Chinas bid to expand its influence in the Indo-Pacific has taken a hit, with Samoa, a strategically located nation in the South Pacific, signalling that it would not go ahead with a Chinese port development project.
Samoa’s new prime minister, Fiame Naomi Mataafa, whose election was upheld by the country’s Supreme Court has told Reuters news agency that she intended to shelve a $100 million Beijing-backed port development project.
The Chinese intended to construct a wharf in Vaiusu Bay—a move that was fully backed by long-serving leader Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, who lost his parliamentary majority during the April elections.
Mataafa’s decision is significant as it feeds into the China-US rivalry in the Indo-Pacific, a vast region of the Indian and the Pacific oceans linked by the strategic Malacca straits.
The Samoan Islands are in contention because they are located roughly halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, in the Polynesian region of the Pacific Ocean. Any rival Chinese military presence here can threaten some of the key shipping lanes of the area. After World War-2, the US has been the most dominant player in the Pacific.
In view of the brewing rivalry, the former U.S. National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien had last October signalled that Washington intended to carry out a feasibility study of basing US Coast Guard vessels in American Samoa, part of US territory southeast of mainland Samoa.
“The United States promotes a free and open Indo-Pacific region where like minded nations uphold the international rules-based order,” O’Brien’s office had said in a press statement then.
The US fears that after building a port in Samoa and elsewhere in the region, including Kiribati, the Chinese can send their paramilitary forces in the guise of fishing vessels, as has been done by Beijing in the South China Sea. Chinese “fishing vessels” a front for its paramilitary have regularly harassed fishermen in contested waters, with Japan in the East China Sea as well as Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea.
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