China’s approach to competition in the Pacific isn’t about a single confrontation or dramatic escalation—it’s a steady grind, a long game of positioning and influence designed to erode U.S. advantages without triggering a kinetic response. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advances without attacking using a mix of coercive diplomacy and—stealing a playbook from their authoritarian allies in Moscow—using weaponized migration and underworld elements to gain a position of advantage.
The latest incursions into the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam fit a well-documented pattern: Leveraging legal loopholes, economic penetration, criminal networks, and information warfare to create conditions favorable to the CCP. This is how Beijing competes—moving the needle incrementally, shifting balances of power without firing a shot. Left unchecked, this activity does more than test U.S. responses; it establishes pathways for future sabotage, influence operations, and strategic denial. As a result, the new Trump administration has an opportunity to harmonize how it integrates different instruments of power to confront Chinese gray zone activity.
A New Codex for Strategic Competition
The United States has spent decades refining its approach to high-end warfighting, but strategic competition in the gray zone demands a different mindset. The codex for thinking about competition isn’t about preparing for the next fight—it’s about shaping the battlespace so that conflict never becomes necessary. The challenge isn’t just about countering Chinese activity; it’s about aligning U.S. operations, activities, and investments across multiple authorities—not just Title 10 (Department of Defense)—to create advantage.
As seen in how it approaches everything from Taiwan and maritime incursions to espionage, the CCP’s model is comprehensive, integrating statecraft, economic leverage, and irregular warfare into a whole. It’s a campaign, not a collection of isolated actions. U.S. responses must follow suit. This means coordinating across the interagency, leveraging law enforcement, intelligence, and economic tools to systematically close off CCP avenues of advantage.
The Marianas as a Testbed for CCP Gray Zone Operations
Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are frontline territories in this competition, not just for their military significance but for what they represent: the soft underbelly of U.S. defenses. The visa waiver program in the Northern Mariana Islands has become a convenient loophole, exploited by Chinese nationals attempting to gain unauthorized access to Guam. The problem manifested in the December 2024 apprehension of seven Chinese citizens near Andersen Air Force Base during a U.S. missile test.
This isn’t an isolated case—it’s part of a broader pattern. Between 2022 and 2024, Guam’s Customs and Quarantine Agency reported 118 cases of Chinese citizens either illegally or illegally attempting to enter Guam from the Mariana Islands. The CCP’s playbook involves embedding personnel in key regions, whether through economic investments, illicit business fronts, or outright illegal migration. These footholds provide logistical and intelligence advantages, allowing Beijing to map critical infrastructure, test security responses, and prepare for future contingencies. It’s a patient strategy, but an effective one.
Beyond the Marianas: A Web of Influence and Subversion
The Pacific isn’t just a geographic space; it’s a contested information and economic battlespace. In the Philippines, authorities are now investigating how CCP-linked entities provided donations—including cash and motorbikes—to local officials and police forces. These are not goodwill gestures—they are investments in access, influence, and coercion.
China’s economic statecraft follows the same logic. In Palau, Chinese-backed companies are positioning themselves to control strategic infrastructure, while illicit finance networks tied to Beijing are active across the Pacific, funneling resources through casino operations, cyber fraud rings, and organized crime syndicates. These activities fund influence operations, bribe officials, and provide cover for espionage.
Parallel to these physical operations, China’s computational propaganda campaigns saturate the region, shaping narratives, drowning out opposition voices, and setting conditions to neutralize resistance to its expansionist aims. Information dominance is just as critical as physical access.
Campaigning to Compete: Understanding the Environment and Acting with Precision
Countering Chinese gray zone activity starts with understanding the environment. A Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) must do more than just react—it must map the operational space, identify CCP lines of effort, and calibrate U.S. responses to both block known incursions and disrupt future avenues of exploitation.
The first step isn’t just kinetic or even diplomatic; it’s analytical. A JIATF, or JIATIF-like construct, must integrate intelligence, law enforcement, and economic tracking mechanisms to identify CCP influence corridors in real time. The goal isn’t just to shut down documented incursions—it’s to shape the environment so that China loses its ability to leverage migration, illicit finance, and cyber operations as tools of competition. This means tightening security loopholes in the Mariana Islands, but it also means deploying targeted counterintelligence and economic measures across the Pacific. It means leveraging the Department of the Treasury’s tools to disrupt illicit Chinese financial networks. It means expanding the use of contracted intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to avoid straining existing military collection capabilities. And it means crafting an influence campaign to expose and undermine CCP operations in the information space before they gain traction.
A success story can be attributed to Jade Spear, an interagency initiative that targeted Chinese illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. With 15 U.S. departments involved, it addressed a specific problem using a diverse array of government authorities and practices. These included targeting labor violations and human trafficking, enacting sanctions, revoking Chinese visas and licenses, inspecting fishing vessels, and conducting campaigns against fishing companies. Jade Spear reimaged the spectrum of engagement with the CCP—it’s not just about use of kinetic action, but the entire arsenal of U.S. bureaucracy can be called to action.
A competitive strategy also requires action beyond government channels. The private sector plays a critical role—financial institutions, tech companies, and media platforms must be mobilized to prevent CCP actors from exploiting digital spaces and economic systems. This is a campaign that requires synchronization across multiple domains, not just the military.
Conclusion: A New Model for Sustained Competition
The Pacific is where China is testing the edges of U.S. resistance, refining its ability to exploit gaps in governance, security, and perception management. The United States doesn’t need a reactive strategy—it needs a sustained, proactive approach to deny China the ability to shape the competitive space unchallenged.
An interagency construct like a JIATF that is focused on understanding and shaping the environment is a necessary step. But the real shift must come from embracing competition as a continuous condition, not a crisis-driven response. This means calibrating operations, activities, and investments in ways that deny China strategic openings and reinforce U.S. advantages across the board. It’s not just about blocking Chinese influence—it’s about making the Indo-Pacific a space where U.S. alliances, institutions, and economic frameworks make CCP subversion infeasible.
Strategic competition in the gray zone isn’t about waiting for the next move—it’s about making sure the board is set in your favor before the game even starts.
Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Kathleen McInnis is a senior fellow with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS. Audrey Aldisert is a research associate with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.
China’s approach to competition in the Pacific isn’t about a single confrontation or dramatic escalation—it’s a steady grind, a long game of positioning and influence designed to erode U.S. advantages without triggering a kinetic response. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advances without attacking using a mix of coercive diplomacy and—stealing a playbook from their authoritarian allies in Moscow—using weaponized migration and underworld elements to gain a position of advantage.
The latest incursions into the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam fit a well-documented pattern: Leveraging legal loopholes, economic penetration, criminal networks, and information warfare to create conditions favorable to the CCP. This is how Beijing competes—moving the needle incrementally, shifting balances of power without firing a shot. Left unchecked, this activity does more than test U.S. responses; it establishes pathways for future sabotage, influence operations, and strategic denial. As a result, the new Trump administration has an opportunity to harmonize how it integrates different instruments of power to confront Chinese gray zone activity.
A New Codex for Strategic Competition
The United States has spent decades refining its approach to high-end warfighting, but strategic competition in the gray zone demands a different mindset. The codex for thinking about competition isn’t about preparing for the next fight—it’s about shaping the battlespace so that conflict never becomes necessary. The challenge isn’t just about countering Chinese activity; it’s about aligning U.S. operations, activities, and investments across multiple authorities—not just Title 10 (Department of Defense)—to create advantage.
As seen in how it approaches everything from Taiwan and maritime incursions to espionage, the CCP’s model is comprehensive, integrating statecraft, economic leverage, and irregular warfare into a whole. It’s a campaign, not a collection of isolated actions. U.S. responses must follow suit. This means coordinating across the interagency, leveraging law enforcement, intelligence, and economic tools to systematically close off CCP avenues of advantage.
The Marianas as a Testbed for CCP Gray Zone Operations
Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are frontline territories in this competition, not just for their military significance but for what they represent: the soft underbelly of U.S. defenses. The visa waiver program in the Northern Mariana Islands has become a convenient loophole, exploited by Chinese nationals attempting to gain unauthorized access to Guam. The problem manifested in the December 2024 apprehension of seven Chinese citizens near Andersen Air Force Base during a U.S. missile test.
This isn’t an isolated case—it’s part of a broader pattern. Between 2022 and 2024, Guam’s Customs and Quarantine Agency reported 118 cases of Chinese citizens either illegally or illegally attempting to enter Guam from the Mariana Islands. The CCP’s playbook involves embedding personnel in key regions, whether through economic investments, illicit business fronts, or outright illegal migration. These footholds provide logistical and intelligence advantages, allowing Beijing to map critical infrastructure, test security responses, and prepare for future contingencies. It’s a patient strategy, but an effective one.
Beyond the Marianas: A Web of Influence and Subversion
The Pacific isn’t just a geographic space; it’s a contested information and economic battlespace. In the Philippines, authorities are now investigating how CCP-linked entities provided donations—including cash and motorbikes—to local officials and police forces. These are not goodwill gestures—they are investments in access, influence, and coercion.
China’s economic statecraft follows the same logic. In Palau, Chinese-backed companies are positioning themselves to control strategic infrastructure, while illicit finance networks tied to Beijing are active across the Pacific, funneling resources through casino operations, cyber fraud rings, and organized crime syndicates. These activities fund influence operations, bribe officials, and provide cover for espionage.
Parallel to these physical operations, China’s computational propaganda campaigns saturate the region, shaping narratives, drowning out opposition voices, and setting conditions to neutralize resistance to its expansionist aims. Information dominance is just as critical as physical access.
Campaigning to Compete: Understanding the Environment and Acting with Precision
Countering Chinese gray zone activity starts with understanding the environment. A Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) must do more than just react—it must map the operational space, identify CCP lines of effort, and calibrate U.S. responses to both block known incursions and disrupt future avenues of exploitation.
The first step isn’t just kinetic or even diplomatic; it’s analytical. A JIATF, or JIATIF-like construct, must integrate intelligence, law enforcement, and economic tracking mechanisms to identify CCP influence corridors in real time. The goal isn’t just to shut down documented incursions—it’s to shape the environment so that China loses its ability to leverage migration, illicit finance, and cyber operations as tools of competition. This means tightening security loopholes in the Mariana Islands, but it also means deploying targeted counterintelligence and economic measures across the Pacific. It means leveraging the Department of the Treasury’s tools to disrupt illicit Chinese financial networks. It means expanding the use of contracted intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to avoid straining existing military collection capabilities. And it means crafting an influence campaign to expose and undermine CCP operations in the information space before they gain traction.
A success story can be attributed to Jade Spear, an interagency initiative that targeted Chinese illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. With 15 U.S. departments involved, it addressed a specific problem using a diverse array of government authorities and practices. These included targeting labor violations and human trafficking, enacting sanctions, revoking Chinese visas and licenses, inspecting fishing vessels, and conducting campaigns against fishing companies. Jade Spear reimaged the spectrum of engagement with the CCP—it’s not just about use of kinetic action, but the entire arsenal of U.S. bureaucracy can be called to action.
A competitive strategy also requires action beyond government channels. The private sector plays a critical role—financial institutions, tech companies, and media platforms must be mobilized to prevent CCP actors from exploiting digital spaces and economic systems. This is a campaign that requires synchronization across multiple domains, not just the military.
Conclusion: A New Model for Sustained Competition
The Pacific is where China is testing the edges of U.S. resistance, refining its ability to exploit gaps in governance, security, and perception management. The United States doesn’t need a reactive strategy—it needs a sustained, proactive approach to deny China the ability to shape the competitive space unchallenged.
An interagency construct like a JIATF that is focused on understanding and shaping the environment is a necessary step. But the real shift must come from embracing competition as a continuous condition, not a crisis-driven response. This means calibrating operations, activities, and investments in ways that deny China strategic openings and reinforce U.S. advantages across the board. It’s not just about blocking Chinese influence—it’s about making the Indo-Pacific a space where U.S. alliances, institutions, and economic frameworks make CCP subversion infeasible.
Strategic competition in the gray zone isn’t about waiting for the next move—it’s about making sure the board is set in your favor before the game even starts.
Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Kathleen McInnis is a senior fellow with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS. Audrey Aldisert is a research associate with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.
