Sounds like some western coordinated economic development plan for these areas would be the best strategic move to counter/contain Chinas expanding influence? They plan very long time for sure and many moves ahead over tens of years. Just look how "they" buy themselves into port authorities globally.
So this is not easy to counter by short term elected zigzagging western politicians and one P-8 patrol here and there. We would need something like a 50 year or 100 year plan ourselves.
There must be a lot of useful cold war lessons learned when the Soviet Union expanded it's area of influence in Africa back then?