When China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi walked into a meeting with the Pacific leaders this week, he may have expected a different reception than the scepticism that greeted him. | Eryk Bagshaw
The Butuka school in Papua New Guinea is plastered with the face of Xi Jinping, the Presidential Palace in East Timor was built with Chinese funding, and the stadium for next year’s Pacific Games in Solomon Islands will be an icon of Beijing’s new partnership with its closest friend in the region.
Beijing’s “Common Development Vision” sparked immediate concerns in Washington and Canberra. Bruised by China’s April security deal with Solomon Islands, the Australian government could not afford a region-wide deal to take shape less than 2000 kilometres off the Queensland coast. It set off a race between Wang and Foreign Minister Penny Wong around the largest Pacific countries.
“It was too big a fruit, too quickly pursued,” says Dr Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “The international hurdles and the local domestic complications are more severe than they realised.”Few countries send their foreign minister without a deal already sewed up, but for China, it unravelled further from there.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong meets with Henry Puna, the secretary-general of the Pacific Island Forum, on Thursday.“The onus is on us, and our partners, to genuinely engage to better navigate these relationships in our best interest as sovereign countries, but more so, bearing in mind that as a collective, we are stronger and more effective,” he said.
“Puna was very much exercising the essential spirit of Pacific regionalism,” says Dr Tess Newton Cain, an associate professor at the Griffith Asia Institute who has lived in Vanuatu for 20 years. “I just don’t see that that’s true,” she says. “I think what’s important is that the new government has recognised the importance of being present in the region.”
“I spent a lot of years trying to change our country’s position,” she said. “I have two daughters. I would like us to be able to say to our children that we did something I think that matters.” “She’s extremely good at identifying what her particular policy interests might be. In listening to what her interlocutors my particular policy interests are, and then looking for bridges between them, looking for convergence, looking for where Australia and whoever it is might meet.
Part of the challenge is the chronic under emphasis on the Pacific Islands in Australian education systems. There is only one university in Australia that offers Pacific studies at the degree level, ANU. Pacific education in high school starts and ends at the Kokoda track.
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