US, China Fight for One Pacific Nation Mirrors a Regional Battle

Ben Westcott
·8 min read

(Bloomberg) -- As leaders from across the Pacific, and special envoys from the US and China, descended on the Cook Islands in November for the region’s largest annual forum, they couldn’t have failed to notice the main island’s sports arena, or the capital city’s police station, or its Department of Justice.

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All these buildings have one thing in common: they were built by Chinese state-owned companies.

Now, as the US tries to push back against Chinese influence in the Pacific, it’s faced with the painful reality that Beijing seems to have made massive inroads in a region where it had long-standing and deep ties, helped by years of sustained presence and commitment to the region’s nations.

Many of these Pacific countries would not appear, on paper, to be natural strategic partners to the Chinese given their remoteness, small size and population. The Cook Islands, for example, is home to fewer than 20,000 people and sits in the remote southern Pacific, more than 10,000 km (6,200 miles) from China. It’s just as far from the US.

Despite this, it’s Chinese officials that have over the past few decades showered them with attention. The success of Beijing’s strategy in the Pacific was reinforced just this week when Nauru became the latest island nation to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of recognizing the People’s Republic of China.

Now, with the US trying to play catch-up, analysts and regional leaders say that while all is not lost, Washington will have to work hard to demonstrate its commitment to the region, at a time when Pacific leaders are increasingly focused on an issue they see as existential: climate change.

Pacific expert Joanne Wallis from the University of Adelaide said strong personal relationships were the “currency of influence” in the region, and the US had not put in the effort until recently. Meanwhile, China had “got the memo,” she said.

“The length of time necessary to build that trust and understanding in the relationships has not been there with the US,” she said. “That’s not to say that they’re not making an effort now. But there’s an understandable skepticism in the Pacific.”

System shock

The US, and its diplomatic partners Australia and New Zealand, have had a relationship with the Pacific going back to World War II, when a number of countries in the region joined forces with the allies to fight Japan. The Cook Islands supplied a regiment to aid the allies during the war.

In the decades after the war, Australia and New Zealand were founding members of the Pacific Islands Forum, the primary grouping of regional leaders. Several Pacific nations became protectorates of Wellington or Washington.

However beginning in the late 1990s, another country began to build its influence in the Pacific through infrastructure loans and development assistance.

As far back as 2006, US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show New Zealand was trying to warn Washington about its concerns over Beijing’s growing influence in the Pacific. According to the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Aid Map, by the late 2000s China was in the top five largest donors to the Pacific. As of 2023, in total, it is now the second largest behind Australia.

The Chinese government’s relationship building culminated in 2022 with the announcement it had struck a security deal with the Solomon Islands — a Pacific nation that sits astride key trade and maritime routes — setting off alarm bells in Canberra and Washington.

That announcement — whose details remain shrouded in mystery — coincided with heightened fears of Chinese ambition in the West. Since then, the US and Australia have swung into action. They’ve promised millions in fresh development assistance, opened new embassies and hosted Pacific leaders in Canberra and Washington.

The sudden interest in the region has been greeted with skepticism by some leaders across the Pacific. Papua New Guinea’s Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso told Bloomberg there was a clear message to the world in the motto for the 52nd Pacific Islands Forum in the Cook Islands — “Our Voices, Our Choices, Our Pacific Way.”

“It’s our place, our choices, our people,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the summit. “The Pacific is moving toward a more united Pacific.”

The united Pacific was in evidence at the forum as the region’s leaders focused on one topic above all — climate change. Many of the smaller Pacific nations sit barely above sea level, and Rosso said that they will struggle to survive if sea levels rise.

“Relocation is not really an option for a lot of our islands, the island and the ocean is our home,” Rosso said.

Three decades late

In a ceremony at the White House in Washington in September, US President Joe Biden officially announced the establishment of diplomatic relations between America and the Cook Islands.

Standing alongside Prime Minister Mark Brown, Biden assured the Cook Islands leader that the US was a key player in the Indo-Pacific. Unfortunately, it was almost three decades behind the Chinese government.

Beijing established ties with the Cook Islands in 1997, one of the first countries to do so and before several other Pacific nations.

Evidence of the long relationship between Beijing and Avarua, the capital of the Cook Islands, are present across the nation’s largest island, Rarotonga.

Avarua first announced China had agreed to build its Department of Justice in 2003 for about $6 million, according to the AidData website. The building was constructed by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), a state-owned entity, and opened in 2004. The same company built the police station in 2006 and then the island’s stadium in 2009, according to Cook Islands government documents.

A plaque stands on the wall of the Department of Justice building, commemorating the “ties of friendship and cooperation” between Beijing and Avarua — just one of a number of such plaques that dot the island, celebrating the relationship between the Cook Islands and China.

Meters away from the Department of Justice is another plaque commemorating the partnership between Avarua, Beijing and Wellington to construct the Te Mato Vai water system in 2014 designed to deliver clean and reliable water to the entire island.

During a visit to China in 2013, New Zealand’s then-Foreign Minister Murray McCully said Te Mato Vai was a “blueprint for future development cooperation in the region.”

Not what we paid for

But the Cook Islands isn’t just an example of China’s rapid advances in the Pacific or successive US administrations caught unprepared by Beijing.

It is also an example of a problem which has confronted the Pacific in recent decades, and one that promises an opening to Washington — shoddy construction by Chinese state companies which has left the region with sub-par infrastructure and a growing repair bill.

“If we just think about the Chinese building that they did in the early 2000s, a lot of it was poor quality,” said University of Adelaide’s Wallis, adding the Chinese state-owned companies hadn’t budgeted for maintenance. “They build and then they just leave it.”

The Cook Islands’ police station, Department of Justice and sports stadium were all found to be in a serious state of disrepair less than a decade after completion, with a repair bill running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2018, the Chinese government announced an additional $10 million in funding to refurbish the buildings.

But the biggest disappointment was that largest project of all: Despite being started in 2014, the final stages of the Te Mato Vai water supply project were still underway in 2022 due to serious defects in the construction. Earlier in the project, New Zealand media reported about a third of pipes were discovered to be faulty and needed to be dug up and relaid.

In 2018, Brown, then-finance minister, said the CCECC had not delivered to the Cook Islands “what we paid for.” On the plaque commemorating the start of the water project, the section in Chinese mandarin has been crudely scratched out.

Trojan horses

On the ground in the Cook Islands, locals were cynical about the growing attention fixed on their small country, with many saying they didn’t necessarily trust either superpower to do the right thing by them.

“China does not have to establish military bases in the South Pacific to threaten our security, they just build Trojan horses and we take them in, smiling,” a letter published in the Cook Islands News said in April 2022.

US and Chinese representatives attending the meetings in the Cook Islands assured the region that they did not want countries to pick sides, and intended to respect the region’s sovereignty and independence.

Nonetheless, the competition between them is intense, with the US stepping up its diplomatic presence across the region and opening new embassies, while the Chinese government appears to be now focusing on quality over quantity in its investments in the Pacific.

Even as the region’s leaders warily eye the US and China, University of Adelaide’s Wallis said, they are making the most of the attention to draw attention to their messages on climate change and environmental protection.

“You would never have seen them on the steps of the White House five years ago,” she said.

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