The deal with the small South Pacific nation is another marker on the board in the Pacific for China, causing concerns abroad and prompting protests at home.
News Analysis
The Cook Islands, a small South Pacific nation, signed a controversial agreement with China this month, raising concerns at home and abroad.
The “Joint Action Plan for Comprehensive Strategic Partnership,” whose details were officially shared on Feb. 15, is seen as a direct threat for New Zealand—with which the island nation shares military and constitutional ties. Experts said it should ring alarms for the United States and Australia as well.
“It diminishes New Zealand’s relationship—and indeed control—over the Cook Islands, while giving [the Chinese regime] a solid inroad into the nation. This is very much a zero sum game and whatever is China’s advantage is a loss for New Zealand,” retired U.S. Marine officer Grant Newsham told The Epoch Times in an email. Newsham has decades of experience in the Indo-Pacific, including serving as the reserve head of intelligence for Marine Forces Pacific.
The pact, signed by Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown during a week-long visit to Beijing, does not mention any explicit joint security initiatives and includes a deal to mine seabed minerals. Brown told reporters upon his return home that there would be nothing for New Zealand “to be concerned about.”
In response to a question from the Cook Islands News, he said that the country will receive a “one-off grant” of nearly $2.29 million following the deal.
“In terms of grant funding, there has been a grant allocation provided to the Cook Islands for potential projects that we may look at in the future and this amounts to about $4 million [US$2.29 million],” Brown said.
“Our ministries will be looking carefully at where they would look to allocate that funding as part of projects or initiatives that we might want to promote. And at this stage, it’s looking like primarily in the area of renewable energies.”
On the day of his return to Avarua, the capital of the Cook Islands, 400 people protested at the country’s parliament. Protestors displayed signs that read “stay connected to New Zealand,” the Cook Islands News reported.
Three days after the deal disclosure, local media reported that China would co-fund an inter-island vessel with the Cook Islands. Beijing will pay half of the $6 million vessel to set up a nationalized shipping service and improve inter-island connectivity. The development reportedly caused concerns for a private shipping operator already operating in the islands.
Cleo Paskal, a nonresident senior fellow for the Indo-Pacific at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Epoch Times that New Zealand thought the island country would never go against its will.
The Cook Islands is a self-governing country but is part of the Realm of New Zealand, thus its citizens are New Zealand citizens as well. While the Cook Islands has about 15,000 residents, as of 2018, more than 80,000 Cook Island nationals lived in New Zealand.
“This blows up that conceit,” Paskal said. “It is calling Wellington, Canberra, and Washington’s bluff, and saying, ‘Not only are we not scared of you, we don’t care what you think.’
“Strategically and economically, this expands the PRC’s foothold in the heart of the Southern Pacific, ‘filling in the blanks’ of its map of the zone.”The deal also stipulates that the Cook Islands will help China to secure preferential treatment at regional Pacific nations meetings. Analysts say this directly poses a threat to U.S. and Australian footprints in the region, while also impacting their reliability on New Zealand.
“It’s another ’marker’ on the board in the Pacific” for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Newsham said. “Combine it with Kiribati and Solomon Islands in recent years, and Beijing must like the trend it sees.”
Kiribati, another Pacific island nation, signed multiple bilateral deals with China in 2019 and severed relations with Taiwan the same year. In 2020, the island nation, with a population of more than 119,000, also joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Tensions arose between Kiribati and New Zealand in January, after a sudden cancellation of a scheduled meeting between New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Kiribati President Taneti Maamau.
Yet another Pacific nation, the Solomon Islands, also withdrew its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in 2019. Solomon Islands signed a security deal with Beijing in 2022.
Paskal said the “preferential treatment” clause suggests that the Cook Islands will serve as a front for Chinese interests. She said it could also make things more difficult for the three regional countries that still recognize Taiwan—Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu.
Newsham said the agreement will help Beijing to further isolate Taiwan. Americans should be equally concerned about the development as it shows the results of their “outsourcing in the Southwest and parts of the South Pacific” to Australia and New Zealand, he said.
Both nations view the deal “as part of the steady expansion of Chinese influence and presence in the Pacific,” he said.
That expansion has the goal of ultimately displacing the United States, allowing China “to dominate everyone else—including Australia and New Zealand,” Newsham said.
Paskal said the deal is “a blow to the credibility of Australian academics and analysts who repeatedly reassure Washington (and elsewhere) that they are ‘in control’ in the Pacific.”
It “shows their strategies are not working for the people of the Pacific who want freedom,” she said.
Newsham, author of the book “When China Attacks: A Warning to America,” said the deal between the Cook Islands and China shows that the CCP has drawn the Pacific Island nation closer to its camp, to tremendous political effect. He said it raises serious questions about New Zealand’s power and influence in its immediate region.
“Wellington ought to be worried about what else China has in store,” he said.
“And keep in mind that this also shapes American and Australian perceptions of New Zealand as a useful ally. Not that the Australians have much to brag about after their own performance in the Pacific Islands.”