DARWIN, Australia—U.S. Marines use the commercial port in this northern Australian city to unload aircraft and other supplies for nearby training. But at the port gate, vehicles pass underneath a sign in Chinese.
The sign, which says Landbridge Darwin Port in Chinese characters, is a reminder of a long-simmering controversy: the 2015 decision by local authorities to lease the port to the Australian unit of China’s Landbridge Group. Now, with competition between the U.S. and China intensifying in the Indo-Pacific, the 99-year lease—which some former defense officials and analysts say gives China a potentially valuable foothold in a strategically important area—is under renewed scrutiny.
Shortly after winning a May election, Australian Prime Minister
Anthony Albanese
launched a review into whether the lease presents security concerns. Many residents of Darwin, a city of about 150,000 that was bombed by the Japanese in World War II, support a re-examination, given the deteriorating relationship between China and the West.
“There is a sense that a significant misstep was made in 2015,” said
Luke Gosling,
a member of Mr. Albanese’s Labor Party who represents the area in the federal Parliament and is a critic of the lease.
The U.S. and Australia are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade defense infrastructure in Darwin, and U.S. Marines have been rotating in to train with Australian forces for a decade. Last year, the two countries joined with the U.K. to create a security partnership called Aukus, which will help Australia to develop nuclear-powered submarines.
Foreign-policy analysts believe Darwin would be a major military staging point in any regional conflict, including a clash over Taiwan. The city is nearer to the contested South China Sea than it is to Australia’s capital, Canberra, and remnants of World War II-era antiaircraft batteries are a short drive from the port entrance.
The government of the Northern Territory, which includes Darwin, still owns the port and has a 20% interest in the lease.
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