China’s South Pacific challenge to Australia and New Zealand
China’s South Pacific challenge to Australia and New Zealand
WRITTEN BY GRANT WYETH
1 May 2020
On April 12 a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) C-17A transport aircraft circled Port Vila airport, attempting to deliver humanitarian supplies to Vanuatu following the devastation brought upon by Cyclone Harold.
However, parked in an awkward position on the runway at Port Vila was another aircraft, one that had been chartered by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corp (CCECC), that was also in the process of delivering medical supplies. With the RAAF pilot assessing that it was unsafe to land the plane owing to the runway’s size, and lacking the required fuel to continue circling, the decision was made to return to Brisbane with the supplies. The delivery was made the following day.
The incident wasn’t particularly unusual - given the limited tarmac space at the airport (even after recent upgrades, by CCECC) - but it was highly symbolic. A sign of China’s growing presence in the South Pacific, and the challenges that Australia and New Zealand now face to maintain their influence in the region.
Australia’s primary security objective is to prevent any unaligned powers from gaining military access to any Pacific Islands, which could - theoretically - be used as an advance base to either attack Australia, or limit Australia’s ability to maneuver. For this, Australia works in tandem with its close partner New Zealand to maintain regional hegemony, with Canberra maintaining a greater focus on the Melanesian states, and Wellington through Polynesia. Although with considerable overlap.
Although concerns that China plans to establish a military facility in the region are yet to be justified with any significant evidence, the anxiety within Australia and New Zealand towards this potential outcome remains prominent
Since the conclusion of World War II and Japan’s expulsion from the region this has been a relatively straightforward task. With the South Pacific not deemed a region of major strategic contest, a like-minded Asian hegemon in the form of the United States, a rehabilitated and aligned Japan, and significant economic and cultural links, both Canberra and Wellington felt comfortable that their primacy in the region faced no major threats. The establishment of the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) in 1971 created a multilateral framework for Australia and New Zealand to cooperate with the states of Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia in areas of common concern, disaster relief and in consolidating regional trust.
Yet China’s growing capabilities have disrupted this comfortable consensus. In the previous decades, China’s actions in the South Pacific were seen primarily through the lens of its diplomatic competition with Taiwan. With the region having a significant number of states that recognise Taipei over Beijing, there was a keen interest in China to overturn this reality. However, during the Taiwanese Presidency of Ma Ying-jeou (2008-2016) a tacit agreement was reached to mute this competition for recognition. The election of President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016 overturned this understanding and Beijing began to increase its activity in the region.
The knock-on effect was that Australia and New Zealand now had a more assertive China operating in the Pacific, with an eye not just on increasing its legitimacy, but also its influence. Aid, trade, and tourism from China have all significantly increased in recent years, creating a more conspicuous presence. A presence that is having its desired effect, with the Solomon Islands and Kiribati shifting their diplomatic recognition to Beijing over Taipei last year. This leaves only four Micronesian states of Marshall Islands, Nauru, Pulau, and Tuvalu - with their traditional links to Taiwan’s indigenous population - maintaining their alliance with the Republic of China.
Yet, there is more to just diplomatic recognition that is driving Beijing’s increased regional activity. For China a presence through the Pacific Islands is seen as advantageous to being able to project power out into the wider Pacific, and to limit the maritime approaches of other states to the Chinese mainland, especially their potential defense of Taiwan. Although this capability is currently distant, it is not unforeseeable should the United States retrench from the Indo-Pacific, and the region’s middle powers are unable to develop a sustainable bulwark to Chinese power projection.
Although concerns that China plans to establish a military facility in the region are yet to be justified with any significant evidence, the anxiety within Australia and New Zealand towards this potential outcome remains prominent. It has been pronounced enough for Australia to drive the upgrading of the Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island as a joint Australia-US-Papua New Guinea venture; a key location that provides excellent access into the Pacific, and also the ability to launch toward northeast and southeast Asia.
This upgrade forms part of Australia’s wider Pacific Step-up, which alongside New Zealand’s Pacific Reset, are policies designed to make a noticeable regional re-engagement in the face of China’s increased presence. Central to this has been the establishment of a new comprehensive partnership with Fiji, known as the Fiji-Australia Vuvale Partnership (vuvale meaning “family” in Fiji’s iTaukei language). Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has extended the idea of family throughout the Pacific region; the concept being that families can have disagreements, but they are bonded by a connection that is always capable of transcending such disputes.
Fiji forms the lynchpin to this concept due to its suspension from PIF from 2009 - 2014, and its attempts to circumvent Canberra and Wellington with its “Look North” foreign policy. This has been coupled with the efforts Fijian Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama, has made to not allow Pacific Island countries to become bystanders to strategic competition in their own region. Bainimarama has been the driver of Pacific Island countries finding common concerns and interests among themselves and developing a more assertive collective diplomatic posture. This strategy has succeeded in shifting the agenda of PIF to one where Canberra and Wellington are required to respond to the concerns of Pacific Island states, rather than vice versa.
The realities of China’s increased regional presence, and the Pacific Islands’ more assertive posture, has transformed Bainimarama from persona non grata to courted leader. Despite some difficulties over Australia’s inactive response to climate change, bringing Bainimarama back into the family has been a key foreign policy victory for Morrison, and an essential component of Australia’s objectives to maintain its influence in the region.
However, this influence will not simply be compliance. Pacific Island countries have the agency to make their own assessments of the opportunities and costs of engagement with China, and undermining these choices won’t enhance regional trust. Despite its growing reach, Beijing operates under considerable cultural constraints in the region, which favours Canberra and Wellington. As does the key factor of increased labour mobility, something Pacific governments desperately want, and something Beijing cannot match. This would form a vital element in making sure that Australia and New Zealand’s new regional engagement policies are conducted in collaboration with Pacific Island countries, not simply towards them.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Grant Wyeth is a researcher at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, and a contributing author at The Diplomat. He specialises in Australia and the Pacific, India, and Canada. Alongside his work for The Diplomat, his analysis has been published by The Lowy Institute, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and the Australian Institute of International Affairs, as well as by mainstream news outlets The Age, The Guardian, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Inside Story. Image credit: Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Defense.