Australia is battling China for influence in the Pacific
AUSTRALIA HAS always been proprietorial about what Scott Morrison, the prime minister, calls its “patch”—those millions of square miles of Pacific Ocean over which the archipelagic countries of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia are scattered. It has also been complacent. The patch was for flying over, not visiting. Until this week no Australian leader had been to Vanuatu since 1990 or Fiji since 2006, and even then only to attend the Pacific islands’ annual powwow. Mr Morrison is making history with state visits to both countries. It is, he emphasises, all part of taking the region seriously.
Admittedly, Australia has for ages been easily the biggest trade partner and aid donor in the Pacific, as well as the main destination for Pacific-island immigrants. It has also been the policeman of last resort. But its exports to the region consist mainly of fatty meat, cigarettes and booze. Its investments are in many cases anaemic (Vanuatu invests more in Australia than vice versa). It is often accused of being arrogant and domineering. It had, one of its diplomats says, “dropped the ball”.
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It is plain why Mr Morrison has picked it up again this week: China. Australia, says Peter Jennings of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, was slow to grasp how quickly China’s engagement in the South Pacific had grown. Chinese fishing fleets are sucking tuna from the seas. State enterprises are building roads and modernising airports. A Chinese-built tower dominates the skylines of Port Moresby and Suva, the sleepy capitals of Papua New Guinea and Fiji. Private entrepreneurs pour in after state-owned firms.
China’s strategic interest in the region has also grown—leading an Australian foreign-policy white paper, published in 2017, to promise a “step-change” in engagement in the Pacific. But it was the rumour that Vanuatu might let China build a military base that really galvanised the Australian establishment last year. That was a red line: the first potential military threat in Australia’s near-abroad since the second world war.
Since then, the Pacific promises have come thick and fast. They include a $2bn fund for infrastructure and new diplomatic missions in the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, the Marshall Islands, Niue and Palau. Australia, along with America and Japan, promises to bring electricity to 70% of households in Papua New Guinea by 2030, up from just 13% today. On the security front, Australia is helping replace the Pacific nations’ ageing patrol boats. It insisted that it and not China should help Fiji turn its Blackrock camp into a regional military and police- training facility. A Chinese base, Vanuatu was told, was out of the question.
Australia and its neighbours still do not always see eye to eye. Atoll nations are naturally alarmed about man-made climate change and rising sea levels; Mr Morrison once brought a lump of coal into parliament to sing its praises. But the welcome promised for him this week underscores how happy the region is with Australia’s re-engagement. Relations with Fiji had turned frosty after a coup in 2006 by Frank Bainimarama, the head of the armed forces; they now seem to be warming again, helped by Mr Bainimarama’s clear wins in two consecutive elections. Australia insists it does not want to force Pacific nations to turn their backs on China. Rather, it wants to be the “partner of choice”.
For now, Pacific countries do not mind Australia’s red lines; after all, they still benefit from having a choice of suitors. The difficulty will come when China’s power grows further. It pays little heed to the tenets of good governance. Its influence is growing fastest where institutions are weakest and money politics is already prevalent, such as Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands (which does not have formal diplomatic ties with China) and Tonga.
Trying to trump China round the region is like playing whack-a-mole, says Jonathan Pryke of the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney. Yet China’s approach is not guaranteed to succeed in the long run. Growing numbers of Chinese are breeding resentment in places where locals have few good prospects. Ethnic-Chinese shopkeepers who have been in the region for generations are as alarmed about the trend as any. In Papua New Guinea in November stores owned by Chinese were attacked amid police protests over unpaid wages. The Pacific is definitely Australia’s patch in at least one sense: if things go wrong, it will have to pick up the pieces.