How China is trying to shape the world (Exhibit A: The Pacific)

Good morning —

I got back late last night from Suva, where China’s missile launch into the South Pacific last month was top of the agenda at the Pacific Islands Forum foreign ministers’ meeting. Australia and New Zealand condemned the launch of a nuclear-capable missile into the waters off Tuvalu, and leaders of some Pacific nations, including the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, said launch was not the action of a “friend.”

Representatives from 16 of the 18 countries at yesterday’s agreed that the group should issue a statement.

“We don’t want to be intimidated by any powers," Tuvalu’s permanent secretary for foreign affairs, Pasuna Tuaga, told New Zealand reporters gathered at the forum. "It’s not about what the Chinese had done, putting these dummy warheads; that’s not the way we want to be treated. That’s why we want to send a very strong statement from the Pacific as a collective.”

But forum decisions must be unanimous — and Kiribati and Naoero (Nauru) would not agree. Not even to the most watered-down of statements that ministers recommend leaders consider issuing a statement before their meeting in Palau early next month. Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong and New Zealand’s Winston Peters were furious — and Peters was blunt in the closed session.

But still, all the group could agree was to kick the can down the road.

Naoero received more than $1bn from China last year after switching diplomatic relations from Taiwan to China, while relations between Kiribati and China have been steadily been developing stronger ties over several years.

(More on the meeting from RNZ’s Lauren Crimp here.)

To find out more about what China wants in the Pacific — and the wider world — my episode of The Detail this week is about exactly this: China’s global ambitions.

I talked to Sam Chetwin George, a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations in New York. Sam is a Kiwi: he was a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Scholar, learning Mandarin in Taiwan, and he also studied at Oxford and Stanford. He recently published an excellent piece in Foreign Affairs magazine about how Beijing is making the most of this “age of anarchy”. (I highly recommend reading the whole thing.)

But to hear Sam and I talk about China’s ambitions, and how New Zealand fits into them, you can listen to it on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. Or on RNZ.

Have a great weekend, I’ll be back on Monday

-anna