Opinion | Australia does not own the Solomon Islands

By Tom Fowdy

China has signed a security agreement with the Pacific archipelago nation of the Solomon Islands. Having opened up diplomatic ties in late 2019 with Honiara, who chose to ditch ties with Taiwan, Beijing's relationship with the country has provoked opposition and classic yellow peril discourse in Australia as it is perceived as China encroaching on the country's own periphery and strategic space, with unfounded fears being circulated in the country's vitriolic right-wing media that China might be able to build a military or naval base there.

In reality, China's security agreement with the islands is in fact the same one as what it already has with Australia. Instead of squarely aligning with Beijing, the country's Prime Minister has stated the Solomon Islands "does not want to take sides" and sought a balanced relationship with all powers. Yet this doesn't seem to ease the anger in Canberra, who seem to assume that they have an unbridled right to dominate the island nations of the Pacific, and portray their tilt towards China not as a balancing act but in fact a subversion and infiltration by Beijing.

Australian exceptionalism and the 'Yellow Peril'

Australia is by heritage, a white European colonial nation, who displacing its indigenous population, emerged in the proximity of Asian, Polynesian and Melanesian peoples in the wider Pacific. As an English-speaking country derived from the British Empire, Australia sees itself as all Anglosphere nations do, as a morally superior and exception civilization which has a right to impose itself on others. Its geographic surroundings have subsequently left this identity with a strong sense of insecurity and xenophobia in potentially being displaced by the perceived "inferior" peoples around it, and as a result in the 19th and 20th centuries, Australia espoused the discourse of "Yellow Peril" whereby it promulgated a fear of China subverting the culture and society of the country.

This soon produced the "White Australia Policy" which sought to ban non-White immigration into Australia for decades. Although that policy is since long gone, its prevailing assumptions have continued beneath the surface and re-emerged under the guise of Anti-Communism in reaction to the rise of China as a great power, and a large-scale immigration of Chinese diaspora populations into the country. This has led to a new era of Yellow Peril discourse masking racism with "Communist infiltration" as notoriously epitomized by Clive Hamilton's book "The Silent Invasion".

Arrogance towards the Pacific Islands

These assumptions transfuse themselves into a longstanding foreign policy whereby Canberra subsequently believes it has a right of political, military and economic dominance over the small island nations of the Pacific, many of which were also part of the British Empire. Because they are small and have populations often less than cities, they are not configured as a racial or cultural threat but that Australia is the only country who "acts in their best interests" and has a "moral duty" towards them. Therefore, it portrays its desire to dominate these countries through the argument it is in fact protecting them from "Chinese influence", irrespective of what these countries may actually want.

In reality, the islands of the Pacific do not want to be forced into terms and conditions set by Australia, and seek to guarantee their own national sovereignty. Forging closer ties with China is not seen as submitting to the will of Beijing, but in fact articulating geopolitical balance for themselves as China offers a guarantee of non-interference. The Solomon Islands has made this abundantly clear, yet Australian media, commentators and academics cannot seem to understand or accept why, because they assume that Canberra's intentions could not be seen as wrong or bad, and that therefore their hegemony over these regions should be a given. Thus the reaction to its ties with Beijing becomes an extension of the Yellow Peril discourse.

In conclusion, Australia must learn to respect the sovereign choices of island countries in the Pacific, and it also must come to terms with the presence of a rising China. Under Scott Morrison, Australia's political atmosphere towards Beijing has become poisonous as it has placed itself as the forefront flagbearer of America's anti-China foreign policy. It has weaponized large-scale paranoia against Chinese people and businesses, facilitated hostile institutions such as the Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), joined new anti-China alliances such as AUKUS, and is then surprised that Beijing would strive to geopolitically checkmate it by bolstering ties with the Solomon Islands. But in the end, this is not so much about a zero-sum game of hegemony as much as it is about what the islands themselves want, and this is the dynamic which is so frequently dismissed. These islands don't commit to Australia because it looks down on them, so why are they surprised in the end?

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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