Anyone who doubts Australia and China are in what Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong called a “permanent contest” in the Pacific need only go for a drive in the capital of the Solomon Islands. Alongside the undisguised poverty, throngs of underemployed youth and potholed roads in Honiara are a proliferation of competing billboards and plaques boasting of efforts to alleviate such problems.

Until recently, most of the signs were extolling gifts of aid from China. Lately, Australia seems to have caught up, extolling on billboards its position as the “nambawan” (“number one” in Pidgin) donor to the Solomons. The Australian signs are accurate. Even after cuts to aid budgets in 2013-2014, Canberra remains by far the largest donor to the Solomons, well ahead of all others, including China.

Beijing, by contrast, has been good at building flashy, visible projects since the Solomons switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan in 2019, such as the stadium for last year’s Pacific Games. Beijing also slyly takes credit for projects Chinese state construction companies were contracted to build, despite their being financed by multilateral donors, like the Asia Development Bank.

The competing billboards are risky on one level. Far from feeling grateful, the locals might wonder why their economy, services and infrastructure continue to deteriorate with all the foreign money flowing in. Then again, the signs might not be directed at the populace. Rather, the target audience might be the local elite and, of course, the expectant visiting ministers who want to see evidence of their budget largesse when being driven into town from the airport.

Still, as much as some might decry it, a contest it is. So how’s it going?

China’s intentions are clear, as they are elsewhere in the world. It seeks to expand its economic and political influence and, eventually, its security footprint in the Pacific, just as it is doing in north Asia, south-east Asia, the Middle East, South America and so forth. You would have to be credulous or worse to believe otherwise. Wang Yi, Politburo member and foreign minister, and perhaps the world’s busiest diplomat, doesn’t take time out to tour 10 Pacific nations, as he did in 2022, without a larger objective in mind.

The deal between the Solomons and Beijing in the dying days of Scott Morrison’s government to station Chinese police in the country was the clearest statement of its security ambitions. It was only “dumb luck”, to quote an Australian government adviser, that a second policing deal wasn’t signed with a much bigger country, Papua New Guinea, in April. Anthony Albanese’s trip to walk the Kokoda Track allowed him to head that off.

China is not standing still. Since elections in the Solomons earlier this year, Beijing has been taking huge numbers of the country’s public servants to China for study tours. In some cases, nearly entire departments have gone. In Honiara, a new Chinese-built hospital is rapidly taking shape, its pagoda-style roof ensuring no one will forget where it’s from.