Tonga’s hour of need gives China a chance to build Pacific influence

As Tonga struggles in the aftermatch of a volcano eruption and tsunami, China has found a way to increase its reach in the Pacific.

The island nation of Tonga is one of the smallest on the planet but last Saturday it made its presence felt around the world.

The eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, an underwater volcano beneath two Tongan islands in the South Pacific, was heard 2250km away in New Zealand, and the tsunami it generated capsized boats in Japan and caused an oil spill in Peru.

On Thursday the first humanitarian flights arrived in Tonga, five days after the dual disaster cut the Pacific kingdom off from the rest of the world.

Two large military transport planes from Australia and New Zealand touched down at Tonga’s main airport – which was only just a few hours before cleared of a thick layer of ash after painstaking effort by the RAAF.

The blanket of ash that now covers many of Tonga’s 170 islands will disrupt agriculture and tourism for months or years, and will do more economic damage to a poor country already suffering from the isolation imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. It will also increase the pressure Tonga finds itself under as a small player in a big game: the struggle for supremacy between the world’s greatest powers that is being enacted among the island nations of the Pacific.

The economic and military growth of China is the strategic story of the age and its assertiveness is obvious in the South China Sea. Not content with dominating its own waters, it shows signs of harbouring ambitions to challenge the US as a Pacific power.

More discreetly, the Chinese government and its state-owned companies are engaged in a stealthy campaign of influence-building among Pacific governments, offering development loans and practical expertise in building, mining and forestry.

China President Xi Jinping honoured King Tupou VI of Tonga with an invite to a state visit in 2018 and had a palatial government building erected. China also provided lavish training facilities for the nation’s athletes in Sichuan province in 2019.

Many people, especially in Australia and New Zealand, are questioning what China seeks in return.

The aid and development is part of the so-called Belt and Road initiative, a huge program of Chinese investment in developing countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, as well as the Pacific.

After riots in 2006 destroyed offices in the Tongan capital of Nuku’alofa, Beijing lent money for reconstruction, much of it undertaken by Chinese companies.

Tonga still owes $US108m; equivalent to a quarter of its GDP. China has declined to write it off.

To some this is “debt diplomacy”, a cynical effort to inveigle susceptible countries into taking out loans that they can never repay, thus putting them at the mercy of Beijing.

During World War II bloody battles were fought between Japan and the US in the Solomon Islands and Palau for control of their airstrips and harbours.

In any conflict between China and the US, the region’s islands would have similar importance.

A Chinese base “would have a profound psychological impact on Australia”, said Jonathan Pryke, a Pacific expert at the Lowy Institute, a think tank in Sydney. “It would accelerate a military build-up (and) confirm all of the most extreme prejudice around China’s strategic intent in the region.”

In a population of only 106,000 Tonga has reported just one Covid case, but that has come at the cost of shutting down its tourist industry. It will need significant help after this latest blow – and the competition is on to provide it.

Mr Xi has already been on the phone to King Tupou to express his sympathies.

“The island nations are not the backyard of the US,” Global Times, the communist party mouthpiece, said in an editorial.

“Tonga is in need of emergency aid, and China said it is willing to help.”

Satellite photographs of Nuku’alofa suggest that China’s embassy there is completely undamaged by the disaster.

The chances are that its ambitions, too, remain intact.

The Times