China derides Australia’s South Pacific policy as ‘paranoid’

Australia’s policy in the South Pacific has been attacked as “paranoid” and aimed at suppressing the rise of China.

Chen Hong.

Australia’s policy in the South Pacific has been attacked as “paranoid”, “patronising” and “hypocritical”, and aimed at suppressing the rise of China in the region.

In China’s Global Times yesterday, academic Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Centre at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, said Australia’s plans to build a naval base on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island were “paranoid”.

Mr Chen said a “flurry of nervous activities” had been “unleashed” in Australia designed to see that nation competing with China in the Pacific. He said there had recently been a “hysterical anti-China brouhaha in the Australian media and among some government officials in Australia” about China’s role in the Pacific “fuelled by America’s unyielding desire to contain and suppress China’s rise”.

After Australia had edged out telecommunications giant Huawei from building an undersea cable linking PNG, the Solomon Islands and Sydney, Mr Chen said it was about to “further interfere in PNG’s domestic affairs” by trying to “coax” it into not using China’s Huawei to lay a domestic cable in the country “on the dubious grounds of so-called security issues”.

Mr Chen said scaremongering in Australia about China’s involvement in potential cyber-security issues had become a “reds in the air” policy — a play on the “reds under the beds” phrase of the past.

He said Australia had a “condescending attitude” to countries in the Pacific in its argument that the region was its “sphere of influence”.

“The South Pacific is not any country’s backyard,” he said. “The nations in the region have their own political and economic wisdom to make decisions.”

He said the recent rise in Australian aid and loans to the region was a “typical club and carrot policy” that was attempting to “scare and smear” as well as entice the countries of the Pacific into the sphere of influence of Canberra and Washington.

Mr Chen said Chinese President Xi Jinping would host a conference of Pacific Island leaders in PNG on his state visit.