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SUVA, Fiji — When four Chinese detectives breezed into police headquarters here in the middle of 2017, it quickly became apparent they weren't in Fiji's capital merely to help with an inquiry. Instead, the officers planned to carry out the investigation — into Chinese nationals suspected of running internet scams from the South Pacific island — pretty much as if they were back in China.
"Everything was done by them," said a former Fijian police officer who was in the Suva headquarters at the time, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. "Fiji police was only there to assist in the arrest, nothing else. All the statements, recordings and the uplifting of all exhibits was done by the Chinese."
Weeks after the initial four landed in Fiji, scores more Chinese police officers arrived on the island, and 77 suspects, many of them young women, were marched in handcuffs and hoods across the tarmac at a local airport before being flown to China. None was given an extradition hearing. There was no proper documentation, no Interpol involvement, the former Fijian officer said.
It was also a moment that began to sour some Fijians on the growing activities of Chinese officials in Fiji, an example of how Beijing can overreach as it attempts to build its global influence.
"We didn't even know there was an agreement," Aman Ravindra-Singh, a lawyer who was one of the few public figures in Fiji to speak out against the arrests at the time, said of the memorandum. "The next thing we knew, there were knocks on people's doors in [the city of] Nadi and there were Chinese people in full uniform arresting people. It was unheard of. It's almost like we were invaded."
The police cooperation between China and Fiji that began in 2011 with the six-page MOU would continue for more than a decade. More than 100 Fijian police officers would train or study in cities across China. Almost two dozen Chinese officers would make the opposite journey, embedding in the Fijian police force for months at a time.
The police agreement provided a blueprint for China to grow its security presence 5,600 miles away in Fiji — from the soft power of people-to-people exchanges to the hard power of arrests, extrajudicial deportations and the transfer of high-tech equipment such as closed-circuit cameras, surveillance gear and drones.
The MOU would also serve as a template for other Chinese efforts in the Pacific. Beijing last year tried — but failed — to forge a sweeping security pact with 10 Pacific island nations.
It has had more success in the Solomon Islands, where China has ramped up police assistance recently, despite objections from Australia and New Zealand. Last year, a security agreement between Beijing and the Solomon Islands inflamed fears that China wants to establish a military base in the strategically important archipelago and, more broadly, become the overarching political power in the region.
At the same time, China has been stepping up its security presence in other countries, including establishing unofficial police stations across North America and Europe to keep tabs on Chinese nationals.
"China is seeking to create an alternative security network across the Pacific," said Anna Powles, a Pacific expert at New Zealand's Massey University, noting that in a part of the world where few countries have militaries, the police are a key avenue of influence. "In that respect, the early MOU signed with Fiji in 2011 laid the groundwork."
China's push into the region — it is interested in these tiny, underdeveloped Pacific countries not only for their votes at the United Nations but also for their large territorial waters — appears to have taken the United States by surprise, leading to a sudden spurt of engagement by Washington.
The police agreement in Fiji, in particular, had coincided with increasingly harsh rule by the Bainimarama government.
In December elections, however, Bainimarama lost the prime minister's office to Sitiveni Rabuka, a longtime rival who ran a campaign critical of China. And in January, in one of his first acts, Rabuka announced he intended to terminate the police agreement with Beijing.
In an interview here, Rabuka said he made the decision because he feared that the MOU risked "treading on people's personal rights." He also suggested that his predecessor's close ties to China had undermined Fijian sovereignty and increased corruption.
"We were so weak, we wanted to befriend them so badly," he said, "that we turned a blind eye to a lot of the bad things going on."
Today Suva bears the hallmarks of Beijing's influence. Bainimarama's "Look North" policy brought in almost $300 million in Chinese aid between 2011 and 2018, though much of it was concessional loans that saddled the island nation with debt. By the time China's top leader, Xi Jinping, visited Suva in 2014, Fiji was fully aboard what Xi called "China's express train of development."
China built a hulking embassy and a Confucius Institute at the university to teach Chinese language and culture. It renovated Suva's civic center and constructed what was supposed to be a state-of-the-art hospital. On a single day in 2018, Beijing unveiled not one but two major bridges in the capital.
But the memorandum made few headlines in 2011 when it was penned by China's powerful Ministry of Public Security and Fiji's Ministry of Defense, National Security and Immigration. Only a preliminary, Chinese-language version appears to have been posted online.
A final, English-language copy obtained by The Washington Post, however, shows that the agreement was more detailed than many of China's other MOUs with developing countries, most of them in Africa.
Chinese and Fijian officials agreed to cooperate in seven areas including the "arrest of fugitives and recovery of illicit money and goods" and the "prevention of and crackdown on" economic crimes, cybercrimes, terrorism and human trafficking. The two nations also agreed to exchange intelligence, visits, training and equipment. The MOU even lists hotline phone and fax numbers in both countries.
The arrangement provided public relations boosts for both countries. Fijian officials — many of whom had trained in Australia or New Zealand — now praised Chinese policing as second to none.
For Fiji, the photo ops in China helped distract from human rights abuses at home.
"Under the Bainimarama government, we saw a dramatic increase in arbitrary arrests, torture cases and abuse of process," said Kate Schuetze, Pacific researcher at Amnesty International.
Fiji police denied that the MOU led to any abuses, or that there was anything improper about the 2017 mass arrests. The Chinese Embassy in Suva similarly defended the relationship as "professional, open and transparent."
It declined to provide information on those arrested, including the charges and outcomes. Instead, it said the 2017 operation was a "good example" of international police cooperation and "in full accordance with relevant domestic and international laws."
Blake Johnson, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the Fiji-China MOU had started small but grown over time into something serious enough to trouble Australian officials.
"Pretty much from the start, Fiji was interested in not just getting vehicles, which is very common in the Pacific, but also communications, surveillance equipment, anti-riot equipment, and that kept evolving," he said.
Inia Seruiratu, who was Fiji's minister for defense, national security and policing from 2018 to 2022 and is now the opposition leader, denied that Chinese equipment had been used to spy on Fijians.
"Surveillance? They were providing us with musical instruments," he scoffed, calling suggestions otherwise a "conspiracy theory."
The specter of Chinese surveillance resurfaced last year when Beijing pushed a sweeping pact with 10 Pacific island nations that would have given China influence over policing, customs, cybersecurity, communications, deep-sea mining and more.
Rabuka's Jan. 26 announcement scrapping the MOU came as a surprise, even to U.S. officials who welcomed it as a sign of a pro-American inclination. The new prime minister had hinted at the move on the campaign trail but few expected him to act after only a month in office.
For China, the decision was a humiliating setback — one Beijing is trying to reverse. It has publicly warned it might slash aid to Fiji in response, after privately urging the prime minister not to rip up the policing agreement.
But it comes amid a broader shift, in Fiji and beyond.
