China’s influence in Solomon Islands is likely to weather the accession to power on 15 May of a prime minister who’s less favourable to it than his predecessor. While Australia has improved its relationship with Solomon Islands in the past few years, in competition with China’s influence, Chinese involvement in the strategically located nation is too deep to be suddenly uprooted.

The island nation’s location gives it great strategic importance to both sides.

Solomons’ parliament removed pro-China former prime minister Jeremiah Manele with a no-confidence vote on 7 May, reportedly because of dissatisfaction with governance and corruption, and replaced him with Matthew Wale on 15 May.

Wale has long criticised Solomon Islands’ ever-closer ties with China. After his elevation to the prime ministership on Friday, he said Solomon Islands was ‘not immune from geopolitics’. He promised that ‘change is coming.’

Many observers in Australia and its allies will hope that Wale will move away from the alignment with Beijing seen under Manele and, before him, prime minister Manasseh Sogavare, who took Solomon Islands into a security pact with China in 2022.

Manele is a member of the same party as Sogavare and widely seen as backing the close relationship with China, though as prime minister from 2024 he took steps to improve the relationship with Australia, which worked towards the same objective.

Wale has been highly critical of the security agreement with China and has said he would roll it back. His current stance is unclear, but last year he led a delegation to Beijing, apparently warming towards it. Since Wale frames the beginning of his leadership as requiring the Solomons to navigate the ‘difficult times … throughout the world’, he is apparently open to a shift in strategic direction.

But China is now deeply integrated into the Solomon Islands through infrastructure investment, policing assistance, telecommunications and political engagement. Even Malaita province, previously resistant to Chinese development aid, has now welcomed Chinese road projects. For many Solomon Islanders, the issue isn’t where resources come from but that they improve daily life and contribute to peace and stability.

Also, winding back the relationship would surely imperil the flow of development aid that China gives to Solomon Islands. And withdrawal of some or all or it would be only part of the coercive measures that Beijing would use.

Australia is an ongoing partner to Solomon Islands and contributes around A$170 million in aid annually. But it has had its share of bad press there, as when Sogavare politicised its offer to support elections in 2022 as an infringement on sovereignty. This was driven partly by Chinese influence operations in local media and politics and partly by Australia’s colonial history in the region and its alignment with US foreign policy. Australia has adapted to the relationship challenge, promoting the idea that it is part of the Pacific Family, whose members should take care of each other.

For Australia, the relationship with Solomon Islands is part of the near strategic environment that shapes Defence’s warning time and operational reach and builds collective resilience. For the Indo-Pacific, strong Pacific partnerships are a reminder that regional security is not determined only by major powers but can also be defined by how smaller states are engaged, supported and integrated into the broader system.

As nations in the region seek both to improve economic security for their people and to navigate major power competition, the diplomatic calculations on defence and security are complicated by a country’s immediate needs and protection of its sovereignty.