Girt by China: Power play in the Pacific: Australian Foreign Affairs 17

By Jonathan Pearlman

What challenges does Australia face as the world's great powers battle for a foothold in the Pacific?

The latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines the growing rivalry and increasing tension in the Pacific as it becomes a stage for a great-power contest to gain influence and a strategic position in the region.

Girt by China looks at the challenges for Canberra as it seeks to strengthen ties with Pacific island countries and to counter moves by China to extend its reach into the waters off northern Australia.

Essays include:

Great games: The new battle for the Pacific

Island diplomacy: China's growing Pacific reach

Northern exposure: How to defend Australia's maritime approaches

Next deal: Inside Beijing's bid to sign new Pacific pacts

PLUS correspondence, The Fix, and more

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781743822814

Jonathan Pearlman

Jonathan Pearlman is the editor of Australian Foreign Affairs and the world editor of The Saturday Paper. He has been a foreign correspondent and a politics reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Straits Times and The Telegraph. He studied at the University of New South Wales and the University of Oxford.

Book preview

Contributors

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His most recent book is Dreamers and Schemers (La Trobe University Press).

Peter Connolly is an international relations security expert with a doctorate on China’s grand strategy in Melanesia. As an army officer he served in Somalia, Solomon Islands, Timor, Afghanistan and at Parliament House and the Pentagon.

James Curran is Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

Febriana Firdaus is a freelance journalist based in Indonesia and the managing editor at Environmental Reporting Collective.

Vafa Ghazavi is a Carr Center fellow at Harvard University and executive director for research and policy at the James Martin Institute for Public Policy.

Virginia Haussegger is a freelance journalist and gender equity specialist. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Canberra, and ANZSOG fellow.

Paul Keating was prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996.

David Kilcullen is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He previously served in the Australian Army, Office of National Intelligence and US State Department.

Rory Medcalf is a professor and head of the National Security College at the Australian National University.

Dorothy Wickham is a journalist in Solomon Islands and the founder and editor of Melanesian News Network.

Editor’s Note

GIRT BY CHINA

In 2014, Xi Jinping, president of the world’s most populous nation, made a state visit to Fiji, which has 944,000 residents. He met with the leaders of the eight Pacific states that recognise China – there are now ten – and promised a new era in ties between Beijing and the South Pacific.

Xi’s visit attracted little attention in Australia. It was not until five years later that Scott Morrison travelled to Fiji – the first visit by an Australian leader since 2006 – as part of Canberra’s Pacific step-up policy.

Australia’s turn towards the Pacific followed reports in 2018 that a Chinese-funded wharf in Vanuatu could be used as a Chinese naval base (a claim that Beijing and Vanuatu denied). Responding to the reports, Malcolm Turnbull, who was then prime minister, cited a basic Australian strategic tenet.

We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific island countries, he declared.

This tenet – based on the belief that major maritime powers are too far from Australia to invade it, unless they can use the Pacific islands as part of their supply lines – was embedded in Australia’s strategic outlook by the Pacific War between the United States and Japan. The tenet resurfaced during the Cold War, as Canberra and Washington cooperated to prevent the Soviet Navy from gaining a foothold in the Pacific.

In 1989, as the Soviet empire started to fall, anxieties in Canberra eased. Australia began to focus less on great-power interference and more on internal threats in the Pacific, such as the risk of political instability or financial collapse.

But the battle for influence in the Pacific had quietened – not disappeared. In 1990, China became a dialogue partner of the Pacific Islands Forum, the main regional body. Since then, Beijing’s relations with the Pacific have rapidly expanded. Beijing has become a major Pacific trading partner and source of aid and loans, and has increasingly attempted to develop security ties. Last year, Solomon Islands signed a security pact with China – a development that Penny Wong, now Australia’s foreign minister, described as the worst foreign policy blunder since World War II.

Australia remains committed to its Pacific tenet. To have any chance of countering China’s growing reach, Australia will need to understand how Beijing operates in the region, the changing strategic role of small islands as modern warfare evolves, the activities of other foreign players in the Pacific and, above all, the outlooks of Pacific states, which are often so different from Australia’s. The gross domestic product per capita of Solomon Islands in 2021, for instance, was US$2305; Australia’s was US$60,443.

In this latest contest for the Pacific, Australia will need to consider and advance the priorities and hopes of its Pacific neighbours. And its leaders will need to keep showing up.

Jonathan Pearlman

SEA OF MANY FLAGS

A Pacific way to dilute China’s influence

Rory Medcalf

Like empires past, Xi Jinping’s China seeks three grand prizes in the Pacific: wealth, control and presence. Australia and other Pacific nations took time to recognise 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 our shores. But even absent 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. The good news is that Australia is far from alone in wanting to build the resilience of the Pacific against China’s control. The Biden administration is expanding American civilian support for the region. But the United States is hardly the only other option. New Zealand, Japan, France, the EU, Britain and India all have much to offer, and others such as Canada, Germany and South Korea could play a part. Taiwan, too, remains a Pacific contributor. 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.

False calm

In 1520, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan named the world’s largest ocean for the peaceful waters he saw. The name has since become evocative of another longed-for vista: a tranquillity among nations, a place without war. This resonates with the region’s deep cultures of respect and sustainability. Yet there is another side to the character of the Pacific Ocean, with its awe-inspiring scale, life-giving treasures and hidden tremors. The Pacific has been no stranger to the clash of interests among nations.

European colonial empires once competed here for territory and aggrandisement, through exploration, exploitation and worse. America and Australia joined the race in the nineteenth century. In the 1940s, some of the most brutal battles of World War II shattered the calm of its waters, beaches and forests. These thwarted the bid by a militaristic Japan to build a Pacific empire, and heralded America’s own hegemony. The Cold War spared the Pacific as a battleground but not as a testing ground, from the shock and defilement of US, British and French nuclear detonations to China’s first long-range missile test near Vanuatu in 1980. The Soviet Union, then Russia, and for a time even Gaddafi’s Libya sought to embroil Pacific nations in their own schemes. Even in the late twentieth century, as the waves of decolonisation unfurled and thoughts of world war temporarily ebbed, the interests of powerful states were never far from the surface.

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 – the region’s main international organisation, which includes Australia among its eighteen member states – 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. All this builds on the October 2000 Biketawa Declaration, which also stresses good governance, democratic processes and the liberty of the individual. And it’s taken further in the forum’s 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, launched in Suva in 2022, which subsumes security in a vision of a future based on development, connectivity and a Pacific way of consensus. Australia and its global partners must not only respect all these priorities, but also acknowledge that our Pacific friends have shown the path in voicing them. Yet that does not mean that the gathering storm of global geopolitics will pass these nations by.

China’s strategic game

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 twenty-first century was not due to some hawkish Washington plot, but was an imposition from Beijing: part of the expansion of a risen China’s interests and influence across the globe. Australia, America 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). Early maps of this signature Xi Jinping strategy were all about corridors of connectivity across Eurasia (the Belt) and the sea lanes from Shanghai to the Mediterranean