A report circulating this week argues that AUKUS's Pillar 1 — the plan to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines — should be scrapped, according to Asia Pacific Defence Reporter. It comes as evidence builds that Beijing's maritime leverage no longer runs through warships alone.

China has assembled the world's largest navy by ship count, but the more consequential shift is institutional. Beijing has fused commercial shipbuilding, overseas ports, coast guard forces, fishing fleets and ocean research into a single maritime strategy under Xi Jinping, who treats sea power as central to national greatness, per Hoover Institution research. Chinese forces sustain pressure around Taiwan and the South China Sea while pushing further into the Pacific.

The financial layer is harder to see but just as deliberate. Zhejiang Chouzhou Commercial Bank, a regional lender, has repeatedly surfaced as a conduit for Iranian and Russian payments for Chinese goods — some with possible military applications — with accounts tied to Iran's shadow banking system and Russia's state-backed A7 sanctions-evasion network, Hoover researchers found (link). That channel keeps sanctioned partners trading through China, reinforcing the same sea lanes Beijing is otherwise militarizing.

Food dependency cuts the other way. Despite pursuing agricultural self-sufficiency, China still relies on imported soybeans, feed grains, fertilizer inputs and the foreign shipping routes that carry them — exposure that analyst Joel Wuthnow argues could itself restrain Beijing from launching a war over Taiwan, since a blockade or sanctions regime would sever those same supply lines (Hoover Institution).

Hypothesis: China's food-import dependency is a two-way lever — it justifies expanding ports and shipping capacity to secure supply, while also deterring the kind of conflict that would cut that supply off. Supporting this: Wuthnow's own case for import exposure as a restraint. Against this: Hoover's broader catalogue of continued Chinese military pressure around Taiwan and the South China Sea shows no sign that the dependency has slowed Beijing down (link).

In the Pacific, Fiji's prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka said this week that his country's partnership with Australia "is not about dependency," according to the Fiji Sun — a sign Pacific states are positioning themselves between Canberra and Beijing's port diplomacy rather than picking a side outright.

  • Whether AUKUS's next review preserves or drops Pillar 1
  • Whether Western regulators act against Zhejiang Chouzhou's correspondent banking access
  • Whether Pacific states follow Fiji's lead in resisting binary alignment with Canberra or Beijing