Kiribati is the latest Pacific Island nation being increasingly infiltrated by Chinese policing influences, causing concern for historic democratic partners.

The police presence across the vast Pacific region is appearing to reshape the security landscape, according to several critical academics and authors.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute visiting fellow, Dr Eric Frécon, says the People's Republic of China is attempting to gain more influence over Kiribati however is yet to fully consolidate it.

"While Australia should seize this very last moment to counter China's efforts, it should ensure it does so in partnership with Kiribati," Dr Frécon said.

"The balance of influence on Kiribati between Australia and China has been shifting."

Tarawa has deepened its ties with Beijing since resuming diplomatic relations in 2019 after the sovereign group of 32 atolls and islands made the switch back from once recognising Taiwan in 2003.

Kiribati's geographically significant exclusive economic zone, which is of interest to Beijing, spans 3.5 million square kms, despite its small land use of just 811.19 square kms surrounding the central Pacific Ocean. The area is crossed by nine undersea cables connecting both the US with Southeast Asia and Australia.

The basis of the support for stakeholders behind the Chinese Communist Party was over recent discussions of collaboration on deep-sea mining.

That occurred in 2024 after Kiribati opted out of Australia's offer of its Pacific Engagement Visa program and had a peculiar diplomatic row with New Zealand within the next 12 months.

"Australia should be concerned, given Kiribati's strategically important location in the Pacific and issues of government transparency," Dr Frécon said.

"Kiribati exemplifies the underestimated influence of microstates in shaping the international agenda, especially on environmental and nuclear issues."

Chinese diplomats were first seen around the Kiribati parliament prior to its opaque adjournment in 2019 following the sudden restoration of diplomatic relations.

China's embassy in Kiribati has since coordinated the docking of the Chinese military's hospital ship in Tarawa in 2023, amid several donations of public use for local grassroots activities.

But it is the Chinese police operations in Kiribati which remain the biggest concern of "how exactly they are assisting their Kiribati counterparts and what China is gaining in return", Dr Frécon said.

Australia had ramped up its own engagement by training Kiribati's police force in Brisbane less than 12 months ago, which extended to visiting its outer islands to check on progress.

A new international report suggests Beijing's sweeping vision of global security includes a growing police presence throughout the Pacific region.

Officers from China's Ministry of Public Security have accompanied joint policing events by Pasifika people with alleged criminal connections or have engaged in intimidating behaviour towards law enforcement advisors from democratic nations who are present on the ground, the report noted.

Released last week, the Police Partnerships in the Pacific report indicated small Pacific states were also benefitting from the growing Chinese police presence in the short-term amid new police academies, vehicles, technology, equipment, and uniforms.

Lead authored by Virginia Comolli, the publication funded by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime comes against a backdrop of deepening geopolitical competition.

China is expanding its influence in the region with deep strategic significance where policing is the latest growing footprint.

The report cited at least 60 police officers from the Solomon Islands had received training from the Ministry of Public Security at a special training centre in China's Fujian province, which was established in 2023 for Pacific islands' police officers.

Special "Chinese Police Liaison Teams" operate across the region, including largely in the Solomon Islands since 2022, where they have run at least 70 training programs, according to the report.

The Solomon Islands is one of Beijing's closest partners in the Pacific, having struck a security arrangement — details of which have never been made public — in 2022 after switching recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019, an act that provoked rioting in the capital, Honiara, two years later.

More recently, China also built a separate police training academy in Samoa.

The report also said there have been growing concerns over geocriminality.

It documented the presence of people with alleged ties to Chinese international crime rings who had participated in police activities in at least two unnamed countries.

It raised troubling questions with Martin Thorley, Ms Comolli's co-author in the report and a specialist in geocriminality, over states using organised crime to further its domestic or foreign policy priorities.

"We're currently at the stage where everyone is assessing what an increased Chinese presence in police cooperation and training means, and what the risks are and what the opportunities are, and it seems no-one has considered that ... alleged criminals are accepted at the periphery of this policing," Mr Thorley, told the prominent US-based Newsweek.

Mr Thorley added Beijing had a track record of allowing allegedly criminal participation when it served the Chinese Communist Party state's aims.

China's Ministry of Public Security's activities now involve about a dozen countries in the Pacific, with only Taiwan's three diplomatic allies among the 16-member Pacific Island Forum remaining untouched - Tuvalu, Palau and the Marshall Islands - according to a New Zealand Professor of Chinese politics, Annie-Marie Brady, from the University of Canterbury.

Prof Brady said there were subtle differences lingering between cooperating with the Ministry of Public Security and with Pacific police forces in democratic nations.

China's police — the Ministry of Public Security — was also the central authority responsible for counterintelligence, dissident-suppression and counterterrorism, with an external role to hunt opponents of the communist party in addition to immigration and other covert duties, she added.

"So, if you've got Chinese police embedded in your country, you've got spies," Professor Brady said.

Professor Brady cited a 2025 Samoan report she co-authored with research organisation, Sinopsis, which found police cooperation became "a central pillar of China's expanding dual use presence in the Pacific" as Beijing aims to set up a cross-Pacific policing network.

But across the region, she said, "the weakest links are the Solomons, Kiribati and Vanuatu — all the others have understood you can't go too far with this".