Chinese police work in Kiribati, Hawaii's Pacific neighbour

SYDNEY, (Reuters) - Chinese police are working in the remote atoll nation of Kiribati, a Pacific Ocean neighbour of Hawaii, with uniformed officers involved in community policing and a crime database program, Kiribati officials told Reuters.

Kiribati has not publicly announced the policing deal with China, which comes as Beijing renews a push to expand security ties in the Pacific Islands in an intensifying rivalry with the United States.

Kiribati, a nation of 115,000 residents, is considered strategic despite being small, as it is relatively close to Hawaii and controls one of the biggest exclusive economic zones in the world, covering more than 3.5 million square kilometres (1.35 million square miles) of the Pacific. It hosts a Japanese satellite tracking station.

Kiribati's acting police commissioner Eeri Aritiera told Reuters the Chinese police on the island work with local police, but there was no Chinese police station in Kiribati.

"The Chinese police delegation team work with the Kiribati Police Service - to assist on Community Policing program and Martial Arts (Tai Chi) Kung Fu, and IT department assisting our crime database program," he said in an email.

China's embassy in Kiribati did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the role of its police. In a January social media post the embassy named the leader of "the Chinese police station in Kiribati".

Aritiera, who attended a December meeting between China's public security minister Wang Xiaohong and several Pacific Islands police officials in Beijing, said Kiribati had requested China's policing assistance in 2022.