China Expands Naval Reach Beyond First Island Chain, Raising Stakes in Pacific

China is increasingly extending its naval operations beyond the so-called First Island Chain, signaling a strategic push toward the Second Island Chain and heightening competition with the United States and its allies in the Pacific.

In recent years, Chinese warships have operated farther from the mainland, moving past the First Island Chain—a strategic arc stretching from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula through Japan and Taiwan to the Philippines. These deployments have now begun to reach areas associated with the Second Island Chain, which includes Japan’s Bonin Islands, the Mariana Islands, and key Pacific territories such as Guam, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, encompassing the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.

The growing Chinese presence in these waters has drawn renewed attention to islands that hold significant historical and strategic value. Many of them were major battlegrounds during World War II, when U.S. forces fought Imperial Japan in the Pacific through an island-hopping campaign that proved decisive in the war’s outcome.

Decades later, those same remote islands are once again emerging as focal points of great-power rivalry. The United States and its allies now find themselves facing a resurgent Asian power seeking to project influence and challenge long-standing security arrangements across the Pacific region.