China and Australia in a high-speed race to win control of the Pacific

If you want to know how China and Australia are competing for influence in the Pacific Islands, here’s a microcosm of the contest.

Constantly seeking opportunities to establish itself as the dominant power in the Pacific, Beijing decided to offer a fleet of 27 brand-new vehicles as a gift to Solomon Islands in time for its hosting this week of the annual summit of the region’s paramount political gathering, the Pacific Islands Forum. The 18-member forum includes Australia and New Zealand. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be there.

The purported function of the vehicles? The 27 SUVs were to ferry the various leaders and ministers around during the summit. It might not sound like a big deal, but for a tiny nation with a per-capita income in the same range as that of Haiti and the Congo, the prime minister himself, Jeremiah Manele, turned out for the handover.

The Australian response? To announce that it would give the Solomons a fleet of 60 brand-new vehicles. “Australia continues to be the Pacific’s largest development partner, and security partner of choice,” Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong said in jointly announcing the gift, together with Pacific Island Affairs Minister Pat Conroy.

Unspoken is that Canberra doesn’t want any of the leaders to travel in China’s cars because they are inevitably set up to spy for Beijing. The Australian aim is that the forum leaders are chauffeured around in the cars from Canberra. After this week’s events, the Australian cars are to be distributed across various islands of the Solomons for police use.

For good measure, the Australian government is throwing in support for the Solomons’ cybersecurity, upgrades to roads around the capital of Honiara, and $3 million for logistics support for the PIF summit.

This is the new reality. It’s a daily competition, hand-to-hand diplomatic combat. Sometimes literally. One of Beijing’s cultural gifts to the Solomons is a program in which Chinese police instructors teach kung fu classes to local kids. The Solomons media call it “kung fu diplomacy”.

When you hear ministers or experts speak of abstract “strategic competition”, this is what it looks like in action in the Pacific.

In some cases, Australia woke up too late. It was the Solomons that dealt Australia its Pacific shock. That was the day in the Scott Morrison years when we woke up to learn that China had struck a security pact with Honiara.

The very islands that a hostile Imperial Japanese Army occupied to cut off Australia’s economic and military lifelines in WWII were falling under the influence of China.

It took a vast and bloody effort by the US, Australia, New Zealand and the UK to dislodge the Japanese from the Solomons in the battle for the island of Guadalcanal. That campaign cost the allies 29 ships sunk, 615 aircraft destroyed and more than 7000 troops killed.

By the time in 2022 that Canberra was shocked out of its complacency, Beijing had not only signed a security pact with the Solomons. Its agents had been offering bags of cash to Solomons’ politicians to look more favourably on China.

How do we know? Because the then-deputy leader of the opposition, Peter Kenilorea Jr, said publicly that China offered MPs the equivalent of between about $300,000 and $900,000 to lend their support to Beijing. The premier of Malaita Province, Daniel Suidani, said he’d been offered the equivalent of around $150,000.

There are some bidding wars that Australia cannot win. To this day, despite Australia’s new attentiveness and new prime ministers in both countries, the Solomons is considered one of the Pacific nations least simpatico with Australia.

Kiribati and Vanuatu are other Pacific states considered to be more sympathetic to Beijing’s interests. The biggest of the Pasifika nations, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, are considered solidly aligned with Australia.

We’ll learn more about the PNG relationship when Albanese travels there next week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from Australia. The two nations’ prime ministers are set to reveal a defence agreement that Canberra believes to be highly consequential.

But this is a daily contest in a permanent struggle across a vast expanse of what the regional nations call the Blue Pacific Continent. China is intent on establishing military bases in the Pacific and will not rest until it succeeds. If it does, will the US under Donald Trump be prepared to help dislodge them next time?

It’s obvious that Australia needs to do more to protect itself in its own near approaches. “There will be lots of ups and downs, and Australia has to continue playing Whac-A-Mole and doing everything it’s doing now,” says the director of research at the Lowy Institute, Herve Lemahieu.

But he has a big idea for transforming the contest, the region and Australia’s future: “Implementing a credible, deep and wide integration project would be the single most consequential project for this generation in Australia’s foreign policy,” he tells me.

If that sounds too abstract, think EU. Applied to the Pacific, the concept would be a Pacific Union, with the ambition to gradually ease barriers to free movement of data, capital and people across the region, including, of course Australia and NZ, but excluding China and the US.

It would be attractive for the peoples of the Pacific, says Lemahieu. He offers the case study of comparing Poland and Ukraine in 1989 when the Cold War ended, when both were similarly poor and hapless. One joined the EU and became one of the richest and most successful nations in the world. The other is a second-rate nation fighting a war of survival against Russia.

“The enlargement of the EU,” argues Lemahieu, “has been the single most effective policy against Putin’s designs to make Eastern Europe a Russian sphere”. A Pacific Union “would make many Pacific countries resistant to top-down elite capture” by China, while making support for integration a popular bottom-up pan-Pacific project. Pacific leaders who wanted to opt out of the union and enrich themselves by selling out their people would have a harder time.

“Our island continent is surrounded by friends and fish,” says Lemahieu. “Sustaining and nurturing that protective membrane, regardless of what Trump and Xi do, is our first principle and should be our guiding star.”

The region that Australia long thought was the least important is now accepted as the most important. As Pat Conroy has been heard telling Australian diplomats, don’t go chasing postings in traditional glamour cities – what you do in the Pacific is what matters most.

Peter Hartcher is international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

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