Currency of Persuasion - China and Taiwan's Approach in Wooing Pacific

Listener, May 2005 - http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3391/features/3950/currency_of_persuasion.html

by Michael Field

China and Taiwan are each wooing Pacific Island nations, offering large aid packages and other incentives in a bid to get recognition for their political positions. The result? Destabilisation of some small countries, with leaders “selling their souls”, personally and nationally.

As China’s forces launch an assault on Taiwan, American aircraft carriers race across the Pacific to Taiwan’s defence. As the world watches, they charge right into a Chinese cruise missiles ambush around Kiribati, the northern Cook Islands and Nauru.

A variation on Yellow Peril, this scenario is game-played in academic circles as Chinese influence in the Pacific rises. Fourteen Pacific Island states, long dominated by European powers, are these days being vigorously courted by China and Taiwan as they jockey for position in the region.

China’s growing influence has come under attack, however, from University of the South Pacific emeritus professor Ron Crocombe. His criticism of China as “the most expansionist power in the world today”, reported recently in the Cook Islands Independent and repeated in an interview with the Listener, has raised hackles.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Wellington, Zhang Wei, last September said, “China seeks no self-interest in the South Pacific.” Crocombe says flatly: “These statements are false. China pursues its self-interest more forcefully, interferes more in Pacific Islands’ internal affairs and has more strings on its aid than any other country.”

China, he claims, has found easily manipulated politicians in the Cooks, who, “to gain some glory, ego massages, free trips and perks, and money to help their election”, offer “the cheapest vote China can buy in the 30 or so international organisations to which the Cook Islands belongs”. The whole region, in a “long, sad story”, offers 14 cheap votes.

An extravagant $US4.8 million courthouse in Rarotonga’s Avarua is part of China’s vote buying. Beijing also plans a lavish police station amid rumours that thousands of Chinese labourers, hearing how wonderful Rarotonga is, have applied for jobs on the project.

It’s just one example of what Crocombe calls “China’s greed to swallow Taiwan”.

“China is playing an increasingly complex geopolitical game in the South Pacific – with a few different objectives: to counter the influence of Taiwan, to get access to the natural resources it needs to fuel its rapid economic growth and to make its mark on the world arena,” says Oli Brown of the Geneva-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

However, Taiwan plays the game, too. Tuvalu now has a large, three-floor administration building worth $US8 million paid for by a grateful Taipei. Taiwan has needed to win recognition from a critical mass of countries to gain a legal personality and, like China, has found that the South Pacific is a cost-effective way of doing so.

Brown says that Pacific Islanders, on a per capita basis, have greater representation in international organisations than anyone else in the world. “No community of 200,000 in China or India has as much independence in international affairs as Vanuatu does. In total, the 7.6 million people of the independent island states of the Pacific have more voting power in international forums … than the 3.5 billion people of China, India, Japan and the US combined.”

With geostrategic importance and voting bloc weight, there is strong competition for influence: “Aid is a persuasive currency in this market.”

Neither China nor Taiwan imposes conditions on the millions in aid that they pour into the region, but political pressure remains.

Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong told the Pacific Islands Forum last year, “China will continue to do its utmost to provide aid to all island countries that have diplomatic relations with China.” Of course, to have diplomatic relations, the countries must accept China’s one-China policy.

The Pacific nations aren’t merely passive recipients in this game. As Brown notes, “Pacific leaders are rather good at playing one country off against the other.” Melanesia, in particular, has proven adept at the two-China battle.

At independence, Papua New Guinea recognised China, but has flirted several times with Taiwan. In the late 1990s, then Prime Minister Bill Skate struck a secret deal with Taiwan, with allegations of under-table money passing between the various players. In return, Taipei was supposedly going to prop up Moresby’s budget to the tune of $US2.48 billion.

China demanded that PNG correct its “erroneous decision’’ and said that the government “must bear responsibility for all the serious consequences arising therefrom”. Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer warned of “some negative economic implications” and Australian Labor Party spokesman Laurie Brereton termed Skate’s behaviour an “example of the worst kind of diplomatic carpetbaggery”.

With founding Prime Minister Michael Somare now returned to office, PNG’s one-China policy is firmly back in place.

PNG’s resources colour the battle. China’s ambassador to PNG, Zhao Zhenyu, says that there is great potential in trade between the two: “Mother Nature has blessed PNG with rich natural resources such as minerals, forestry, liquid natural gas, crude oil, marine products … China is a resource-deficient country.”

The two Chinas, as well as Japan and Malaysia, are all battling for control of South Pacific resources: fish, timber and minerals. The seabed, rich in minerals especially in Cook Islands waters, is worth having “in the bank” for coming generations. The South Pacific is part of the long game played by many Asian governments.

Brown says that China is looking to secure the mineral and food resources it needs for its expanding population and economy. “A good way to get access to these resources is to develop close relationships with Pacific nations – and one of the best ways to achieve this is through bilateral aid programmes: cynical, I know, but the Europeans and North Americans have pursued this for decades.”

The China-Taiwan issue brought down the Vanuatu Government of Prime Minister Serge Vohor last year in a distinctly murky affair. Vohor secretly went off to Taipei and decided that Vanuatu, unlike any other nation, could run a Two-China policy, rather than recognising China alone. “When I took the decision to engage full diplomatic relations with Taiwan, I knew it was a difficult decision. But Vanuatu is different from other countries, due to its strong Christian principles and Melanesian values, which we can use to help both Taiwan and China,” Vohor said.

Vohor was tossed out by his Cabinet colleagues in December and replaced by Ham Lini. Foreign Minister Sato Kilman then raced off to Beijing to restore normal relationships and has been rewarded with a couple of new ships and extra “uncommitted” grants, totaling $US12.2 million.

Brown says that access to aid funds was often the prize for competing powers inside a state, such as in the Taiwan-recognising Solomon Islands. Taiwan provided a loan of $US17 million to compensate people displaced by the conflict, but part of it went to the insurgent Malaita Eagle Force.

Concern about rising Chinese and Taiwanese influence is one thing, but Michael Powles, a former New Zealand ambassador in places as diverse as Suva and Beijing, warns that some reactions are bordering on racism. “For example, I heard one Pacific academic say that although the Pacific had got used to Western crooks and swindlers over the years, the difference with the Chinese was that they didn’t even subscribe to a moral order such as the West’s Judaeo-Christian inheritance. Had he never heard of Confucius?”

Powles says that the region has to adapt to the Chinese involvement.

“If the region is prepared to take notice of what’s happening and take a few sensible measures (like ensuring Pacific countries adopt sensible policies on the issue of visas and passports and the enforcement of the law in respect of itinerant Chinese business people) and look for the opportunities that the trend can provide … then there would be as much cause for satisfaction as for worry.”

The economic benefit of Chinese interest was shown last year when trade volume between China and the 14 island states reached $500m – up 68 percent on the previous year.

The US-based civilian intelligence service Stratfor says that China enters the region not as a “moralistic outside force – nor even a Maoist nor Communist ideological force – but simply as a concerned Asian nation with cash”. Stratfor has been among interest groups touting a Chinese missile scenario. China does not have a strategically significant blue water navy, but military thinkers point to its land-based anti-cruise missiles, particularly the Ying Ji-82 anti-ship missile, which is said to have a range of up to 200km and flies just below supersonic speed 30m above the water.

“The Pacific strategy of China is multi-faceted, ranging from keeping votes away from Taiwan (a political issue) to tracking stations and listening posts to future security concerns,” Stratfor’s director of geopolitical analysis, Rodger Baker, says.

“And, as in Central America, these are some of the cheapest buys on the international market, but their political whims often make them unreliable, as they flop back and forth between China and Taiwan. Ultimately, it is not the US that will feel the need to fill the regional void to counter China, but Australia, which counts the Pacific Islands as within one of their inner spheres of strategic interest.”

Auckland University political studies senior lecturer Dr Jian Yang is dismissive of the missile scenarios. “To say that China could deploy missiles in the islands is particularly imaginative,” he says. “Will these islands be happy to be involved in such a conflict? Is it realistic to expect countries like Australia and New Zealand to sit by when China starts to deploy these missiles? Is China able to protect these missiles, given US military supremacy?”

Yang says no and although China’s growing presence in the Pacific serves strategic, political and economic interests, they should not be exaggerated: “To be a major player in the region certainly helps China strategically. But the strategic benefits still are vague and can only be defined very broadly.”

During the Cold War, the Pacific was strategically important to Washington, but they had now pulled out: “Beijing happily fills the power vacuum as it serves its interest of winning over Taipei’s friends in the region.”

The Suva-based monthly Island Business says that although Pacific countries often complained about interference by Australia and New Zealand, they seldom sounded off about China and Taiwan. The editorial went on to say: “The ping-pong game has got to the stage at which it is destabilising small countries that can’t afford the price of being unstable … The number of Pacific Island leaders who have sold their souls, personally and nationally, to either one or both of the two Chinas is disturbing. It may be realpolitik, but the procession of them trotting off to Beijing … to obediently toe the line in return for crumbs is a demeaning one.”

Base Action

As 38-year-old Yang Liwei soared into space in October 2003 to become China’s first astronaut, it was a triumph for Chinese technological might and a satellite tracking base in Kiribati.

China Satellite Launch and Tracking Control General built the base behind the airport on Tarawa Atoll after signing a secret deal in 1997 with President Teburoro Tito.

The base caused speculation, because there were often dozens of technicians on the atoll and the road from the airport to the base was the best in the nation. One day, a couple of US Navy carrier jets buzzed the base.

Right on the equator, Kiribati is a good spot for launching geostationary Earth orbit satellites. Several times a year, California-based Sea Launch tows a converted oil platform to launch satellites near Kiribati. The Japanese space shuttle project, currently stalled, will use Kiritimati Atoll. Tarawa is 1000km south of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a US Army strategic and tactical missile-testing range.

Tracking dishes at the Chinese base caught telemetry from missiles fired from California to Kwajalein in the continued testing.

In Kiribati’s 2003 presidential elections, the base became a key issue between rivals, part-Chinese brothers Anote and Harry Tong. Chinese Ambassador Shuxue Ma got involved in the campaign, with cash donations to organisations linked to Harry Tong.

Anote Tong won and the satellite base was closed, just a month after Yang had gone into space. No other Chinese astronaut has gone up since, and in the bidding for support, Kiribati has moved away from China by diplomatically recognising Taiwan. The Chinese diplomats, however, would not go. Two years on, four men maintain the closed Chinese Embassy.

Anote Tong believes that Beijing wants to change the Kiribati Government and has left diplomats there so that they can quickly take over from Taiwan and restore the satellite base. “We have to keep an eye out on what their real role is, the role they are playing … It is very dangerous.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that Kiribati has played host to others’ conflicts. In 1940, New Zealand sent Post Office workers and unarmed soldiers to what were then the Gilbert Islands to create a coast-watching network. When Japan entered the war, it rounded up the 17 New Zealanders and on October 15, 1942, beheaded them and five other white men. In the 1943 Battle of Tarawa – fought on an area the size of Auckland Domain – more than 6000 Americans and Japanese were killed.

Crime and Corruption

Illegal Chinese migrants and triads, not terrorists, are the biggest security threat in the Pacific, says Fiji’s Police Commissioner Andrew Hughes. “This is a frightening example of transactional organised crime elements using Fiji as a staging ground for their illegal activities. Increasingly, we are seeing these elements coming to Fiji and joining up with local organised criminal gangs.”

Outspoken PNG Police Minister Bire Kimisopa shares the fears, claiming that triads are running illegal businesses and money laundering and are corrupting police “right to the top. Chinese mafia have bought off officials throughout the system.”

In PNG, authorities believe that around 10,000 Chinese have been smuggled in, and Fijian authorities believe that in the past three years around 7000 illegal Chinese have arrived, many on fishing boats.

Tonga sold citizenship to Chinese in the 1990s, not expecting them to show up. Chinese now own 70 percent of the businesses in Nuku’alofa.

Triad gangs were key players in a 357kg heroin bust in Suva in 2000 and four years later in a $753m crystal methamphetamine factory. Fiji police have yet to solve the savage gangland murder of four Chinese men and a Fijian.

A Solomon Islands Cabinet minister, Clement Rojumana, is facing corruption charges over selling citizenship certificates to Chinese.

The cultural change – and crime – has prompted the emergence of anti-Chinese feeling in places like Nuku’alofa and Suva. In Samoa, Opposition politician A’eau Peniamina questioned China’s “real motives” and warned “be careful of the Chinese, they could run you out of business as seen elsewhere”.

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele took issue: “That is racist and I will not stand for any racism in this Parliament.”

However, it raises speculation over what Beijing might do to protect its expatriates. Oli Brown of the International Institute for Sustainable Development says that if anti-

Chinese feeling grows, it might want to act against anti-Chinese actions: “a good test-bed for this sort of assertive foreign policy could be the South Pacific”.

Auckland University’s Dr Jian Yang says Beijing might co-operate with the Pacific over crime, but only if it became “a serious obstacle” to relations: “The reason is that China can be preoccupied with its own domestic and transnational crime problems.”