My Say
Don't Mess With China
Are PRC Pacific Advances Aimed at Canberra and Wellington?
Papua New Guinea’s Sir Mekere Morauta is the latest Pacific Island prime minister to court China. Quite a procession of others have gone to Beijing in recent years, Tongan royalty included.
In May, Morauta was there fishing for Chinese aid, cheap loans and investment.
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One idea is for a private holding company, owned by some Papua New Guinea big businesses, to invest domestically in joint ventures with Chinese entrepreneurs. Morauta sweetened his hosts with obeisance to the "One China Policy" — the fiction that Taiwan doesn’t really exist — and proclaimed that Taiwan’s attempt to buy influence through "dollar diplomacy" threatened relations between PNG and China and elsewhere in the region.
China has been diplomatically active in the Pacific Islands for more than two decades. It has embassies in several countries like Kiribati, where it also has a rocket/satellite tracking station, Samoa, Fiji and in Tonga where after some members of the royal family hopeful of a squillion or two from Chinese patronage of Tonga’s satellite slot business saw to the ejection of a Taiwan mission in favor of one that skipped in from Beijing
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The One but really Two China game is an old Pacific Islands ping-pong event. Nauru, the Marshall Island, Palau and the Solomon Island recognize Taiwan officially, much to Beijing’s chagrin, and have been rewarded quite handsomely with aid.
In June, the Fiji government, about to open an embassy in Beijing and which allows Taiwan to run a “trade office” in Suva as an unofficial embassy, rejected local press reports that China had threatened it with something nasty if it went too far in being friendly with the Taiwanese. The Chinese Embassy was equally insistent that no threats had been uttered. Was that a smokescreen to hide a fire?
A Forum trade office, partly funded by China, will also soon open in Beijing. The enormity of China and its population, there on the north-western part of the Pacific Rim, obviously is something the Pacific Islands cannot afford to ignore. There are opportunities for exploiting real gains from a sensible relationship with China. What does China really want from the islands, apart from compliance with its One China demand? Fish is one attraction but at this point of time no other great one is apparent.
The real value of the location and the large staffs of China’s missions in the region is cause for conjecture. A senior Japanese foreign affairs official concerned with the Pacific Islands summarized China’s view of the Pacific Islands has being “long term,” a cliche attached to most other of China’s attitudes.
But in learned and not so learned journals of world affairs there is now a disturbing inclination towards a theory that if there is another big war, a really big one, it will be between China and the United States, and that the North Pacific Islands region at least will inevitably become the battleground for it, just as it was the battleground for the war between Japan and the United States and its allies.
In other words, after a couple of decades of being out in the cold, the Pacific Islands could again become strategic pawns in a power play between two giants. That eventuality is some years ahead. Militarily, China is no match for U.S. air and sea power. The day that Chinese warships first appear in Pacific Island ports on “goodwill” trips could be a prelude to it.
Some writers are already portraying China’s South Pacific Island diplomatic outposts as vanguards aimed in the direction of Australia and New Zealand. Do they envisage for Canberra the equivalent in the Solomon Islands, Samoa or Kiribati of the 1960s Cuba missile crises?
China is changing for the better, but only partly so. In being friends with China, or appearing to be, the Pacific Islands must never forget what a harsh, aggressive, hypocritical, grasping and corrupt regime the Chinese dictatorship is. In Tibet and other parts of Asia, China is a bloody and rapacious colonial power. It slaughters freedom fighters. It is equally oppressive of its own people; witness the persecution of the followers of Falun Gong.
China is not a state small countries should play games with. It is to be courted with extreme caution. At last year’s Forum meeting at Tarawa China’s Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, Liu Huaqiu, made a polite speech to Forum delegates but later turned nasty, threatening that if a plan for entertaining Taiwan went ahead at the Forum at Nauru this August the People's Republic of China might not be present. That’s an attitude a self-respecting Forum should take note of cooly.
Photo: (c) By Stefan Helders www.world-gazetteer.com
