Australia’s arm-wrestle with China is all over the billboards

Anyone who doubts Australia and China are in what Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong called a “permanent contest” in the Pacific need only go for a drive in the capital of the Solomon Islands. Alongside the undisguised poverty, throngs of underemployed youth and potholed roads in Honiara are a proliferation of competing billboards and plaques boasting of efforts to alleviate such problems.

Until recently, most of the signs were extolling gifts of aid from China. Lately, Australia seems to have caught up, extolling on billboards its position as the “nambawan” (“number one” in Pidgin) donor to the Solomons. The Australian signs are accurate. Even after cuts to aid budgets in 2013-2014, Canberra remains by far the largest donor to the Solomons, well ahead of all others, including China.

A billboard showing Chinese President Xi Jinping with PNG PM Peter O’Neill in Port Moresby ahead of an APEC meet. Credit: AP

Beijing, by contrast, has been good at building flashy, visible projects since the Solomons switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan in 2019, such as the stadium for last year’s Pacific Games. Beijing also slyly takes credit for projects Chinese state construction companies were contracted to build, despite their being financed by multilateral donors, like the Asia Development Bank.

The competing billboards are risky on one level. Far from feeling grateful, the locals might wonder why their economy, services and infrastructure continue to deteriorate with all the foreign money flowing in. Then again, the signs might not be directed at the populace. Rather, the target audience might be the local elite and, of course, the expectant visiting ministers who want to see evidence of their budget largesse when being driven into town from the airport.

Still, as much as some might decry it, a contest it is. So how’s it going?

China’s intentions are clear, as they are elsewhere in the world. It seeks to expand its economic and political influence and, eventually, its security footprint in the Pacific, just as it is doing in north Asia, south-east Asia, the Middle East, South America and so forth. You would have to be credulous or worse to believe otherwise. Wang Yi, Politburo member and foreign minister, and perhaps the world’s busiest diplomat, doesn’t take time out to tour 10 Pacific nations, as he did in 2022, without a larger objective in mind.

An Australian aid billboard in Honiara. Credit: DFAT

The deal between the Solomons and Beijing in the dying days of Scott Morrison’s government to station Chinese police in the country was the clearest statement of its security ambitions. It was only “dumb luck”, to quote an Australian government adviser, that a second policing deal wasn’t signed with a much bigger country, Papua New Guinea, in April. Anthony Albanese’s trip to walk the Kokoda Track allowed him to head that off.

China is not standing still. Since elections in the Solomons earlier this year, Beijing has been taking huge numbers of the country’s public servants to China for study tours. In some cases, nearly entire departments have gone. In Honiara, a new Chinese-built hospital is rapidly taking shape, its pagoda-style roof ensuring no one will forget where it’s from.

Australia has been playing geopolitical whack-a-mole over the past decade to prevent Beijing from expanding its Pacific reach, building undersea cables, financing local mobile phone services and signing defence co-operation deals.

A more systematic approach is now emerging, with some notable advances. The Albanese government signed a landmark deal with Tuvalu in 2023 to cooperate on climate and security. A similar deal is in the winds with Nauru. At the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in August, leaders agreed to an Australian initiative to establish regional police training centres, undercutting Beijing’s aim to broaden its own security footprint.

Instead of Australia constantly reacting to Beijing, such initiatives mean that Beijing is having to do some reacting of its own. This is welcome. But no one should think Australia can declare victory in the Pacific any time soon. China will remain the largest economic partner of most countries, which in turn will continue to leverage their sovereignty to get the best deal. Who could blame them?

This is another way of saying the “permanent contest” with China isn’t going away and the sharp-elbowed jostling will continue for years.

This presents Australian diplomacy with a once-in-a-generation challenge of the kind Canberra, and indeed the population at large, is not used to. Australia doesn’t generally go around picking diplomatic fights. As a country, we aren’t used to head-on security competition and everything that goes with it – the ruthless building of leverage and the occasional using of it.

China, by contrast, is hardwired for struggle. It is the very DNA of the ruling Communist party. For sure, China is good at what is euphemistically called “elite capture”, which in many Pacific countries costs very little money. But to suggest Chinese advances are built on corruption and brutish diplomacy alone underestimates them and misreads the landscape they are working in.

Australian aid programs often, if unintentionally, require Pacific societies to change. Beijing doesn’t bother with such notions. Instead, it leans into existing power and cultural structures, giving themselves space to exploit the deep strain of anti-colonial, anti-western sentiment in places like the Solomons.

On top of conventional aid and security deals, Australia has to battle such narratives as well, which requires using every tool in the diplomatic box. Premature declarations of victory, and defeat, aren’t realistic. The best is to take some wins in the Pacific and dig in for the long haul.

Richard McGregor is senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute.