As China’s tour of the Pacific draws to a close, Sam Sachdeva looks at the successes and failures of Wang Yi’s trip to the region and what the future may hold in store
“For friends in need, China is always a friend indeed.”
The closing lines of an editorial from state news agency Xinhua, assessing Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi’s tour of the Pacific, provide a (predictable) insight into how the visit is being portrayed to a domestic audience.
The view within the region itself is far less rose-tinted, with the apparent centrepiece of Wang’s trip – a Pacific-wide ‘Common Development Vision’ agreement covering matters as diverse as police training, cybersecurity and criminal forensics – stymied by leaders’ frustration over the rushed nature of the proposal and the sense that such a significant agreement required a more deliberative approach.
“As always we put consensus first among our countries throughout any discussion on new regional agreements,” Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama pointedly noted in a joint press conference with Wang after his visit to Fiji, while Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa was equally staunch.
“Our position was that you cannot have regional agreement when the region hasn’t met to discuss it, and to be called in to have that discussion and to have an expectation that there would be a comprehensive decision or outcome was something that we could not agree to,” Fiame told reporters, according to The Guardian.
Terence Wood, a research fellow at the Australian National University’s Development Policy Centre, says the hype around Wang’s visit – and the failure to live up to it – has provided “a useful lesson about how not to jump the gun and panic too early”.
“That seems to be a real intellectual industry afoot in Australasia which involves freaking out about China, and yet China is not omnipotent, and it doesn't always get its way and it’s a long way from being some sort of hegemon dominating the Pacific at this point in time – that's been proven very clearly over the last couple of weeks,” Wood says.
But although Wang’s visit has not been an unrivalled success, nor could it be described as an unmitigated failure.
While the multilateral talks were put on ice, plenty of deals have been signed with individual Pacific countries including Samoa, Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu.
“If you look back on the experiences of Australia and New Zealand trying to negotiate a region-wide trade deal, and how hard they had to press for that and how they ultimately failed in doing that, something more ambitious like a region-wide security agreement was obviously going to be a pretty tall ask on China's behalf.” – Terence Wood
Dr Anna Powles, a senior lecturer at Massey University's Centre for Defence and Security Studies, says the predictable success of the bilateral agreements has helped China to promote the trip as “getting some diplomatic runs on the board” in the Pacific.
While the superpower was always going to move into the multilateral space at some point, Powles says the hasty nature of, and ineffective diplomacy behind, the Pacific deal seemed a result of Chinese overconfidence spurred by its successful security agreement with the Solomon Islands.
Wood agrees, and points to the drawn-out nature of the PACER Plus trade deal as further evidence of the uphill task that China faced.
“If you look back on the experiences of Australia and New Zealand trying to negotiate a region-wide trade deal, and how hard they had to press for that and how they ultimately failed in doing that, something more ambitious like a region-wide security agreement was obviously going to be a pretty tall ask on China's behalf.”
The outcome may have been a setback for China, but it is unlikely to be deterred: shortly after the decision, it released a “position paper” on the Pacific sharing much in common with the leaked draft deal, but without the more contentious security aspects.
Some are already looking to the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum meeting next month as a potential stage for the next Chinese push, but there are some factors making that unlikely, as Powles notes.
PIF’s membership includes four nations which hold diplomatic ties with Taiwan, while three – Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia – are part of a compact of free association with the United States.
In a letter to 18 Pacific leaders about the draft deal, Federated States of Micronesia president David Panuelo decried what he described as China’s efforts to “acquire access and control of our region, with the result being the fracturing of regional peace, security, and stability, all while in the name of accomplishing precisely that task”.
“Despite our ceaseless and accurate howls that climate change represents the single-most existential security threat to our islands, the Common Development Vision threatens to bring a new Cold War era at best, and a World War at worst,” Panuelo added.
Geopolitics 'without Pacific at table'
With the forum still facing internal turmoil and trying to convince Micronesian members to rescind their notices of withdrawal, Powles says the reaction to China’s push has fed into long-held concerns that geopolitical competition could be yet another point of division within the Pacific.
However, she believes the reaction to the deal is in fact “galvanising regional solidarity, in the sense of that frustration about strategic competition”.
That frustration is not with China alone: Bainimarama and Fiame both expressed irritation with what the Fijian leader described as “geopolitical point-scoring”, with Samoa’s prime minister noting that new or renewed groupings like Aukus and the Quad “look past us”.
“Geopolitical conversations are taking place without the Pacific at the table, and those concerns still exist and are warranted,” Powles says.
There is further concern that outside countries are focusing too much on security matters and not enough on climate change, the issue consistently at the top of the Pacific agenda.
“Our forum leaders have identified climate change as the single greatest threat facing our Blue Pacific region. Action to keep our world below 1.5 degrees is vital for the future prosperity and wellbeing of our region,” forum secretary-general Henry Puna said ahead of his own meeting with Wang.
Within Aotearoa, the headlines around China’s trip and new Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s own swiftly organised visit to the region has sparked debate about whether the Government has been living up to its claims to be a Pacific nation.
Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta, who has made just one visit to the Pacific in her 18 months in the portfolio, has argued New Zealand does not need “to act in a way that makes us look desperate”.
National Party foreign affairs spokesman Gerry Brownlee has taken issue with that view, saying on Thursday: “We do need to have a foreign minister who’s taking a bit more interest in this, should be up there with Penny Wong, putting on a … bi-national view, if you like, of how we want to see the Pacific develop in the years ahead.”
Wood contrasts the positive headlines from Wong’s trip with what he describes as “some fairly unscrupulous behaviour from Australian politicians” seeking to win political points on the campaign trail in the wake of the Solomon Islands security deal.
“If countries like Australia and New Zealand are going to increasingly treat Pacific as a little more than some sort of geo-strategic chessboard, or something from which political actors in Australia and New Zealand can derive domestic political advantage that's going to come at both a cost to the people in the Pacific but also to our own reputation in the region.”
Powles says Mahuta has a point about building consensus rather than rushing in, but believes it is an open question as to whether she – and the country more widely – has done enough to develop the relationships necessary to building that consensus.
“We claim to have Pacific credentials and Pacific currency, but the question is, do we have enough?”
With China’s interest in the Pacific showing no signs of abating, answering that question in the positive will rapidly become a critical matter for the Government.
