This program of military upgrading has been accompanied by a steadily growing appetite for adventure. The same year as Xi’s announcement, China opened its first overseas military base, in the East African nation of Djibouti. It has built or is negotiating to build dual-use naval facilities in nations across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Kenya, Seychelles, Tanzania, Tajikistan, and Myanmar.

More worrying to its rivals, China has been willing to engage in military confrontations that previous leadership had steadfastly rejected. In the South China Sea, Beijing has seized and fortified scraps of rock claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan, and asserted rights over areas claimed by Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. In the high Himalayas, the PLA initiated a lethal 2020 border skirmish with nuclear-armed India: 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of PLA troops (fighting with fists, rocks, and clubs wrapped in barbed wire—all forces on the border have been unarmed for decades) were killed in the first fatal encounter between the two nations since the days of Mao Zedong.

All of this makes China’s intentions in the Solomon Islands more troubling. “This isn’t just paranoia,” Rory Medcalf, of Australia National University and the author of a recent book on Chinese expansionism, told me. “For years we’ve been seeing quasi-imperial behavior by China throughout the region.”