An official in Papua New Guinea, the biggest island nation in the Pacific, said last week that China has offered to support the country’s police force in the wake of recent violent unrest that involved officers. That sequence serves as an example of a growing threat to Pacific democracy and stability: a lot of island governments have corruption and inadequate law enforcement, which erodes the rule of law. China is able to exert influence thanks to this vacuum in responsive governance by providing technical support based on its authoritarian police style. Democracies must thus reform their constrained, antiquated methods of providing security aid.
Corruption Undermining Governance
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a key player in contests for influence by superpowers, as seen by Prime Minister James Marape’s visit to Australia this week, which included a rare speech to the Australian parliament by a foreign leader. Marape is expected to face a legislative vote of no confidence during his tenure as premier in addition to domestic complaints.
PNG and many other Pacific countries have made insufficient investments in their rule-of-law institutions for many years, partly because certain influential elites appear to be making money off of corruption that would not be able to withstand more robust oversight and financial accountability systems. According to a Transparency International study conducted in 2021, 61% of respondents in ten Pacific Island nations and territories said that government corruption was a major issue. Remarkably, 96% of respondents in PNG and 97% in the Solomon Islands shared this opinion. In the Asia-Pacific area, “another year of little to no meaningful progress towards curbing corruption” was reported in the monitoring group’s most recent worldwide report.
China’s Strategic Opportunism
Concerns about policing in Western policy and political arenas are sharply strategic: China may use the lax legal system in the Pacific Islands to gain leverage over rival nations like the United States, Australia, and others. However, any viable solution to the issue must address both the Pacific and, more crucially, the China sides of the equation. This entails reorienting our focus to fixing the governance flaws, such as the policing system, that cause many Pacific Island nations to be insensitive to the needs of their citizens.
The standard solutions provided by foreign aid training, supplies, and advisors are insufficient. The riots in PNG last month brought to light how completely inadequate this decades-old support paradigm is. PNG’s police force is deemed ineffective by the government and independent evaluations, in part due to insufficient resources such as cars, gasoline, and stationery. Last month, this inefficiency suddenly came to light. A portion of the capital city’s police force vanished on January 10 when government workers only received a portion of their salaries. More than 20 people were killed, along with mayhem and looting.
Corruption Undermining Governance
The police and rule of law changes that PNG needs for long-term stability and peace must target and obstruct official corruption. Therefore, the primary goal of any successful security aid should be fighting corruption. In previous years, independent watchdogs like Global Witness have calculated that corruption has stolen as much as 7% of the nation’s GDP. The administrations of Papua New Guinea have declared anti-corruption campaigns, although they have been sporadically and poorly financed.
A “lack of significant [enforcement] efforts” and “endemic corruption and complicity among officials” were noticed by the US last year in relation to human trafficking, including claims of “government complicity in a sex trafficking syndicate.” The police agreement gave China the green light to expand its security presence in Fiji, 5,600 miles away. It did this by transferring high-tech equipment like drones, closed-circuit television cameras, and surveillance gear, as well as by using the hard power of extrajudicial deportations and arrests. Then, last week, eight weeks after PNG had accepted a $150 million security support package from Australia, PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkachenko stated his government was taking into consideration a Chinese offer of training and equipment for its police forces. Richard Verma, the deputy secretary of state for the United States, promptly advised PNG not to accept China’s offer.
Conclusion
In conclusion, China has played a part in the extraterritorial policing of its people. Chinese people have been arrested and deported from Fiji and Vanuatu as a result, without facing any judicial action. Chinese nationals living in those nations may be the group most concerned about Chinese enforcement in the Pacific.
After more than 40 years of considerable (and costly) assistance to the police of Papua New Guinea, the components of Western assistance for police forces in the Pacific seem to have remained relatively unchanged. Democracies must drastically expand their attention to encompass the underlying reasons of poor rule of law and inefficient governance, even while technical support is still required. As one of the nine nations it is implementing its 10-year Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability in, Papua New Guinea presents a clear opportunity for the United States to expand this approach.
