China in the Pacific: The Fiji Case

Much has changed in the Pacific in the year since Solomon Islands signed a security agreement with China in April 2022. The benignly worded agreement sent shockwaves around the globe because it allows China immense opportunities to expand its military operations in the South Pacific. Future instabilities and domestic divisions in Solomon Islands, a nation plagued by violence and discord since its independence, now offer China a gateway to deploy military personnel and assets under the pretext of protecting people of Chinese heritage and Chinese investments in the island nation. 

As recently as November 2021, people of Chinese descent and their businesses in the capital of Honiara were targeted by violent mobs who had initially gathered to protest Beijing’s grip on Solomon Islands’ political leadership. These events happened two years after Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare switched his nation’s allegiance from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China in late 2019.

In the wake of the China-Solomon Islands agreement, nations around the world have scrambled to reverse decades of inattention and lack of investment in the Pacific. Now the traffic of visits, meetings, opened checkbooks, and fast-tracked strategies to counter China’s influence in the Pacific ­have impacted nearly every Pacific nation or territory, island, and atoll in varying degrees. The substantial Pacific diaspora populations scattered mainly throughout Australia, New Zealand, and the United States have also received unprecedented attention over the past year. Their numerous challenges have become enveloped in new grand strategies all intended to “out-compete” China in the region.

The new attention and investment in the Pacific region has included the entry of new nations into the arena, like South Korea. These diplomatic and economic efforts to counter China have been accompanied by a huge upscaling of defense attention, not least through the AUKUS agreement. Announced seven months before China’s security agreement with Solomon Islands in September 2021, the secret agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States was initially vague, though its purposes were clear enough. AUKUS was clearly about drastically enhancing Australia’s defenses and yoking Britain and the U.S. to Australia’s security needs through deeper military intelligence and equipment-sharing arrangements. 

The AUKUS centerpiece – Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines – hit many raw nerves in the Pacific region, where the legacies of Cold War nuclear testing programs continue to shape regional attitudes and aversions to this form of energy and its military uses. Like the populations in the three AUKUS nations (not least Australia, where it is a game-changing agreement), Pacific nations were unaware of the agreement until it was publicly announced. 

In March 2023, the leaders of the three AUKUS nations met in San Diego to unveil much-needed information about the scale, scope, timelines, and financial costs of AUKUS. By then, thanks to consultation, the additional details about the actualization of AUKUS did not elicit notable responses from the islands, adding weight to the side of the AUKUS debate that argues the agreement aids peace and security in the region, rather than undermining it.

Pacific leaders, and their populations, have had much to say about this sudden glare of attention, though it should be stressed that Pacific peoples remain predominantly concerned with domestic issues. Concerns relating to climate change and post-pandemic economic recovery are at the top of lengthy lists. 

Samoa’s prime minister, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, recently described the accelerating geostrategic contest in the Indo-Pacific as an imposition on the region. She also noted that despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, Pacific nations are still not treated as equal partners. She articulated the region’s aversion to the very concept of “the Indo-Pacific,” which unwillingly shoe-horns the Pacific Islands into the “geostrategic approaches of the development partners working in the region” and detracts from the region’s “Blue Pacific continent” approach. 

That said, Fiame, who is in a strong position domestically at present, has been able to capitalize on the many overtures and offers of much-needed assistance, and the global attention that has been coming thick and fast over past months. In other parts of the Pacific, like Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and the Federated States of Micronesia, geostrategic competition has fomented domestic discord and division in very telling ways.

Changes Afoot in Fiji

AUKUS and the China-Solomon Islands security agreement impacted the Pacific regionally and domestically. Fiji is no exception. The regional hub and focal point for a multitude of diplomatic, development, and relationship-building efforts, Fiji has undergone substantial change since its December 2022 national elections. The termination of Frank Bainimarama’s 16-year political dominance of Fiji and the systematic dismantling of his power base across the country has happened at a rapid pace since the new government was sworn in on December 24, 2022. 

When Bainimarama grasped power in a 2006 military coup, his ostracism by Fiji’s traditional partners in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States was China’s great gain. Throughout Bainimarama’s authoritarian rule in Fiji, China built a foundation in the Pacific. Beijing was a generous supporter of Bainimarama’s domestic agenda as he rolled back democratic freedoms across the board. In turn, Bainimarama adopted a “look north” policy that embraced China’s growing regional influence and “reorientated” Fiji in that direction. 

Bainimarama’s stance toward China began to shift in 2018, when Australia outbid China to fund a military installation, the Black Rock Camp. Then, when Fiji’s traditional partners upscaled their regional presence after early 2022, Bainimarama strongly lent support to these efforts. He welcomed Australia’s new political leaders after they won office in the May 2022 election, ousting a conservative government that was loathed in the Pacific and which had caused considerable friction in Australia’s Pacific relationships. Bainimarama signed onto the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) at the same time, making Fiji the first Pacific nation to do so. He then attended President Joe Biden’s Pacific Islands Summit in Washington D.C. in September 2022.

Even with these shifts away from China before his election defeat, Bainimarama’s political demise has been a blow to China’s regional efforts to expand its influence. 

Bainimarama was succeeded by Sitivani Rabuka. Rabuka has a long history of political leadership in Fiji going back to 1987, when he seized power in his own military coup. His previous terms at the helm of Fijian politics pre-dated China’s push in the Pacific. When he returned to the prime ministership in December 2022, Rabuka’s stance on China was unclear. 

Four months later, Rabuka’s position on geopolitical developments is much more transparent, and China is not pleased with it. Despite some pointed comments about former colonial powers at the start of 2023, Rabuka, along with the members of parliament in the “People’s Coalition” he governs with and which holds a slim parliamentary majority, have nonetheless shown themselves to be bold in rectifying Bainimarama’s domestic and geopolitical legacies.

On the domestic front, the People’s Coalition has restored press freedoms and lessened government control in people’s lives – not least by permitting the right to express dissent and protest. It has also restored academic freedoms by boosting the University of the South Pacific (USP) financially and by allowing its exiled vice chancellor to return to Fiji and resume his vital role. In addition, the People’s Coalition has revived the Council of Chiefs that was disbanded under Bainimarama. 

Along with Aiyez Sayed Khaiyum, who served in numerous key positions including as deputy prime minister and attorney general, Bainimarama had substantially altered the social and political landscape of Fiji. Fiji has long been plagued with divisions between I Taukei or Indigenous Fijians, and its Girmitya, or ethnic Indian population. 

Under the new government, the pillars of Bainimarama’s power base have been systematically removed, through a “resign or be removed” ultimatum. It forced the resignation of the chief of police, a notoriously partisan supreme court justice, multiple leaders of other departments and government agencies, including Sayed Khaiyum, and then, in late February, Bainimarama himself. The former prime minister was suspended from Parliament for three years for uttering remarks deemed “denigrating and humiliating to our Head of State, the President… while appealing to the rank and file in the RFMF (Royal Fijian Military Force)” that was taken to be an attempt to incite another military coup.

Since his suspension, Bainimarama has also faced charges of “abuse of power” for intervening to halt a police investigation of former USP staff members. Bainimarama is currently out on bail. For this part, Rabuka maintains that his government is not driving a campaign of retribution against Bainimarama and his staunch allies. Instead, Rabuka insists that the law is taking its course at arms-length from his government.

While this far-reaching erosion of Bainimarama’s domestic power base has been playing out, the stance of Rabuka and his People’s Coalition on China has come into sharper focus. The first sign of a shift was the new government’s cancelation of a policing agreement with China in late January 2023, citing differences between the two nations’ political systems as the rationale. Since then, his government has made other decisions that have aggravated China, like meeting with Taiwanese officials and then on March 24, reinstating the name of Taiwan’s diplomatic mission in Fiji as “the Trade Mission of the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the Republic of Fiji.” China had pressured Bainimarama’s government to alter the name to the “Taipei Trade Office in Fiji” in 2018. 

As well as these generally symbolic changes, China’s campaign against Taiwan in the Pacific has had some ugly manifestations in Fiji, such as when a Taiwanese diplomat was physically attacked by two Chinese diplomats in October 2020 during celebrations of Taiwan’s national day at a Suva hotel. The Taiwanese diplomat was admitted to the hospital with a head injury.

April 2023 has seen an upscaling of acts and statements that are straining the new government’s relations with China further. Rabuka gave an interview to the Australia Broadcasting Commission’s Pacific Beat program in which he addressed a number of concerns about China, both within Fiji and regionally. In particular, Rabuka expressed “concern” about claims made in March by the outgoing president of the Federated States of Micronesia, David Panuelo. 

Panuelo revealed that he felt “threatened” by Chinese intelligence officials who followed him when he was in Suva in July 2022 to repair the rift in the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). Panuelo’s claims came in a sensational letter where he decried China’s “political warfare” in his nation and through the region and the Chinese government’s concerted attempt to undermine him politically because of his measured stance toward Beijing. Rabuka described these blatant activities of a foreign power acting on Fijian soil as “a slap in the face” that undermined his nation’s sovereignty.

While Rabuka chose his words about China carefully in the interview, he strongly supported Australia. In particular, when asked about his stance regarding plans for Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement, Rabuka insisted that they did not break any nuclear non-proliferation agreements or the Rarotonga Agreement of 1986 that declared the South Pacific a nuclear-free zone. Rabuka went as far as to say that he had “no reason” to doubt Australia’s sincerity when it stated its aim with the submarine deal is to make themselves “a stronger friend in the area.” Rabuka said it was “not a bad thing” for Fiji to have “a strong friend,” in language that clearly set Australia apart from the prime minister’s stance on China.

If this interview did not make matters clear enough, Rabuka then declined to meet with Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Ma Zhaoxu. Ma traveled to Suva following talks in Canberra on April 12 aimed at deflating tensions between the two nations. Rabuka cited supervening cultural demands of mourning a close family member as the reason he could not meet with Ma, a reasoning that did not placate the Chinese delegation. Rabuka instead proposed a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Mania Kamikamica, but this contingency was rejected. 

China has not taken these developments lightly. A Chinese government organ, the Global Times, attacked “the U.S.-led West” for “politicizing, instrumentalizing and weaponizing the region,” with Rabuka’s Fiji being evidence of this activity.

Going forward, the intersection of China’s geopolitical ambitions and Fiji’s domestic political landscape could escalate if China’s activities in other Pacific nations are a guide, which they should be. In Solomon Islands, China has shown how adept they have been in countering opposition in the national parliament and also in removing bulwarks against their agenda to extend influence across Solomon Islands’ provinces. 

The premier of Solomon Islands’ most populous province, Danial Suidani of Malaita, had been a strident anti-China and pro-Taiwan voice (and therefore an anti-Prime Minister Sogavare voice). That was until he was ousted from his position in a no-confidence vote in late February 2023 that was widely seen as corrupted by Chinese influence. China has funneled cash payments to politicians who vote in favor of Sogavare and his pro-China agenda.

What could future Chinese influence in Fiji look like? While Bainimarama remains a political force and an obvious contender to align China’s interests with his own revived political fortunes, as Sogavare has done in Solomon Islands, there are significant risks. Given Fiji’s history, a military coup is a considerable concern. It would be no surprise, though damaging in a multitude of ways, if Chinese interests upscaled a campaign at this point to foment discord and divisions within Fiji, by encouraging military figures to work with Bainimarama to reclaim political power. 

Given Australia’s strong backing of Rabuka’s government, such an outcome could bring Australia and China into a confrontation in Fiji. Government sources have articulated concerns about this course of events. 

Fiji’s wheels of justice need to work in ways that avert this outcome. The government remains on high alert for attempts by foreign powers to interfere at a national and subnational level, or within the RFMF. 

Fiji needs a period of political stability to address its most pressing needs – the climate crisis and post-COVID economic recovery. The scale of Fiji’s economic woes were outlined in an April 2023 World Bank report that detailed the nation’s debt levels reaching 90 percent of GDP in 2022. Measures put in place to tackle this will be painful and will impact an already fragile political situation. Stability and prosperity in Fiji remains critical to the Pacific region as a whole. Yet the specter of geostrategic competition being mapped onto Fiji’s political fault lines remains a distinct possibility that would be deeply damaging for the nation, and region, as a whole.