Duchesses & overlords: an outdated view of China & the Pacific
21 January 2018
GRAEME SMITH | Inside Story
CANBERRA - Australia’s international development minister, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, found herself in a fix recently after she claimed that China’s aid in the Pacific produced “useless buildings” and “roads to nowhere” while “duchessing” politicians.
Australia’s relations with China, already at their lowest ebb in years, took another blow, and Xinhua News’s Canberra correspondent bestowed on Australia the title of “arrogant overlord” of the Pacific.
In the region itself, Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele suggested that the minister’s remarks could “destroy” Australia’s relationship with island nations. He zeroed in on China’s willingness to provide aid to deal with the impact of climate change.
The media director of the Vanuatu Daily Post noted that while “we are right to question the design, implementation and price of some of these projects… these roads are not ‘roads to nowhere.’ They lead to our homes.”
Where did the senator’s remarks come from? What is fuelling the differences opening up between the Coalition and Labor on our relationship with China, quite at odds with the Liberal Party’s traditionally pro-business ethos?
A hint came in an opinion piece by Maurice Newman, former chair of the ABC, the ASX, the Australia–Taiwan Business Council and the government’s now-defunct Business Advisory Council.
Writing in The Australian earlier this month, Newman revealed that his expertise extends beyond his well-known conspiracy theories about the Bureau of Meteorology, and takes in China’s engagement with the Pacific. The title of the piece — “China Emerges as All-Powerful New Deity in Pacific Cargo Cult” — gave an inkling of what was to follow.
Newman may not have chosen the headline — or the accompanying cartoon, which features a huge panda ready to devour an uninhabited Pacific island — but he went on at length about cargo cults, a term that no credible anthropologist still uses.
In fact, I first heard about Newman’s article when one of my doctoral students emailed me to protest that “‘cargo cult’ belongs in the savage slot that anthropology disowned decades ago. No serious anthropologist uses the term anymore.”
Beyond hurting the feelings of anthropologists, though, the piece might reveal where Senator Fierravanti-Wells’s thinking on the Pacific and China comes from. The most striking thing is that Newman’s Pacific is terra nullius.
No Pacific Islanders are quoted in an article purporting to be about their welfare, save for Kiribati’s “President Anote Tong,” who is scolded for daring to suggest that his island is sinking like the Titanic. Alas, Newman can’t even get this right.
Tong is the former president of Kiribati, and the incumbent, Taneti Maamau, used the Titanic analogy to convey more or less the opposite, in a YouTube address launching Kiribati Vision 20.
“Climate change is indeed a serious problem,” Maamau said. “But we don’t believe that Kiribati will sink like the Titanic ship. The Titanic ship is different. It is built by human hands whilst our country, our beautiful islands are created by the hands of God.”
Where it does appear, Newman’s Pacific is home to passive folk ripe for exploitation by Leninist China, which has “de facto colonialism” as a “probable objective.” We aren’t given a percentage on this, but under the spell of the cargo cult (which seems to apply to the entire South Pacific), “the people of the Pacific are very open to seduction.”
Similarly, in Fierravanti-Wells’s world, Pacific politicians are “duchessed.” This wonderful word suggests that flattery and a top-notch banquet are enough to make Pacific elites sign over anything. But portraying the Pacific’s leaders as passive, corrupt and slightly dim is probably not the best way to win them over.
We’ve been here before. A 2006 Senate report, China’s Emergence: Implications for Australia, had an entire chapter dedicated to warning of the dangers in the southwest Pacific. Analyst after analyst after think-tank expert lined up to warn that China was “going for the jugular” with “lavish banquets” targeting “tiny, fragile Pacific states.” Many of the experts were from the Centre for Independent Studies, of which Newman was a founding member.
Underprepared Chinese aid contractors find the Pacific far from passive. China Jiangsu International saw its workforce in Port Moresby robbed twice in two days when locals discovered it had no security guards watching over the construction site for the National Convention Centre in Waigani.
The management of China Shenyang International Economic & Technical Co-operation Ltd begged nearly every other Chinese contractor in Papua New Guinea to take over their Pacific Marine Industrial Zone project.
Far from the company benefiting from the A$196 million project, it was local spivs who profited, receiving such vastly inflated payments as four million kina (A$1.5 million) for a gate.
Newman sees China’s presence in the Pacific as monolithic and entirely controlled by Beijing. While he is right that China under president Xi Jinping is a different proposition from that of the Deng Xiaoping era, to conclude that “the emergence of a more assertive, Leninist China means all bets are off” is an astonishing leap, particularly for a leader of the Australian business community.
While much of China’s own propaganda would like you to believe Beijing calls the shots, the reality in the Pacific is far from Newman and Fierravanti-Wells’s vision. The Chinese government has little sway over what happens there.
It simply lacks the personnel to oversee aid projects, leaving the field open to Chinese companies, their subcontractors and their Pacific partners, who reverse-engineer projects for approval by China’s Export-Import Bank.
While there is no shortage of white elephants to show for Chinese companies’ work — my own favourite is a seldom-used aquatic centre outside Apia whose mascot was a white elephant, hastily repainted yellow — Pacific leaders are more discerning buyers than they were in 2006, when China unveiled its first round of concessional loans.
Even in those early days, where Pacific officials had the right institutional settings in place, Chinese contractors were able to deliver high-quality projects with long-lasting benefits, such as the dormitories at the University of Goroka.
What matters is not the source of development finance, but the capacity of the host nation to use or misuse it.
In the past, Chinese diplomats were notorious for not showing up to donor coordination meetings, or showing up late, or spending the entire meeting taking calls. Under Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, China is making an effort to improve the quality of the staff it posts in the Pacific. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce are appointing personnel who can engage with other development partners.
Lack of personnel will continue to hamper China’s efforts, but it is now more interested in working with other nations on development issues. And not all Chinese aid contractors are bent on a race to the bottom. Chinese companies with long-term commitments to the Pacific — such as COVEC PNG and the Guangdong Foreign Construction Group — have adapted to host-country concerns, localised their workforces, and learned how to work with multilateral and bilateral donors, including Australia.
Aid in the Pacific is one area where Australia can look to cooperate and coordinate with China. Roads in the Pacific rarely lead to nowhere; they help Pacific islanders get access to healthcare, education and markets for their goods. It would be unfortunate if the minister’s outdated view of China and the Pacific got in the way of our building them together.
Graeme Smith is a Research Fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University and host of the Little Red Podcast
A balanced article from an expert.
The dormitories in the University of Goroka is a Chinese legacy that stands tall. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same for the PMIZ.
To counter, Australia should place more emphasis on sports diplomacy. Apart from the PNG Hunters, the PNG NRL bid should be taken seriously and more PNG talents should be given an opportunity in the NRL. Instead of roads build rugby stadiums and support the domestic competition with NRL expertise. That is the way to win PNG hearts and minds.
Posted by: Bernard Singu Yegiora | 23 January 2018 at 02:12 PM
It would not be too outrageous, Paul, to suggest that we are already a Chinese tributary state. China may not have demanded the provision of princesses, eunuchs and other 'hostages' as it once did, but key sectors of our economy: mining, agriculture and higher education, for instance, are already within its thrall.
In policy terms, our political leaders will be able to obfuscate for but a short while. A sense of reality will eventually prevail and, with it, short of military conflict between China and the USA, will come acceptance that China is the new Sheriff of the Asia-Pacific region.
China has a 100 year plan to return to its former glory, due to be achieved on or before the centennial of the foundation of the PRC in 1949. My bet is that it will be achieved well before then.
Posted by: Ed Brumby | 21 January 2018 at 04:05 PM
Ed, you are quite right to question the motivation behind some Ministerial indignation over Chinese influence in the South Pacific.
The background to that issue could be both overt and subliminal.
In the first instance, the parallels between the rise of the Japanese in the early 20th Century and now the Chinese are in many ways remarkably similar. That’s because any hegemony is based on empirical methodology. Does the growing Chinese influence in our region present a potential threat to our national security? The answer could be; No more than any other has in the past.
The fact that since the Second World War we are part of a security alliance with the US hasn’t stopped the Yanks in the past determining their own way and sometimes at our expense. Much the same applied to the British before 1939.
The real question that must first be addressed is ‘What is our national interest?’
Only recently it seems we have finally had our leaders begin to make public statements on just what this issue might mean for us and our regional neighbours and friends.
Under these circumstances, is it any wonder that other South Pacific nations have correctly decided to determine their own perspectives since we haven’t been too free to disclose what our own might be. Of course, that deafening silence may be because like the proverbial policy explained in the TV series ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, it was actually not to have a policy.
Ultimately, any ill-defined nihilism is like sitting on a barb wire fence. You can only do that for so long before you either give up or redefine your objective.
Posted by: Paul Oates | 21 January 2018 at 09:44 AM
The "juvenilistic terra nullius" ideology rings hollow in an ocean and a land that have been inhabited by people well before the "territorial conquests" began .
This is the 21st century. The century, where the rights of each nation states, however perceived fragile and needy they maybe to decide on their own direction and relationships in whichever way and whomever they feel important themselves.
That can be a mixed one of so many sorts. It can take the form of a hybrid version, a multi-faceted one or even a universal and open one. That's none of any one or two other powers to decide. It's within the exclusive province of every nation to craft, decide and move on.
Why is it that there's this nagging notion that some higher guiding (earthly) power's permission be sought on all sovereign matters?
Posted by: Corney Korokan Alone | 21 January 2018 at 08:54 AM
The recent brouhahas amongst politicians and the commentariat about the increase in China’s endeavours to wield its influence in PNG and Australia reflect the fear, long-held by many Australians, of China generally and, more recently, its resumption of world power status.
The fear is concocted from a fertile cocktail of ignorance and misunderstanding, a generic wariness of the unknown and ‘the other’, and the longstanding threat posed by the so-called ‘yellow peril’.
It has been exacerbated by China’s rise as an economic and military power and the concurrent questions as to how the USA and China’s neighbours, including Australia and PNG, will respond to the shifting power relationships in the Asia-Pacific region.
Whether, and to what extent our fear is warranted, and rational, remains to be seen.
But what, exactly, are we afraid of?
Change, of whatever type, invariably causes the pulse to race and the liver to quiver.
The comfort we’ve derived from the USA’s warm embrace and protective arsenal is dissipating as we observe its apparent withdrawal into self-centred isolation – its recent bellicose bombast towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea notwithstanding.
Our hegemony over the nations of the south-west Pacific is being threatened by Chinese political and commercial forays into the region.
Just as we loathed the rise of Japan as an economic power thirty years ago and its impact on our material well-being, we now resent our economic dependence on China for similar reasons – compounded by the stark differences in our political philosophies.
And, adding to our fears, our political masters, apart from railing about roads to nowhere, seem to be incapable of crafting and implementing any kind of coherent and sustainable response to the change that confronts us.
Posted by: Ed Brumby | 21 January 2018 at 06:48 AM