Pacific Series. Canberra: The Australian National University, 2021. xvi, 504 pp. US$70.00, cloth. ISBN 9781760464165.
In the past two decades, the relatively recent growth of China’s presence and influence in the Pacific has been attracting more and more scholarly interest. Since the publication of Ron Crocombe’s Asia in the Pacific Islands: Replacing the West in 2007, the two most comprehensive studies on China in the Pacific have been China in Oceania: Reshaping the Pacific, and the volume Pacific-Asia Partnerships in Resource Development. These publications reflected increasingly confident criticisms towards the depiction of Chinese in the Pacific as being solely or mainly characterized as a destabilizing influence. This criticism has, in the past few years, been nourished by an increasing diversity of voices from within the Pacific, rather than those of outsiders preoccupied in various ways with the penetration of China. That such a confidence has matured is perhaps well suggested by the bold title of this volume, The China Alternative, especially as it includes a variety of contrasting viewpoints, including those of Indigenous scholars, on a wide range of heated debates.
To begin with, the debate concerning “who’s losing the Pacific to whom” is confidently addressed in the opening remarks, with a forthright rejection of the terms of the debate itself. That might not be enough to convince popular media and political commentators who will perhaps continue to simplify and narrate the contemporary Pacific Islands as poor, isolated, and fragile states confronted by a Faustian bargain for the soul of the ocean, as it is sometimes referred to in international relations and strategic studies. However, after the publication of The China Alternative, the idea that one has to either be pro or against China in the Pacific can only be defended if, at the same time, one deliberately excludes the many in-between, nuanced perspectives that these 16 chapters so well represent.
As the editors explain in the Introduction, these perspectives have received less attention compared to narratives that more directly relate to the interests and fears of postcolonial external actors. Their outsiders’ viewpoints, perhaps due to their particular cultural lenses, shape the current phase as an age of competition between great powers; however China is an alternative not only in the sense of being another great power. In another sense, China is an alternative to the established way of thinking about the relationship between Pacific Islanders and major foreign powers. In this other sense the volume truly provides alternative ways of thinking about the debate about China in the Pacific, one that combines the variables of the debate in unexpected, original, and fundamentally novel ways.
For example, an Indigenous perspective from the Solomon Islands is offered by Transform Aqorau, who is also a governance expert severely preoccupied with China’s influence. His chapter well represents the argumentative style of less-nuanced, more practically-minded commentators who see unprecedented inflows of foreign capital as the main cause of new (read, unstable) political and diplomatic relations. Dubbed as “chequebook diplomacy,” Sino-Pacific relations are especially dangerous for Solomon Islanders and other citizens of so-called fragile states, who do not have the “wherewithal” (340) to confront an incomer of such a larger size as China.
An entirely different, more interpretive, argumentative style can be found in Jessica Marinaccio’s chapter, which concretely shows how Tuvaluans are not passive recipients of the “Austronesian” (349) discourse as it has been culturally/ethnically re-signified by Taiwanese diplomats. To the contrary, they contest the top-down narrative of Austronesian proto-diplomacy and assert their bottom-up perspectives on what these new relations between Asia and the Pacific are meant to be. She takes these perspectives so seriously as to title the sections of her chapter, and even the chapter itself, with direct quotes from her interviews. That is as close as you can get to valuing Indigenous perspectives to the point of bringing them to bear on major theoretical debates. They are now black on white, ink on paper, pixels on screens, and there is no excuse for excluding them from the debate.
Once these perspectives have been brought to bear on major theoretical debates we can postulate that the meaning of words commonly in use will change. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka takes the Indigenous perspectives rather seriously too—so seriously as to devote an entire chapter to explain the meaning of “Blue Pacific” (41) as narrativized by Pacific Islanders, and also looks at the meaning of “Pacific” in different agendas of different countries in the context of growing Chinese influence and presence. For him, the Blue Pacific is “both a narrative and a strategy for assertive diplomacy” (58); it is an expression with profound implications of self-determination in the context of increasing geopolitical competition by foreign powers that are attempting to frame the region in a way to make it discursively convenient. In other words, we are encouraged to look at the interactions between top-down and bottom-up narratives in a variety of perspectives and case studies.
Eventually, the overall picture that readers will get from this cutting-edge volume is one where the China threat discourse has become one among others of equal, if not superior, argumentative value. It follows that, rather than treating the supposedly destabilizing power of Chinese interests on security, commerce, governance, and other issues as minor or non-influential, The China Alternative encourages scholars to treat new Sino-Pacific relations in their own right, i.e., as likely to develop independently from the external views of them within a framework in which the West is the West, rather than the centre of the world.
Rodolfo Maggio
University of Turin, Turin