News Analysis Chinatown and a police station in the Solomon Islands’ capital city of Honiara were partially burned down during protests that started on Nov. 24. Many locals are unhappy with Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare’s 2019 turn away from Taiwan and toward Beijing (known locally as “The Switch”), not to mention poverty, preferences given to Chinese residents, and jobs going to foreigners hired by Chinese companies, rather than to locals. Beijing is said to have offered parliamentarians as much as $615,000 each to vote for the switch, and documents show $200,000 embassy payouts to 39 pro-Beijing members of parliament—the number required to amend the constitution, which Sogavare wants to do. The result of Beijing’s overbearing influence in the Solomons and economic exploitation of islands distant from the capital is near ethnic civil war, with the archipelagic state’s most-populous island, Malaita, supported by the United States and Taiwan. All this is …