Like empires past, Xi Jinping’s China seeks three grand prizes in the Pacific: wealth, control and presence. Australia and other Pacific nations have recognised the nature and scope of this neocolonial ambition and the risk it brings; responses have veered from complacency to overreaction, fatalism to alarm.
The events of 2022 – especially the controversy over China’s security agreement with Solomon Islands – have thus been a useful wake-up call. Australian interests would be directly jeopardised if China were to establish a military base so close to Australian shores. But even without that scenario, the prospect of a Pacific island government turning to the guns and truncheons of a one-party nationalist megastate to suppress domestic dissent is confronting.
A long contest has begun. The aim cannot be to exclude one of the world’s greatest powers from the largest ocean. That is neither a realistic strategy nor what most of the region’s governments and peoples want. Instead, the challenge for Pacific island states and their international friends is to craft an inclusive vision for long-term development and protection of sovereignty.
China has a rightful place in the Pacific, just not the right to dominate. If many partners sustain their commitment, then all Pacific nations will benefit and strategic rivalry need not permanently shadow the future of the blue continent.
Any conversation on the international relations of the Pacific must be grounded in the interests, values and identity of the Pacific nations. The September 2018 Boe Declaration of the Pacific Islands Forum provides this starting point with undeniable clarity. Here is an “expanded concept of security”, including human wellbeing, environmental protection and resilience to disasters. Health, social inclusion and prosperity are common goals. Collective stewardship of the shared “Blue Pacific” is affirmed.
So are the principles of the UN Charter: non-interference, non-coercion and a rules-based order. Climate change is emphasised as the single greatest threat: rising seas, not rising China, are front of mind.
Strategic ambition
The many nations of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia have every right to want to develop and coexist free from strategic rivalry. Still, it has found them. The Boe Declaration itself acknowledged the unavoidability of “a dynamic geopolitical environment leading to an increasingly crowded and complex region”.
Australia and the United States are sometimes accused of foisting an anti-China campaign upon small countries determined to avoid taking sides. This is false, both as narrative and chronology. The resurgence of strategic ambition in the Pacific in the 21st century was not due to some hawkish Washington plot, but was an imposition from Beijing: part of the expansion of a rising China’s interests and influence across the globe. Australia, the U.S. and the rest are catching up with that new reality.
The shift did not occur overnight. A crystallising moment was Beijing’s redefinition of its 2013 One Belt, One Road geoeconomic plan (later renamed the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI).
In the past two decades, Chinese activity in the Pacific has expanded dramatically – from aid, loans and sensitive infrastructure projects, such as undersea telecommunications and data cables, to trade and investment, resource exploitation, education, propaganda, policing links, diplomatic dialogue and political pressure.
Still, it’s not a comprehensive or categorical takeover. For instance, China remains far from the largest aid donor to the region. Indeed, its rate of commencing new projects has declined markedly in the past few years, following a decade of acceleration.
Japan has long been the softly spoken achiever in Pacific assistance, steadily around the sixth-largest contributor and specialising in strengths such as stewardship of fisheries. Moreover, the Asian Development Bank – in which Japan and the United States have the largest roles – remains a vital lender for many Pacific nations.
But Beijing’s impact is not in scale alone. It converts activity into influence. Its aid projects are high profile, such as government buildings, sports stadiums, telecommunications towers, medical centres and multi-lane highways. These are typically funded by loans, which local elites see as easier to get (more red flag than red tape), even though they add to unsustainable debt.
Empire and disruption
China has become busy, but that does not prove it has a grand strategy for the Pacific. Given the sheer scale of China’s capabilities, combined with its destabilising impetus as an authoritarian power impatient to impose change, other nations can’t afford to wait for a fulsome exposition of its plans before deciding how to respond.
Resilience means being prepared for multiple futures. One is that China seeks to dominate the Pacific in every sense – commanding resources, political influence and military access – as part of a strategy for region-wide hegemony and to challenge the United States globally. But another disturbing prospect is that, as with other colonial undertakings, there’s a self-perpetuating spiral of infiltration.
Either way, we now see an authoritarian giant pursuing wealth, control and presence across one of the world’s most vulnerable regions, and therein lies risk for all. China’s quest for economic benefit in the Pacific should not be considered only as short-term returns from trade or investment, but as long-term advantage in a region with concentrations of the world’s untapped raw materials – especially fish, minerals and timber.
It’s on the seabed that Beijing has the most massive ambitions, collecting offshore exploration licences across the region. The prospective prize: vast “polymetallic nodules”, including critical minerals for battery production.
Meanwhile, China has a separate reason for seeking political control and strategic presence. The Pacific has long been terrain for rivalry over diplomatic recognition between China and Taiwan, with largesse often an inducement. More generally, the support of Pacific governments has been a goal for China’s multilateral statecraft. And political influence paves the way for favourable economic and security ties.
For China, a security presence could involve police on the ground and preferential relations in training security forces, warship visits and even access for its military forces. Many observers were sceptical about such aspirations until the 2022 Solomons Islands security agreement incontrovertibly put them in print.
Even without strategic intent, China’s growing footprint in the Pacific brings danger – including for China. Disruption could come in many ways. Accusations of “debt-trap” diplomacy may have been premature, but the existing Indian Ocean case studies of Djibouti, Sri Lanka and Maldives are sobering. Here, unpayable debt to China foreshadowed variously military basing, loss of strategic assets, compromised sovereignty, political unrest and pushback.
A Pacific kind of leadership
In all this, Australia could be a guide and an informal co-ordinator for other international contributors, encouraging them to invest efficiently, for the long haul and in line with what Pacific communities want. This is leadership, but of a quiet kind, with a premium on self-awareness, inclusion and genuine diplomacy.
As the only nation with a diplomatic presence in every Pacific Islands Forum member country or territory, Australia is uniquely suited for this vital connecting role.
Its operating picture of the region is unparalleled: from the maritime domain awareness of our navy, air force, Border Force and other intelligence assets, to the vital climate data of the Bureau of Meteorology. This can augment a political and cultural understanding of the region – often situated outside government – which is being renewed after long neglect.
The role of Australia as co-ordinator would not be about power or entitlement, but a function of how much others trust our expertise, experience and networks. Any advice we give to external contributors should be based on clear signals from local communities.
We should accept that sometimes others may have capabilities and ideas more suited for Pacific needs than our own – perhaps Japanese technical expertise, French marine research, German democratic transparency, Indian health care or British climate finance.
Even in security, Australia will want to be forewarned of what others are doing and deconflict wherever it can, but it should not always insist on being the mediator or leader of its friends’ contributions.
Pacific institutions and communities have modest bandwidth to absorb the new-found torrent of global interest, and Canberra should be wary of flooding the zone. Labor foreign policy lore recounts Australia’s key role in enlightened collective achievements of more than a generation ago, like the Cambodia Peace Process, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and global arms control and disarmament agreements.
Now Australia needs to rediscover that muscle memory for multilateral convening and co-ordination and apply it close to home, submerging hard national interest in a sense of regional or global citizenship where true partners hold each other to account. This is not about backing down on security, but rather providing it in the broadest sense. The test ahead is to prove it is up to this authentically Pacific kind of leadership.
Rory Medcalf is Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University.
