Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison boasted in March about how his country’s COVID-19 vaccine aid to Pacific islands had prevented a Chinese “incursion” into the region. About two weeks later, the Solomon Islands seemed to blow that claim out of the water when it confirmed it was hammering out a security partnership with Beijing.
The Solomons’ pact with China has become a thorn in Morrison’s side as he heads into an election this Saturday. Amid fears that Beijing could use the deal to establish a naval presence, Morrison finds himself exposed to attacks that he allowed the very sort of incursion he claimed to have prevented.
Whatever the impact on the Australian polls may be, the controversy has delivered a wake-up call for the Pacific’s traditional benefactors to take a fresh look at how they engage with the region. Experts say that for countries like Australia and New Zealand, as well as the U.S., throwing aid and little else at the islands may no longer be enough to keep them on their side as China makes inroads with a seductive mix of money, security and ceremony.
“Something China is very good at is cultivating those political-level relationships with Pacific island leaders,” said Mihai Sora, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute think tank and a former Australian diplomat posted to the Solomon Islands and Indonesia. “It does better at celebrating those relationships and paying lip service or giving due respect to Pacific island leaders and emphasizing those relationships,” partly through “elaborate visits, ceremonies and pomp.”
At the same time, he said, China’s relationships in the Pacific “are not underpinned by aid, they’re underpinned by trade, underpinned by economics.”
National flags of the Solomon Islands and China flutter in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 2019: An analyst said China has excelled at courting Pacific leaders with “ceremonies and pomp.” © Reuters
In the case of the Solomon Islands, China accounted for 64.4% of exports and 34.4% of imports in 2020, according to the latest available data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Australia took in just 1.05% of its exports while providing 13.5% of imports. The island state mainly exports rough wood, processed fish, aluminum ore and palm oil.
A Brookings Institution report by Jonathan Pryke from 2020 noted that two-way trade between China and the Pacific region had overtaken that of Australia since 2013, excluding Papua New Guinea. He also noted that while Beijing is not the dominant source of aid, a distinction that belongs to Australia, “the way in which it delivers its aid — large infrastructure projects funded by concessional loans — makes these projects stand out. Chinese lending has also been used as a vehicle to get Chinese state-owned enterprises into the region.”
Appeals on democratic grounds will only go so far, Sora told Nikkei Asia. “You can’t ask Pacific island countries to choose between income versus an alliance [of] like-minded powers,” he said. “Better diplomacy is part of the answer, but it’s not the whole answer.”
Part of the answer, everyone seems to agree, is to help protect the tiny but strategically situated states of the balmy South Pacific from the ravages of COVID-19.
Front-line workers delivering vaccines to Pacific populations slogged through waist-deep mud in Vanuatu, trekked to far-flung corners of the Solomons and hiked through mountains in Fiji, supported by horseback teams carrying the lifesaving cargo.
Meanwhile, choreographed photo opportunities told the geopolitical story behind the jabs. Some packages were stamped with little kangaroos and the words “Australia aid,” while others read, “China aid” — a microcosm of the bigger, often bitter competition for influence.
Canberra in late 2020 committed 500 million Australian dollars ($350 million) to vaccines for Southeast Asian and Pacific countries. Around the same time, during a video meeting co-chaired by the Chinese and Solomon Islands’ foreign ministers in November 2020, Beijing promised to deploy its own COVID-19 vaccine “as part of its contribution to vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries, including Pacific island countries.”
The pair also “agreed to align their development strategies for the ‘post COVID-19 era'” and to expand “cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative,” Beijing’s global infrastructure development campaign.
Sinopharm vaccines from China arrive at Honiara International Airport in the Solomon Islands in April 2021. © Xinhua/Kyodo
The Quad — a loose security grouping of Australia, the U.S., India and Japan — later said Australia would provide full vaccine coverage to nine Pacific island countries.
Nevertheless, in addition to sending at least 50,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine to the Solomons, China has provided thousands of doses to states including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Kiribati. A release on the Solomon Islands’ government website in May 2021 showed Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and Chinese Ambassador Li Ming looking on as Deputy Prime Minister Manasseh Maelanga, stripped to a tank top, awaited his Sinopharm shot.
Sogavare, who was reportedly already inoculated with AstraZeneca at the time, said his government had asked Beijing for the supplies. “Imagine if we had waited for WHO approval before making [a] request to China. We would have to wait for weeks or even months,” he said. Shots for the country of around 700,000 have come from not only Australia and China but also New Zealand, India and the U.S. through the WHO’s COVAX initiative.
The Lowy Institute’s Sora said one challenge for countries like Australia is that Pacific states do not view relationships “as a choice or a swap,” but rather additions to existing cooperation. “I think that goes to the vaccines as well,” he said.
Amid concern about China’s other moves in the region besides the security deal — lately it has also provided policing equipment to the Solomons and military equipment to Fiji, as well as loans to shore up pandemic-hit Pacific economies — Western allies are keeping the jabs flowing.
In April, the U.S. donated tens of thousands of additional doses to the Solomons. Earlier this month, even as Sogavare was, without evidence, accusing Australia of contemplating an invasion of his country over the security deal, his government said an Australia-UNICEF partnership had supplied over 150,000 more Pfizer doses to Honiara.
Vaccine diplomacy is not a new concept. Academics cite examples from as early as 1801 in the U.S., when a White House physician vaccinated Native American representatives against smallpox during a visit to Washington. During the Cold War, archenemies Russia and the U.S. collaborated on polio vaccination. But this time it has taken on a particularly competitive tone.
Last July, China accused Australia of interfering in its vaccine assistance to Papua New Guinea, claiming that Australian consultants were using “political manipulation and bullying” to hinder the rollout. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Australia should “stop disrupting and undermining vaccine cooperation between China and Pacific island countries” — a charge Australia rejected.
A local walks along a new road funded by the Chinese government in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in 2018. © Reuters
“In a sense, [China and the West] are direct competitors,” said Seow Ting Lee, professor of strategic and health communication at the University of Colorado Boulder, who authored a report titled “Vaccine Diplomacy: Nation Branding and China’s COVID-19 Soft Power Play.”
“For nation-states, soft power is viewed as a zero-sum game.”
China denies exploiting the pandemic to bolster its influence, or engaging in vaccine diplomacy at all. “China’s vaccine assistance to [the] Solomon Islands is sincere, without any conditions attached,” Ambassador Li said last July. “China never pursues ‘vaccine diplomacy’ and has no intention to compete with any other country on vaccine assistance.”
Lee’s report, however, argues that China has used its vaccines “for image repair and for expanding Beijing’s great power ambitions … to reinforce and leverage existing soft power programs, and to capitalize on new economic and geopolitical opportunities.”
Despite the global rush to provide the Pacific with vaccines and the high rates of inoculation on certain islands, some states remain vulnerable. Papua New Guinea is expected to be one of the last countries worldwide to achieve widespread inoculation, if at all. The Solomon Islands, where only around 20% are fully vaccinated amid a raging outbreak, is in a similar boat.
Either way, the countries of the region — and their bigger partners — are also looking beyond the pandemic.
What exactly the China-Solomons security agreement means in practice remains to be seen. Both parties have denied planning to establish a Chinese naval base. Sogavare has said the arrangement promises protection against “internal threats,” after unrest last November — fueled in part by anger over the government’s decision in 2019 to switch allegiance from Taiwan to China.
Asked if the security agreement came as a surprise, a former senior official from New Zealand replied on condition of anonymity, “Not at all.” The ex-official noted China’s ambitions in the Pacific had been visible for some time.
With or without a base, the pact is seen as a potential game changer. In a Brookings article, foreign policy analyst Patricia Kim raised the question of whether it “heralds the rise of a more activist China that is now willing to extend military support to other states in its concerted search for allies.”
If so, she warned, “there may be sweeping geostrategic consequences,” including potential “erosion of democratic governance and norms, and greater volatility in the global arena as a result.”
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison participates in an election debate on May 8. His government has sharply criticized the Solomon Islands’ security deal with China. © Reuters
But there are also possible avenues for Western powers to counter China.
With tourism not returning to pre-pandemic levels anytime soon, there is an urgent need to strengthen Pacific economies and inject liquidity “so governments can develop their social protection mechanisms so people have food on the table and can access basic health care and services,” said Alexandre Dayant, Lowy’s project director for development economics in Asia and the Pacific.
Lowy’s Sora said development partners would be wise to do more to deliver economic stability as China courts Pacific leaders.
A way forward could be to forge more well-rounded relationships, with countries like the U.S., Australia, Japan and New Zealand pooling resources on “large-scale infrastructure projects and projects that deliver a security dividend as well an economic dividend,” Sora suggested. This could allow them to assist with more ambitious projects in a more organized way. “There’s also a real need to have business involved” to make the relationships sustainable.
Australia has sought to better assert itself in the infrastructure game, with local media last year reporting it was ready to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars for Pacific projects. In January, it agreed to back Papua New Guinea port upgrades to the tune of $420 million. And local reports this month said Australia’s Solomon Islands Infrastructure Program had signed a memorandum of understanding to back upgrades of the islands’ second-largest port.
Last Thursday, a joint statement from a European Union-Japan summit committed to deepening “ties with the Pacific island countries to strengthen good governance and resilience.”
For residents of these islands, all this geopolitical jockeying can seem a world away from their daily needs.
Berlin Kafoa, director of the public health division at the Pacific Community, an international development organization, said fragile economies and shaky health systems continue to pose a challenge.
Kafoa made a plea “on behalf of the region to other countries for continuous support to small island countries in the Pacific, knowing that they deal not only with COVID but they have a crisis of noncommunicable disease, they face the brunt of climate change, their economies are not as robust some of the better-developed economies.”
While the Solomon Islands’ security pact affects the whole region, Sora argued it is a distraction in a way.
“Whether or not China establishes a military base in the Pacific,” he said, “it doesn’t really solve the day-to-day development needs and livelihood needs, education and health needs of people in the Solomon Islands.”