood by law enforcement. Investigative reporting has also exposed many examples of how laundered funds move into real estate across the globe, including in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, in Canada, and in the United States.

The relationship between these criminal groups and the Chinese government is a confusing complex of mixed incentives and mutual opportunity, leading Chinese law enforcement to focus on some of the Chinese-origin criminals behind the scamming networks but not on others.

China’s strict laws against gambling, in person and online, have pushed organized crime groups into Southeast Asia, where they can tap this lucrative market from a safe distance and align with local elites to protect themselves from Chinese law enforcement. While Chinese police try to crack down on the networks with campaigns targeting illegal online gambling, fraud, and money laundering in China and elsewhere, the same crime groups maintain close relations with members of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as partnerships with a range of Chinese state actors, including business enterprises, party agencies, and quasi-governmental institutions.

As the criminal networks have become more powerful, the Chinese state, recognizing that it can no longer control them, has become more concerned about the threat their activity poses to its citizens, who are major victims of the criminal scamming and the capture of forced labor through fraudulent trafficking. At the same time, however, Beijing appears to see opportunity in instrumentalizing the rising global reach and influence of criminal groups to advance China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its new Global Security Initiative, which aims directly at countering global security norms.

Beijing has found in countries such as Cambodia and Laos that leaders will align closely with China politically in exchange for Beijing ignoring lucrative criminal activity. Meanwhile, rampant corruption in China also poses a major challenge to any Chinese crackdown, with anti-corruption agencies struggling with countless cases of police accepting bribes or favors to ignore illicit activity or undermine enforcement.

The United States has become a major victim of the Southeast Asian scamming industry, with annual financial losses mounting rapidly.

Recent documentaries broadcast or posted on major US and international media outlets have exposed the experience of victims across the United States who have together lost billions of dollars to sophisticated scams and fraud at the hands of malign actors operating across Southeast Asia. In 2023, for instance, Americans and Canadians are estimated to have lost $3.5 billion and $350 million, respectively.

In December 2023, the US Department of Justice announced the indictment of four individuals based in the United States for allegedly laundering over $80 million in scam profits, confirming that the criminal groups are now working on American soil. This scamming industry could soon rival fentanyl as one of the top dangers that Chinese criminal networks pose to the United States. In 2023, US authorities warned Americans of the danger of being trafficked into scam syndicates in Southeast Asia and noted that US residents are now the top target of the criminal networks’ financial crimes.

Aside from targeting American citizens, the criminal networks behind these scams also threaten US security interests for three key reasons. First, they endanger democracy, good governance, and stability around the world by co-opting local elites, undermining law enforcement, weakening state authority, and threatening the United States’ strategic interest in a free and open Indo-Pacific.

Second, the criminal networks have taken advantage of weak governance to gain control over territory and acquire opaque influence over the governments of Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, from where they can victimize Americans with near-absolute impunity. And third, China’s government and law enforcement, after failing to take this problem seriously for years, are now using the presence of Chinese-led crime groups in other countries to justify striking increases in the presence of China’s authoritarian police around the globe.

Policy Options

Constraining the transnational criminal networks examined in this report will require a holistic response that addresses their causes, effects, power, reach, and methods of operation. A country-by-country approach will be defeated by the criminal groups’ agility in hopping borders and outrunning law enforcement.

There is no overstating the degree to which robust international coordination is central to combating transnational organized crime. Tackling the scamming networks will require harnessing the research and law enforcement capacities of key countries and international organizations. The United States and China, as the two most strongly affected victims of the online scamming industry, would be key to any international response. Should they fail to find means of coordinating their efforts, criminal networks will exploit the resulting gaps to sustain their activities.

An effective response by United States government will require a coordinated, whole-of-government effort that draws on the competencies of federal agencies in information collection, financial management, and law enforcement.

A coordinated US mechanism of this kind would facilitate consistent US cooperation and coordination with countries in Southeast Asia and others affected by the criminal scamming. It would help compile and centralize a more robust information base than that which currently exists. Such a response would be most effectively centered in a National Security Council interagency task force. One major objective of a US response should be to strengthen the governmental and law enforcement capabilities and actions of Southeast Asian countries, not only to address this problem in their own countries but also to work together to interrupt the ability of the networks to move around the region and exploit weaknesses that provide new openings for their operations.

Buttressing these efforts should be a concerted effort by the US government to hold accountable all evidenced criminals— including compound owners, state-embedded co-conspirators, and affiliated corporations— through sanctions, asset seizure, travel bans, and other safeguarding mechanisms.

The US response should begin by addressing the serious lack of information on all aspects of the scamming industry, not least the constantly advancing technology that facilitates the scamming operations, their financial underpinnings, and money laundering.

Working internationally in Southeast Asia and globally, this effort should coordinate data collection on a worldwide basis, engaging not only government sources but also civil society, media, business, and financial institutions. One of the greatest weaknesses of current law enforcement efforts and other attempts to counteract the criminal activities involved in the scamming industry is the lack of systematic and coordinated data collection. This gap must be urgently filled if law enforcement is to have a full picture of the problem, its vast and evolving network of criminal actors, and its constantly shifting dynamics. Effective data collection demands significant international cooperation.

To protect its own citizens, the US government should conduct a nationwide public awareness program to draw attention to the scamming methods used to draw potential victims into fraudulent investment, dating, and gambling schemes designed to impoverish them.

Germany in Southeast Asia

In March 2024, Germany hosted the leaders of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand as part of its efforts to engage Southeast Asia. Germany's overtures to the region are motivated by its aim to reduce dependence on China, diversify supply chains, and secure critical minerals for the green transition.

The visits also highlighted Germany's support for the region's democracies and its commitment to upholding the rules-based international order.

Despite facing domestic challenges, Germany recognises the potential of Southeast Asia's dynamic workforce in addressing its demand for skilled workers. To further strengthen its presence in the region, Germany should consider securing a permanent seat at ASEAN gatherings, revitalizing EU-ASEAN free trade agreement talks, and addressing bureaucratic complexities faced by foreign workers.

Germany observed its Southeast Asia Week in March 2024, hosting Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin. These visits highlighted the resolve of Social Democratic Party (SPD) Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ‘traffic light’ coalition to walk the talk on engaging Southeast Asia and to pursue a de-risking strategy towards China.

In 2020, Germany became a party to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia as it rolled out its first ‘Policy Guidelines for the Indo-Pacific’, mapped out by then-chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. The guideline provides a roadmap for Germany to partner with ASEAN to boost trade and investment ties, fight climate change and defend the liberal international order.

Germany’s Southeast Asia overture is motivated by incumbent Chancellor Scholz’s aim to reduce dependence on China — a lesson learned from Berlin’s reliance on Russia before the invasion of Ukraine. Germany’s 2023 strategic paper on China referred to Beijing as a simultaneous ‘partner, competitor and systemic rival’.

By inviting Anwar, Marcos and Srettha to Berlin, Scholzsent a strong message to German businesses to speed up the drive towards de-risking, diversifying supply hubs and relocating plants from China by turning to Southeast Asia. Germany is also looking to Southeast Asia for supplies of critical minerals needed for the green transition, with Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand on the radar as potential suppliers.

Southeast Asia is a natural partner for Germany and the European Union in times of global uncertainty as a result of geopolitical competition and geoeconomic fragmentation. If Donald Trump returns to the White House in January 2025, EU–ASEAN cooperation will be more important than ever in upholding the norms of a rules-based international order and multilateralism.

Standing alongside Marcos, Scholz also threw strong support behind the Philippines amid its increased resistance since 2023 against China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea. Germany has dispatched the warship Bayern to assist freedom of navigation operations in the maritime Indo-Pacific, supplied the Philippine Coast Guard with state-of-the-art military drones, and promised more to come.

Noticeably, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, whose leaders received red carpet welcomes in Berlin, are either functional or semi-functional democracies in a region surrounded by rising authoritarianism — as demonstrated in Indonesia’s recent presidential election. Thailand itself has seen a flawed post-coup return to democracy with the poll-winning progressive party facing disbandment after being systematically obstructed from taking power. These endeavours to engage the democratically declining region reflects Germany’s broader attempt to strike a balance between normative and pragmatic foreign policies.

German leaders have frequented Southeast Asia over the last 18 months. Chancellor Scholz visited Vietnam and Singapore on his way to the G20 summit in November 2022. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Cambodia and Malaysia in February 2023 before his debuts in Vietnam and Thailand in January 2024. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore as recently as January 2024.

To further bolster its regional presence, Germany should also consider securing a permanent table at ASEAN gatherings, including the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus. The absence of Baerbock and her French counterpart Stéphane Séjourné from the recent EU Indo-Pacific Ministerial Forum in February 2024 was a missed opportunity.

Thai Prime Minister Srettha has pledged to German and French leaders to revitalise the decade-long free trade agreement (FTA) talks with the European Union, after EU–ASEAN FTA negotiations were scrapped in 2009. Within ASEAN, the European Union has two bilateral FTAs in effect with Singapore and Vietnam and is negotiating FTAs with Indonesia and the Philippines. Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos export to the European Union without tariffs and quotas under the Everything but Arms trade scheme.

At home, Chancellor Scholz is dealing with a long queue of domestic crises, including economic woes, an aging population, numerous transport service strikes and the rise of far-right extremism. His ruling SPD polled third among German political parties with 16 per cent nationwide support, trailing behind the extreme far-right Alternative for Germany and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, which respectively received 18 and 30 per cent support according to a March 2024 survey.

Southeast Asia’s dynamic workforce can help meet Germany’s demand for skilled workers. To attract the best and the brightest from the region, Germany must address the far-right anti-immigrant wave and ensure that all feel welcome in the country.

Berlin also must address the bureaucratic complexity faced by foreign workers by cutting down wait times for permits needed to enter and work in Germany. Facilitating greater mobility of people between ASEAN and the European Union will help Germany meet its domestic demand for foreign talent.

How China is Winning the Solomon Islands

By Cleo Paskal and Grant Newsham

Since 2019, Beijing has spent a considerable amount of money and effort setting up its position in the Solomon Islands and openly assisting in the crushing of dissent. April 17 was election day in the Solomon Islands, a country of around 750,000 people northeast of Australia that is best known to most Americans as the site of the World War II battles of Guadalcanal, Iron Bottom Sound, and Bloody Ridge.

The outcome of the vote is still being decided, but so far, it is shaping up as a coup for China against the will of the people—one that will have major strategic implications for the United States. It is a case study of how Beijing is expanding its influence to the point of control throughout the world—and the West is not just watching it happen. It is helping.

The Vote

On April 17, Solomon Islanders voted in two elections. They chose their representatives for the national and provincial parliaments. Solomon Islanders voted overwhelmingly for change. At the national level, the government of former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is deeply unpopular. As Professor Anne-Marie Brady, Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, pointed out, “76 percent voted against Sogavare’s OUR Party in the 2024 election, and they only [won] fifteen seats” in the fifty-member national parliament.

However, once Solomon Islanders voted, power moved from the people to the members of parliament. Members pick the prime minister (at the national level) and the premier (at the provincial level) from among their own. In a rough U.S. analogy, imagine if the House of Representatives voted among themselves to see which member would be President of the United States or if state legislators chose their governor. On top of that, there are multiple political parties and independents.

Parliamentary Musical Chairs

The choice of prime minister was closely watched around the world. In 2019, Sogavare switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, presided over a security deal with the PRC that could allow for People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces to deploy in the country, and agreed to the installation of over 160 Huawei telecom towers. On a July 2023 visit to China, Sogavare talked about being “back home.”

Meanwhile, Sogavare worked in a building whose construction was financed by American taxpayer money in memory of the Americans who died in the war. Furthermore, Sogavare even skipped the commemorations of the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Guadalcanal.

Much of the reporting on the recent election hinged on his success or failure. On the day of, his party fared poorly, and he was narrowly reelected. When he stepped aside as the prime ministerial candidate in favor of Jeremiah Manele, it was reported that “Australian officials were relieved.” As Manele later gained support from enough members to claim the premiership, Australian media announced “A new era for the Solomon Islands.”

This showed a serious misunderstanding of both the Solomons’ politics and how PRC influence operations work. Beijing doesn’t just back one horse. It fills its stables with as many docile rides as possible. The new prime minister, Manele, was foreign minister under Sogavare and was a key point person for much of the engagement with China, including the switch from Taiwan. Nor has Sogavare gone away. He is now the Finance and Treasury Minister. Indeed, much of the old gang never left.

In his first speech, Manele discussed prioritizing legislation to facilitate mining, logging, and the establishment of special economic zones (SEZs)—all PRC priorities. SEZs are a particular security concern as they can be used to bypass customs, immigration, employment, and environmental regulations.

As Professor Brady put it, in spite of Solomon Islanders voting for change, Sogavare’s party is “now back in power, in control of all the key portfolios. The voting process may have been relatively free and fair, but the voting negotiations after it were far from it.”

Indeed, for those who care about the democratic will of the people or about forestalling the PRC’s ability to degrade the Solomons’ sovereignty, perhaps fatally, this is possibly one of the worst outcomes as many external experts are in full “nothing to see here mode,” and the fight isn’t even over.

With the national government firmly in the hands of the same old gang—who had also spent the past few years ensuring as much of the press, judiciary, police, and other levers of the state as possible were under their control—the battle for provincial premiers continues.

The most consequential one is the province of Malaita. It is the Solomons’ most populous province and, since the switch to China, has been the epicenter of the debate over the economic, cultural, and environmental implications of aligning with Beijing.

Malaita Holds Back the CCP Flood

In 2019, the Malaitan parliament chose a former schoolteacher, Daniel Suidani, as its premier. After Sogavare switched to China, Suidani’s Malaita Province Government (MPG), backed by the traditional chiefs, issued the “Auki Communiqué” explaining why they didn’t want CCP-linked businesses operating in the province. It is one of the most precise, principled, and courageous statements put out by any government about the Chinese Communist Party.

One reason the provincial legislature cited in its declaration was that it “acknowledges the freedom of religion as a fundamental right and further observes the entrenched Christian faith and belief in God by Malaitan… peoples and therefore rejects the Chinese Communist Party—CCP and its formal systems based on atheist ideology”. Also “MPG specifically observed the need to be free from unwarranted interference of persons and therefore reject any notion of a police state.”

What happened next shows the lengths China will go to eradicate dissent even in other nations, often with the willing compliance of its proxies.

Crushing the Opposition

Suidani suffered a life-threatening health condition requiring treatment outside the country. Being an honest politician in a developing country, he couldn’t afford it. The national government let it be known that he’d get the funding if he dropped his opposition to CCP operations in Malaita. He refused—literally saying he’d prefer to die than take Chinese money. The president of Taiwan ended up stepping in on humanitarian grounds and getting him to Taiwan for the needed treatment.

China and its proxies pressed on, flooding Malaita with money and engaging in disruptive political warfare. After several attempts, the PRC and its proxies deposed Suidani and his government through a no-confidence motion. Then Sogavare’s government disqualified Suidani from his elected seat for not recognizing the “One China” Policy—effectively giving Beijing a veto over Solomon Islander voters.

One of the new PRC-backed government’s first acts in Malaita was to “axe” the Auki Communiqué. To drive home the point, Huawei survey crews arrived in Malaita, and the new premier headed off to China.

The message was clear: stand in China’s way, and your government will fall, and you will lose your job—and Beijing will get what it wants anyway.

Meanwhile, Australia did nothing—and the U.S. even denied Suidani a visa when he was invited to attend a United Nations event on indigenous environmental issues. It took Congressional letters to ensure he could attend.

Remember the Voters?

In the April elections, Suidani was elected in a landslide, and the pro-PRC premier who replaced him—and most of his supporters—lost their seats.

The provincial assembly’s vote for the premier is on May 14. At first, it looked like Suidani would have the numbers. Then, according to Suidani, his supporters started getting calls: “telling them if they join the [opposition] they will be given projects for their wards and also they will be receiving [around US$35,000] each member.”

The national government is in a position to deliver on both carrots and sticks. The minister who disqualified Suidani from his seat in the last parliament is now Minister for Rural Development—perfectly placed to financially punish Malaita for the “wrong” choice and reward it for the “right” one.

It would be like Washington telling Texas, “You better chose a governor we like or forget about any federal government programs, and we will also do our best to block any international investment and unseat the person you chose.”

There have also been fierce political warfare attacks on Suidani personally, causing him to withdraw from the contest for premier so as not to distract from his group’s message.

So, imagine you are a member of the Malaita legislature. You were voted in because the people want change. But there are no jobs. The roads and school buildings are terrible. Your people have to walk for miles to get to an ill-equipped health clinic. Relatives are dying in childbirth. And it appears nobody anywhere will help—not even providing moral support. What do you do?

What Does This Mean?

If the pro-PRC national government gets its chosen person in place in Malaita, we will see a rapid and unopposed acceleration of the transformation of the Solomons into a power projection base for China. The Huawei towers that Suidani’s government blocked in Malaita will go up, joining the network that is being set up in the rest of the country, allowing for increased surveillance capabilities. China is eyeing more ports as well and may establish poorly monitored SEZs, furthering Chinese existing commercial domination and attendant political influence. Chinese police—already in the country—will expand their presence. Eventually, the PLA itself may one day be a regular feature in the Solomons.

Long Mekong

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