What Happens if Beijing Expands its Indo-Pacific Push?
[By Joe Keary, Raji Rajagopalan and Linus Cohen]
Rather than gradually expanding its defense and security engagement across the Indo-Pacific, Beijing may choose to accelerate its trajectory, pushing boundaries to advance its interests and take advantage of a distracted United States. The result would be a rapid buildup of Chinese presence and a sharper, faster-moving cycle of pressure that tests regional cohesion and alliance resolve.
Earlier articles this week explored the likely effect of China’s defense and security engagement beyond the first island chain until 2031 and 2036. We’ve also looked at where friction and miscalculation could emerge. This final article examines a different future, one in which China picks up the pace in securing physical access and increasing its presence while actively testing the thresholds of regional states and alliances.
In the Southwest Pacific, a more assertive Beijing would pursue port access and logistics agreements more aggressively, including dual-use arrangements and hubs capable of sustaining persistent operations. A buildup of China Coast Guard and maritime militia activity would intensify pressure in fisheries and maritime zones, expanding Beijing’s access while testing sovereignty boundaries.
This would place Pacific island countries under significant strain. Their ability to balance economic engagement with sovereignty would be tested, and diverging responses would be likely. Some states, such as Solomon Islands, might deepen partnerships with Beijing, while others might seek to leverage heightened competition to extract greater benefits from external partners, risking regional fragmentation.
At the same time, many island countries would work to avoid such fractures. This might involve tighter management of external partners by the islands or a turn inward to preserve cohesion. Consolidating security cooperation through the Pacific Islands Forum, and consolidating engagement with traditional partners Australia and New Zealand, would help to reinforce regional norms and resist coercion. However, this could also constrain engagement with partners such as the US and Japan, reflecting difficult trade-offs to maintain unity.
In Australia’s maritime approaches, higher-tempo Chinese operations would bring capable naval flotillas, survey vessels and intelligence ships closer to critical infrastructure and shipping routes. These activities would probe Australian and allied response times while signalling China’s capacity to operate persistently in areas of strategic importance to Canberra.
Intensified live-fire exercises, seabed survey activity and grey-zone operations would place additional strain on Australian Defence Force readiness. To maintain credible deterrence, Australia would need to respond by strengthening its surveillance of the sea, its broader intelligence and surveillance capabilities and its northward deployment of forces. Greater emphasis on partnerships with middle powers and regional states would also be critical, particularly if US regional engagement fluctuated.
As activity increased on both sides, so would friction. China’s more assertive posture would test Australia’s domestic resilience, political resolve and alliance settings, while Canberra’s response, through expanded presence and exercises, would contribute to a more complex and crowded operating environment. Strategic messaging and domestic cohesion would be essential to managing escalation risks.
In the Indian Ocean, accelerated Chinese naval activity would focus on key sea lanes and chokepoints. Expansion of China’s base in Djibouti, alongside greater access to ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, would support a more persistent presence. This would increase operational proximity with India, Australia and other regional actors, likely driving deeper cooperation through intelligence sharing, joint exercises and undersea surveillance.
Encounters between submarines, surface vessels and surveillance aircraft in this environment carry inherent risks. Misinterpretation, close manoeuvring or signalling of resolve could escalate quickly, particularly around busy chokepoints. Efforts to maintain freedom of movement might generate a reinforcing cycle of action and response across vital maritime corridors.
Beyond expanding its presence, China would also seek to test allied responses. By varying the tempo and intensity of its activity, Beijing could assess thresholds, probe alliance cohesion and identify gaps in regional resilience. These actions might fall short of provoking conflict but would increase operational risk and the likelihood of miscalculation.
China’s most recent five-year plan reinforces this trajectory. Despite fiscal pressures, defense and security objectives remain a priority, suggesting that a larger and more persistent Chinese presence is likely.
For Australia and its partners, the security environment will continue to grow in complexity. If China continues to accelerate investment in its defense forces, deterrence will remain necessary but insufficient on its own. Partnership building, domestic resilience and sustained regional engagement will be critical to shaping outcomes. Persistent presence, intelligence sharing, joint exercises and operational interoperability will need to grow to manage risk and maintain influence in an increasingly contested environment.
If China continues to accelerate, regional states are more likely to hedge rather than fully align with either side, balancing economic opportunity against sovereignty and security concerns. This will complicate collective responses and reinforce the importance of flexible, inclusive regional approaches.
The challenge for Australia and its partners is not to prevent Chinese presence, but to shape the strategic environment in which that presence operates, managing risk, reinforcing partnerships and reducing the likelihood that intensifying competition tips into crisis
Joe Keary is a senior analyst, Raji Rajagopalan is a resident senior fellow and Linus Cohen is a researcher at ASPI.
This article appears courtesy of The Strategist and may be found in its original form here.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
May 4, 2026
RFA
By Taejun Kang
Southeast Asian leaders are unlikely to resolve long-standing disputes in the South China Sea at next month’s ASEAN Summit, but they could make “incremental progress” towards a Code of Conduct, or COC, aimed at managing tensions there, analysts told Radio Free Asia.
The annual summit brings together leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, to discuss regional security and economic issues. China is participating as a dialogue partner this year, and the forum presents an opportunity to address the South China Sea, a persistent flashpoint where China’s sweeping claims overlap with the exclusive economic zones of several Southeast Asian states.
Regional officials have said they are aiming to complete negotiations on the COC by 2026, but key issues, including its geographic scope, legal status and enforcement mechanisms, remain unresolved after more than two decades of talks.
Resolution unlikely
It is improbable that a code resolving all disputes in the South China Sea could be hammered out at the ASEAN leaders’ summit this year, Joseph Kristanto, a research analyst at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told RFA. The key issue at the summit will be if meaningful progress on mitigating tensions can be achieved.
“While the COC may help prevent misunderstandings in daily interactions, I’d say it’s unlikely to stop grey-zone activities or coercive behavior by claimant states, most notably China, altogether,” he said. “Therefore, the COC is best seen as a mechanism for managing friction, rather than transforming the underlying dynamics of the dispute.”
Agreements to reduce friction have been tried before. ASEAN and China signed a non-binding Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in 2002 and began formal negotiations on a binding code in 2013. Progress since then has been described by some officials as slow.
COC negotiators face a fundamental trade-off between a politically feasible but limited “thin” code based on general principles, and a more robust framework with clearer rules and enforcement mechanisms that would be harder to achieve, Kristanto said.
“The slow pace of the COC process demonstrates the complexity of these issues and exposes the limits of ASEAN’s consensus approach,” he said.
Other analysts say that China’s track record of frequent provocations in the region makes them skeptical that any agreement would make a meaningful difference in practice.
“My pessimism on the COC really comes down to two things: China’s track record of undermining or ignoring its existing agreements, and the question of who would actually do the binding in a ‘legally binding’ COC,” Ray Powell, executive director of Stanford University’s SeaLight maritime transparency project, told RFA.
Powell noted that the 2002 declaration already committed parties to self-restraint and peaceful dispute resolution, yet tensions have persisted.
“That experience shows the problem is not the absence of written rules but a lack of any authority China is willing to accept above its own political will,” he said, adding that a meaningful code would require an enforcement or arbitration mechanism that Beijing has historically rejected.
A weaker version, he warned, could risk undermining existing legal protections for Southeast Asian states under international law.
Legal questions
Others argue that even a limited agreement could still play a role in stabilizing day-to-day interactions, provided it is grounded in established international legal frameworks.
“A substantive and comprehensive COC on the South China Sea would not just be about something that could ease the tensions between the Philippines and China,” Josue Raphael J. Cortez of the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde in the Philippines, told RFA.
“Instead, it would be an inclusive document, grounded in UNCLOS and public international law that should pave the way for all state claimants to coexist responsibly and peacefully,” he said, referring to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Cortez said a meaningful code should go beyond traditional issues such as fisheries and navigation to include broader resource-sharing arrangements, including oil, gas and critical minerals, reflecting the region’s evolving economic stakes.
Though a legally binding framework could help reduce tensions, he cautioned that it would need to be backed by continued dialogue and mechanisms to ensure compliance.
“Forging such an agreement can never be enough,” he said. “Instead, continuous dialogue … must still be continued so as to ascertain compliance and whether future revisions can be undertaken for the framework’s viability.”
The 48th ASEAN Summit is slated to start May 5-9 in Cebu, Philippines
Exercise Balikatan Concludes Amidst South China Sea Tensions
This year’s Exercise Balikatan, which concluded last week, was the biggest ever such annual exercise mounted jointly by the Philippines and the United States. 17,000 troops took part, along with naval vessels and participation from Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Save for individual hold-outs hiding out in the jungle who missed the surrender in 1945, this was the first time that Japan had deployed troops to the Philippines since the Second World War, and follows a defense reciprocal access agreement signed by the two countries last year. Japan deployed the Hyuga Class helicopter destroyer JS Ise (DDH-182), the Osumi Class Amphibious Landing Ship JS Shimokita (LST-4002), and the Murasame Class destroyer JS Ikazuchi (DD-107). More than 1,000 troops from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade conducted a beach landing alongside Filipino marines on the north coast of Luzon, opposite Taiwan across from the Balintang Channel.
Occupied islands and competing claims in the South China Sea (Google Earth/Copernicus/CJRC)
Much of the exercise activity took place on or off the coast of Palawan, which is the nearest Filipino mainland to the concentrated cluster of islands in the South China Sea, where China disputes possession of islands with the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia. After claiming construction work on small islands and low-lying rocks was for civilian purposes, China in effect took possession of a number of disputed islands, consolidating its position by building airfields and defensive fortifications. After something of a lull in this activity in recent years, tension flared last year between China and the Philippines over fishing rights in the Scarborough Shoal, which the Philippines defended vigorously and successfully.
The tension has continued with an upsurge of Chinese island-building activities in the South China Sea, with an estimated 15km2 of land reclaimed recently on the atolls of Antelope Reef, which is contested by the Philippines but in particular by Vietnam. This upsurge has been interpreted as a move to take advantage of the US Navy’s switch of assets recently to the Middle East. Two weeks ago, Taiwanese minister Kuan Bi-ling made a rare and hence politically-significant trip to the Taiwanese garrison on Itu Abu, to witness a military exercise to recapture a ship seized at sea.
Aside from the first time Japanese troops had been deployed and worked alongside allies, Japanese and Filipino air defense units worked closely with US Army and Marine air defense units, practicing techniques to counter drones and to provide littoral air defense support to ships at sea.
The exercise also saw the deployment of a Japanese ShinMaywa US-2 amphibious aircraft (top), which rehearsed air-sea rescue medical procedures alongside the Whidbey Island Class dock landing ship USS Ashland (LSD-48). American forces have no comparable counterpart to the US-2, and it has been proposed as a potential off-the-shelf asset for long range ocean rescues and medevacs - missions which are currently fulfilled by U.S. Air Force parachutists.
.jpg)
