Guest Opinion: For South Pacific, China is opportunity, not threat

Kalinga Seneviratne

I spent about 18 months at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji in 2022 and 2023. During that time I observed that the Pacific media’s coverage of Asia was dismal.

I have noted that the Australian media in particular, as well as some of their think tanks, spread the message that Australia and New Zealand and their Western allies are the region’s traditional friends and partners, and they are here to help the Pacific.

This lecturing is tempered with China-bashing rhetoric, where China is painted as an outsider infiltrating the region to exploit the people and the resources.

When I hear this rhetoric, I often think, what about Papua New Guinea, one of the most mineral-rich countries in the world, whose mineral resources have been exploited by Australian and Western mining companies for over half a century, and what have the Papua New Guineans got in return? They are still citizens of one of the poorest countries in the world.

I still remember the very first international news feature I did in the early 1990s. It was about how the American Tunaboat Association was plundering the fish resources of the South Pacific without paying any licensing fees to Pacific Island countries because the Americans don’t recognize the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea.

They still don’t, while they lecture about protecting a “rules-based order” in the Pacific.

RULES-BASED ORDER: WHOSE ORDER?

A popular mantra of Americans and their allies today is that they are protecting a “rules-based order” that is under threat from the rise of China and its partnership with Russia. However, it is seen as mired in hypocrisy rather than reality outside the Western bloc.

The United States and its European allies have been imposing unilateral sanctions and breaking international law at will — the latest being efforts to take some 300 billion U.S. dollars of Russian money held in Western banks to help pay for the arms supplied to Ukraine.

The rules they are talking about are rules they have set themselves, to rig the international economic and political order, to help themselves. Now, a majority of the world’s nations, known as the “Global South,” are challenging these rules.

The problem is that the West only knows how to lecture to others; it doesn’t know how to listen and respect other points of view.

DEBT TRAPS: WHOSE TRAPS?

Ever since the West established the so-called Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the West has set the terms of international lending to the so-called Third World, their former colonies.

For half a century, the West has used these debts, which they call “aid,” employing the IMF to impose structural adjustment policies to dictate economic and foreign policies to poor countries.

At the turn of the century, when a rising China started to lend money to developing countries, especially to build infrastructure such as roads, ports and railways which are designed to link cities not only domestically but across regions, the West got alarmed. It no longer controlled the global development agenda that favors it, especially after China introduced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013.

Australia too has realized that. In 2015, the Northern Territory government granted a 99-year lease over the Port of Darwin in Northern Australia to China’s Landbridge Group. After a security review, just before Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited China in November 2023, the Australian government announced on its website that the deal could go through. Darwin is slated to be Australia’s link to the BRI and Asia.

South Pacific countries are in its rim and to benefit from it, the Pacific needs to link up with the region through connectivity, media exposure, cultural interactions and intellectual ideas.

In June, Chinese Premier Li Qiang visited New Zealand and Australia. In New Zealand, the leaders of the two countries discussed enhancing their partnership through improving trade in services and goods, and intellectual exchanges. The same was agreed in Australia between the two countries.

While Australia and New Zealand are trying to benefit from China’s economic rise, calling it a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” their leaders and think tanks come to the Pacific to warn the region of Chinese “debt traps” and security threats.

PACIFIC LINKING UP WITH ASIA

In a recent commentary in the China Daily, Chinese political science professor Li Wei argued that China-U.S. competition is set to be a long-term three-dimensional battle, with diplomacy, capital flows and technological innovations playing pivotal roles.

In terms of diplomacy, he points out that the U.S. system is based on its military alliance system, “which is relatively exclusive and rigid.” In contrast, China’s diplomacy is founded on a global network of partnerships that focus on cooperation, “which is more open and flexible.”

It is the latter that the Pacific Island leaders and policymakers need to understand. When China builds a port in the Pacific it needs to be looked at in terms of linking up with the BRI, and China’s aid to the region needs to be seen in terms of building partnerships.

In 2023, I did a story for the South China Morning Post on how Chinese agriculture specialists are training Fijian farmers in rice cultivation. There are no loans here and it is an aid project building partnerships between the Chinese and Fijian agriculture sectors introducing Asian know-how.

When China offers to build a fishing harbor in Daru, Papua New Guinea, alongside a Chinese-built fish processing plant to export seafood products to China, it is again building partnerships between the Pacific fisheries sector and the Chinese market. But, when this was announced in 2021, the Australian media was up in arms, seeing it as building a naval base 200 km from its shores.

China has built a 414 km-long railway in Laos, a former French colony. I took this railway in May this year and it is an impressive technological feat built through rugged mountain terrain.

It is through a direct experience of Asia that you can have a balanced view of the geopolitics in the region, and help develop win-win situations.

Right across Southeast Asia, the Chinese are building railways which would open up a huge market for goods, services and tourism that could be bigger than the European Union’s market in years to come.

Editor’s note: Kalinga Seneviratne is a research fellow at Shinawatra University in Bangkok and a consultant to the journalism program at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Covert Magazine.