Subject
Belt and Road Initiative, China, Fiji, Islands, Small Island Developing States (SIDS), South Pacific, Sovereignty, islands, sovereignty, [SHS.GEO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Geography

Domains
Economie, Géographie, Sciences Sociales, Sciences humaines

Description

International audience Though peripheral to China’s policies of global engagement, the small island developing states (SIDS) of the Pacific are becoming an annex to Beijing’s project for a 21stCentury Maritime Silk Road under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Traditionally part of the West’s exclusive sphere of influence, the Pacific Islands have become a contested space, seeking to benefit from the rivalries between the major powers. Among the foremost of these small island states is Fiji, whose Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has enhanced Fiji’s engagement with China. His government has sought to raise Fiji’s profile on the international stage, seeking to be a regional power among the small states of the Pacific, and to carry the latter’s voice and interests to global fora. Though on significantly different scales, both China and Fiji have embraced a form of ‘go global’ ambition. This paper examines the concrete and theoretical aspects of China’s involvement in Fiji within the BRI and what Beijing and Suva each hope to achieve from this partnership. It will consider potential long-term trends, and whether this initiative may be empowering for Fiji and will discuss whether a SIDS can repurpose to its own advantage a much more powerful state’s initiative, despite the latter’s relative lack of interest in remote small island countries.

Keywords
Histoire, Geography

Language
English (en-GB)

Creators
Rodd, Adrien

Contributors
Centre d'Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines (CHCSC) ; Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Université Paris-Saclay, In addition to being the most developed and wealthiest per capita state among the small island countries of the Pacific, Fiji has benefited from its central geographic location, and has long been the transit hub for airline travel between other Pacific Island countries. For that reason, it has also long been the host of regional organisations. The Pacific Islands Forum, historically the main forum for regional cooperation, is based in Suva, as is the main campus of the international University of the South Pacific. The United Nations Development Programme’s office for the South Pacific is in Suva, as is the Asian Development Bank’s. It therefore had the potential for a significant role within the region, which Frank Bainimarama’s government sought to actualise after Australia and New Zealand attempted to marginalise the country in the wake of the 2006 military coup. Their efforts succeeded in seeing Fiji temporarily suspended from the Pacific Islands Forum, thus persuading the then-military regime of the need to strengthen its intra-regional relations. In recent years, Fiji has sought to make itself an important and valued partner to poorer, generally smaller countries in the South Pacific. Fiji is now an aid donor to several Pacific Island states, and has signed its own bilateral ‘memoranda of understanding’ to assist in the development of Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, and Tuvalu (Wallis, 2017, p. 14). Prime Minister Bainimarama’s launch in 2013 of a de facto Fiji-led Pacific Islands Development Forum to rival the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) demonstrated Fiji’s capacity to attract Chinese funding for a project aimed at undermining Australian regional leadership: the PIDF was mainly funded by China (Bryant-Tokalau, 2018, p. 26). Though it has failed to eclipse the PIF, it remains a statement of Fiji’s (China-enabled) ambition.

Sources
ISSN: 1715-2593, Island Studies Journal, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03032265, Island Studies Journal, Institute of Island Studies, 2020, 15 (2), pp.93-118. ⟨10.24043/isj.128⟩

Relation
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.24043/isj.128

Coverage
Vanuatu

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