Beijing appears to know no bounds in expanding its influence

China’s influence is everywhere across the Pacific and farther afield.

Papua New Guinea PMPeter O'Neill, left, meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in June. Picture: Getty Images

Asia is heading into typhoon season, symbolising the rivalries being unleashed in the region with a fervour not seen for decades.

The great global powers are jockeying to position themselves to emerge on top from the big ­annual summits they increasingly seek to game to demonstrate their authority and attractiveness.

An early indication of where Australia stands will come from the annual Australia-US Ministerial Consultations in California next Monday and Tuesday. Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and Defence Minister Marise Payne will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Jim Mattis.

While Washington probably will look for Canberra to commit to greater efforts to challenge China’s militarisation of the South China Sea, it also will want to hear from the Australians about the legislation they have introduced to guard against undue international influence at home.

Discussions are set to ­include China’s fast-growing ­involve­ment in the Pacific Islands region, which has tended to be viewed by Washington as an area best managed — in terms of ensuring its political inclinations lean towards the West — by Canberra, assisted by ­Wellington.

Yet it will prove difficult to counter President Xi Jinping’s success in pushing China towards a dominant regional position — ­despite having only North Korea as an ally and having no real friends in Asia or the Pacific — by the brilliant device of weaponising economic interdependence.

 

The central role played in the Pacific by China will be showcased at this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation leaders’ summit, to be held in Port Moresby on November 17-18.

China has spent $82 million on building and resurfacing roads in Papua New Guinea’s capital ready for the summit, and $35m on a new convention centre where the meet­ing will be held. The permanent sign outside the latter is ­eloquent — its Chinese characters equalling the size of the building’s title in English, and with “center” spelled the American way when PNG normally follows Australian spellings. China is paying about $16m for a new Independence Boulevard Precinct, focused on a six-lane road providing grander, more ­direct access to the national parliament building.

Port Moresby Governor Powes Parkop has boasted that this new boulevard is “of no economic cost to the national government”. He ­describes it as “another milestone, setting a benchmark for PNG and reinforcing Port Moresby as the capital city”.

Last month PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill took a delegation of about 100, including 19 government officials and 50 PNG-based Chinese businesspeople, to Beijing on a chartered Air Niugini plane.

O’Neill said after meeting Xi in the Great Hall of the People: “Papua New Guinea is committed to deepening its strategic partnership with China, firmly pursuing the One China policy, highly praising and actively supporting President Xi Jinping’s great ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative.”

He said he looked forward to increased “co-operation with China in the fields of economy and trade, investment, agriculture, tourism, and infrastructure”.

The PNG leader — the most successful and powerful politician to emerge in the nation after ­Michael Somare — was praised by Xi, who said “mutual political trust and mutually beneficial co-operation between the two sides have reached a new historical level”.

China, he said, “is willing to work together with Papua New Guinea” — which he described as “an influential Pacific Island country” — “to strengthen communication, deepen co-operation, expand exchanges and push bilateral relations to a new level”.

But O’Neill came under fire from former prime minister and now leading opposition MP ­Mekere Morauta, who said mismanagement had turned PNG into a “hunting and gathering” economy. “The Prime Minister is now begging and selling the country into China’s lap,” he said.

Morauta said good roads in Port Moresby were being torn up “for the Chinese and his (O’Neill’s) friends to rebuild, just for APEC motorcades to ride on for one day”.

Meanwhile, he claimed, hospitals and health centres were running short of medicine, small PNG businesses were waiting for the government to pay its bills and some retired public servants were dying before their entitlements had been paid.

“We have signs of Chinese domination already, in the conduct of public finance and structure of the economy, and with Chinese doing the jobs of Papua New Guineans: driving trucks, bulldozers, tractors, sweeping roads, opening trade stores in every corner of the country. What is next?” Morauta said.

Xi was the first foreign leader to commit to attend the APEC summit in Port Moresby, and O’Neill announced during his speech to Fiji’s parliament during a recent visit that the Chinese President would host a summit of his own immediately before the APEC forum.

Xi was inviting the leaders of ­Pacific Island nations to attend this earlier event — though only, O’Neill said, the countries in the region that recognised Beijing diplomatically.

Six of the 14 island nations ­— Kiri­bati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and Solomon ­Islands — instead recognise ­Taiwan.

O’Neill said he wants Pacific nations to participate actively during the APEC forum and to “highlight our issues to our Asian counterparts”. “We want the ­Pacific to benefit from opportun­ities from Asia,” he said.

New Zealand released an unusually blunt defence policy paper this month that addressed the perceived threat from China.

Responding to O’Neill’s announcement of the Pacific summit in Port Moresby, Winston Peters — New Zealand’s Acting Prime Minister, who is also the Foreign Minister — said: “It’s with great clarity you can see we live in a much more highly stressed area of geopolitical competition because we have left, some of us, a vacuum there which others would fill.”

Beijing tacitly accepted a truce on poaching rival diplomatic partners, proposed by previous Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou, leader of the Kuomintang or Nationalists, which it perceives as tolerable partners in talks.

But since the 2016 return of more leftist Democratic Progressive Party government led by President Tsai Ing-wen, China has resumed its efforts to win over Taiwan’s international partners.

It has gained four so far, leaving Taiwan with just 18 — a third of them in the Pacific where, before the Ma-led truce, bitter and disruptive bidding took place ­between the rivals. But Tsai has said she has no interest in resuming such a contest.

Taiwan ally Nauru is hosting the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ summit in September, which will be attended by Malcolm Turnbull.

At this summit, Australia and New Zealand are due to conclude a wide-ranging security agreement with the island nations, The Australian recently revealed. This is ­intended to limit the military ­involvement of outside countries, including China and Russia, and is expected to include commitments by Canberra and Wellington to assist in defence, law and order, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

Last week Australia forestalled plans by Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to build an underwater internet cable linking PNG and Solomon Islands to Australia, and connecting outer Solomon Islands with the capital, Honiara. It signed a deal with those countries to pay two-thirds of the project cost of $136.6m.

Canberra’s move to re-engage with the Pacific follows a period during which it had come under criticism for failing to develop a sufficient cadre of diplomats and others with knowledge of and networks in the islands region, including PNG. Australia’s influence has diminished — not only because of the energy of China’s involvements but because of Canberra’s withdrawal from programs including broadcasts to the Pacific.

The regional leaders’ meetings this year — with the East Asia Summit taking place in Singapore, immediately before or after APEC in PNG — will provide crucial platforms for Xi and US President Donald Trump to rally support as Beijing and Washington extend their rivalry.

The Communist Party flagship publication People’s Daily editorialised last week under the headline, “America ratcheting up the trade war is a bullying provocation to the world”.

“White House trade policy has completely lost its rationality, and its bullying behaviour has accelerated to the point where it shocked the world,” the editorial read.

During the annual meeting ­between the EU and China in Beijing this week, Xi told European Council president ­Donald Tusk and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker that they should make concerted efforts to safeguard multilateralism, the rules-based free trade system and an open world economy — in clear contrast, he strongly implied, with the disruptive moves of Trump.

He said China had always seen the EU as an important force that promotes stability and the development of international order.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim also has been visiting Beijing this week, and Xi praised the body for supporting his Belt and Road initiative and for ­recent reforms that provide China with a greater say. Kim responded with praise for China’s support for multilateralism and economic globalisation.

Xi appears to be winning the trade war in terms of ­lining up support. And China also believes that the Singapore deal between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in effect enshrines its own favoured “double suspension” program, with Pyongyang suspending its nuclear program while Washington and Seoul halt their military exercises.

But the deal now appears to be listing dangerously for lack of ­implementation and could sink by the time of the big summits unless it is revisited by the signatories — pushing North Korea back to the front of the regional agenda.

Xi wants China’s economic heft to be reflected in international ­influence and respect, and in a ­capacity to transform global institutions to better suit its own ambitions. But while he achieved remarkably swift success in this new ambition, regional critics have emerged.

Malaysia’s sprightly new leader, Mahathir Mohamad, 93, has foreshadowed a review of Belt and Road projects there, using the phrase “unequal treaties”, which he would be well aware carries deep resonance within China, which since 1840 has applied it to the arrangements forced on it by Britain after the first Opium War. Mahathir’s government has suspended about $25 billion worth of China-linked infrastructure developments over the investigations into corruption surrounding the 1MDB fund.

And former Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan said a fortnight ago that China believed its interests should be promoted wherever they might be. A key tactic, he said, was to present target countries with oversimplified narratives, “forcing false choices on you and making you choose ­between them. China doesn’t just want you to comply with its ­wishes, it wants you to … do what it wants without being told. When the Chinese try to impose a Chinese identity on Singapore, we must resist, because modern Singapore is based on the idea of being a multiracial country.”

Farther afield, there are rumbles of discontent even within ­Europe, where the German Mercator Institute for China Studies said in a recent report: “China’s rapidly increasing political influencing efforts in Europe and the self-confident promotion of its ­authoritarian ideals pose a significant challenge to liberal democracy. China commands a com­prehensive and flexible influ­encing toolset, ranging from the overt to the covert, primarily ­deployed across three arenas: political and economic elites, media and public opinion, and civil ­society and academia. European states increasingly tend to adjust their policies in fits of ‘pre-emptive obedience’ to curry favour with the Chinese side.”

Enhancing that toolset, Xi is boosting China’s diplomatic resources. Since 2013, its ­foreign affairs spending has almost doubled — while last year the White House cut such US spending by 30 per cent. This year Beijing established its first aid agency, tasked “to better serve China’s diplomacy”, as well as the Belt and Road initiative. In September it is likely that every African leader will fly to Beijing for the ­second Africa-China Summit, ­underlining whose power wields most influence in that continent.

Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin this week for his “extremely strong and powerful” rejection of evidence that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential election.

But if he supposed he would win Putin to his side of the big international battles he is waging, especially his trade wars, it would seem he’s too late.

Last month Xi invested Putin, in the Great Hall of the People, with China’s first Friendship Medal, declaring him “my best, most intimate friend”.