Papua New Guinea: All Geopolitics Is Local

At the end of April 2024, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a high-profile visit to Papua New Guinea (PNG) just before a similar trip by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Albanese was there to walk the hallowed World War II Kokoda Track with his PNG counterpart, James Marape, in a two-day display of bromance steeped in both history and contemporary concerns.

In a telling incident, a helicopter carrying the two prime ministers was disrupted by a large Chinese cargo plane delivering aid tied to Wang’s visit. The incident was no doubt intended to send a geopolitical message. The message was for Australia but also Papua New Guinea, particularly to Marape who plays a pivotal role in managing the increasingly complex web of geopolitical maneuvers shaping his nation. The whole Pacific is grappling with Beijing’s multifaceted campaign to become the dominant regional power and the pushback from a coalition of nations aligning against China. PNG is experiencing this competition in unique ways that have vast consequences domestically and internationally.

The geopolitical pressures and relationships shaping PNG have particular and intense forms due to the country’s size – it is the largest Pacific nation after Australia – its location at the strategic center of the Indo-Pacific region, as well as PNG’s uniquely complex domestic realities. The geopolitical game playing out in PNG is mapped onto what seems at times to be a precarious domestic situation.

While Marape cuts a self-assured political figure on the international stage, courting many nations seeking stronger ties with PNG, the events of 2024 have challenged his domestic authority. Indeed, Marape has deftly used opportunities presented by the flood of foreign interest in PNG to offset domestic criticism of his leadership. This was evident when Marape made a high-profile appearance as a guest of the Australian government (the equivalent of a state visit) in February 2024, and became the first Pacific leader to address Australia’s Parliament. This came at a particularly opportune moment for Marape given the domestic turbulence that preceded it.

Although PNG is a nation all too familiar with unrest and a plethora of social and economic challenges, the country was shaken by riots that broke out on January 10 in Port Moresby, which turned the capital into a warzone. Deep economic and social frustrations were unleashed in a blaze of lawless looting and arson. The cost was high both in human life – at least 22 died – and monetarily. The damage bill was put at 1 billion kina (around $260 million). In the immediate aftermath of the riots, Marape resisted calls to resign and instead suspended Parliament until mid-May to foil political moves intended to exact a toll on his leadership and government.

After Marape visited Canberra in February, more violence erupted – this time in the province of Enga on February 18. A tribal fight exacerbated by high-powered weapons turned ancient animosities, amplified by economic and social frustrations, and a lack of government authority into mass bloodshed. At least 50 people were ambushed and killed in this latest episode of violence in PNG’s Highlands. Like the riots in Port Moresby, this deadly ambush shone a harsh light on numerous shortcomings, not least the PNG government’s ongoing inability to provide adequate policing and security.

In late May the horrific tragedy of a landslide that is thought to have buried alive nearly 2,000 people from villages in Enga Province exposed additional serious shortcomings of Marape’s government. Enga community leader, Ruth Kissam, pointed to the failure of political leaders to respond urgently and adequately to the tragedy and save lives because they were more focused on political machinations instead.

Shortly after Parliament recommenced operations mid-May, moves were made by MP Rainbo Paita to challenge Marape’s leadership through a no-confidence vote.  At the time of writing, Marape maintained that he had the numbers to survive such a vote – the most serious political threat since he became prime minister in 2019 in very similar circumstances.

As with the January riots and the Enga tribal ambush in February, the May landslide will echo domestically as political recriminations play out and geopolitically as reconstruction will draw international support that will further feed into the unfolding contest.

While human development aid will be the most likely focus of assistance for the landslide-affected areas, foreign offers of security assistance, particularly from Australia and China, are some of the most contested and concerning dimensions of the geopolitical game unfolding in PNG.

In the wake of the January riots, Beijing attempted to broker a policing deal with Marape’s government that Australia strenuously resisted ahead of Albanese’s April visit. Despite “pulling out all stops” to scuttle the China-PNG policing deal, Australia only succeeded in having it “shelved but not killed off,” according to a Sydney Morning Herald report. Beijing’s involvement in security issues heightens anxiety about the impacts of China’s push into the Pacific.

The brokering of an earlier security agreement between China and PNG’s southern neighbor, the Solomon Islands, in March 2022 triggered a watershed in global geopolitical priorities and strategies.

The election of Jerimiah Manele to the Solomon Islands’ prime ministership on May 2, 2024, brought to power another leader who has been keenly forging closer ties with China. Manele follows Manasseh Sogavare, who was instrumental in his nation’s switch from recognizing Taiwan to China in September 2019, and the myriad ways Beijing has become embedded in the Solomon Islands since. The controversial security deal struck in March 2022 between China and the Solomon Islands now seems safe following the national election and is likely to be actioned in ways that cause further anxiety. 

Kiribati, which also switched allegiance to China from Taiwan at the same time as the Solomon Islands in 2019, confirmed in February 2024 that Chinese police were operating in their nation in community policing and in developing a crime database. This revelation prompted some reassurances from the PNG government at the time that a police deal was not being negotiated with Beijing – though it was.

All geopolitical developments impacting the Pacific are now refracted through what has occurred in the Solomon Islands. The same pattern has reverberated through the region, as the Kiribati example shows. For its part, Australia insists that only members of the “Pacific family” – that is, member nations and territories of the Pacific Islands Forum – should be involved in providing security assistance. This has happened on numerous occasions, with Australia being the regional leader in this arena, though it has left legacies that have not always worked to Australia’s long-term benefit. These legacies are potently embedded in the immense uncertainty in PNG’s internal security as well as regional geopolitics ­– the future of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville – that will be discussed below.

Albanese and Marape’s show of solidarity and “mateship” on the Kokoda Track in April 2024 came after the signing of the Australia-PNG bilateral security agreement in December 2023. The agreement, scaled down from an initial plan to forge a security treaty, essentially formalized many activities already underway. It also took great care to not introduce measures that undermined PNG’s sovereignty. This was one of the key criticisms of the U.S.-PNG Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) signed in May 2023.

During the Kokoda trek, Marape gave his blessing to PNG citizens being recruited by the Australian Defense Force, which is suffering from a recruitment crisis. Recruiting beyond Australia’s citizenry will be game-changing for individuals and the building of people-to-people relationships throughout the regional nations selected for recruits. As far as the bilateral Australia-PNG relationship, recruitment signifies the trajectory Australia would like to see realized, of even greater force integration between the Australian Defense Force and Papua New Guinea Defense Force in the future.

Marape and Albanese united on the Kokoda Track in part to remember the brutality of World War II. Both pledged that war must not be revisited in the region, yet differences in historical experience and perspectives on the present underlie these prominent displays of unity. New Guinea was the longest open front of the Pacific war where Australians fought and died so that Australia, itself, did not suffer the same fate as New Guinea: invasion and pitched battles against Japanese imperial forces. The war transformed the colonial relationships that had defined Australia’s engagement with New Guinea for decades.

Although the Australian government is locked on to remembering wartime history, it does not want to recall what happened before 1942. The legacies of harsh colonial rule meant that not all New Guineans willingly supported Australia’s forces. Many were conscripted into service and many also supported Japan. The uncomfortable reality is that there was division within New Guinea about who really was their greatest enemy. There is agreement that the war was utterly devastating and a contemporary consensus that PNG cannot become a battleground for kinetic warfare between superpowers again.

Divided views between Australia and New Guinea on who was the enemy in the 1940s mirror the present. Greater force integration between Australia and PNG begs the question: Who is the enemy? The answer differs for each nation.

For Australia it is China. Australia no longer equivocates about naming its present-day foe, a shift that took place in 2020 amid the dramatically altered relations following the COVID-19 pandemic. The September 2021 AUKUS announcement and all the iterations of heightened security relationships that have followed, like those brokered with PNG, are all directed at challenging Beijing. Australian politicians have made strong statements naming China as the nation’s foe. The dangerous in-air incident between an Australian Air Force plane and a People’s Liberation Army Air Force helicopter over international waters in the Yellow Sea in early May 2024 has only heightened the atmosphere of animosity and the sense of a looming escalation in hostilities.

For PNG, the enemy is war itself. The on-going difficulty for Australia’s determined efforts to partner with PNG is that the latter does not see China the same way. People of Chinese descent are part of the fabric of PNG and have been since the late 19th century, thanks to German colonial practices of sourcing indentured labor from China.

More recently, Beijing has been playing a long game in PNG. In 2000, when he was governor of Fujian province, Xi Jinping first visited Papua New Guinea’s Highlands. By the time of Xi’s visit, there was already a project underway between the East Highlands Province and Fujian Province involving juncao grass and dry-land rice cultivation. Xi and Peti Lafanama, the governor of the Eastern Highlands Province, established a sister-province relationship during the 2000 visit that has formed the basis of close relationships since. This relationship has involved significant exchanges of knowledge and numerous delegations traveling both ways. These people-to-people connections in the agricultural sector grew exponentially from there.

In 2006, China openly began its efforts to displace “traditional” powers – Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Japan – in the Pacific Islands. PNG, given its size, resources, and location, was at the center of Beijing’s field of vision in the Pacific. Xi consolidated these efforts when he became president in 2013. China poured over $800 million into PNG between 2006 and 2016, investing in 27 projects including energy projects, freeways, and landmark buildings.

The depth of the relationship was made even more clear in June 2018 when Marape’s predecessor, Peter O’Neill, was welcomed in Beijing and signed PNG onto the Belt and Road Initiative. Then in November 2018, Xi became the first Chinese leader to visit PNG, when he was welcomed for a state visit that further signified the deepening of relations and “ignited a China passion” in PNG, according to the China Daily. A comprehensive strategic partnership was brokered with that visit.

Xi’s visit came just ahead of the 2018 APEC summit in Port Moresby, which for many in PNG marked the first time the intensity of growing geopolitical competition was felt. The capital, still bedecked in Chinese flags for Xi’s state visit, then welcomed U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who to this day is the highest-level U.S. official to visit PNG. (In 2023, President Joe Biden canceled his much-anticipated visit due to political turmoil in Washington.)

Pence was joined by the prime ministers of Australia (Scott Morrison), New Zealand (Jacinda Ardern), and Japan (Abe Shinzo), in announcing the first pushback against the unchecked inroads China had made in PNG. At the time, while Australia was still a major contributor of aid and development to PNG, it did not have the appetite to meet China’s huge investments alone. Together the four nations announced a joint electrification project that promised to connect 70 percent of PNG households to electricity by 2030. The starting gun in the geopolitical contest in PNG had been fired.

O’Neill returned to Beijing in April 2019 and hailed the Belt and Road Initiative as a tool to improve the lives of the vast majority of people in his nation, those engaged in agricultural production who struggle to get their produce to market. O’Neill’s emphatic push toward China was halted a month later when he was replaced as prime minister by James Marape following a no-confidence vote in Parliament.

When he became prime minister in late May 2019, Marape slowed the pace of China’s involvement in PNG by suspending several of China’s projects because he wanted to recalibrate Beijing’s influence. In the five years since, China has adjusted large aid initiatives, and the relationship seems back on strong terms.

The success of China’s efforts are plain to see. Within a month of participating in the second U.S.-Pacific Islands Country Forum in Washington D.C., Marape was welcomed in Beijing in October 2023 for the Third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. The visit made significant advances with China, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s April 2024 visit confirmed this. Several projects suspended in 2019 have been reactivated. Although PNG’s membership in China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was approved back in 2018, Marape’s government has now signaled it will finalize this process, opening the doors to another financial stream further binding PNG to China.

Wang also signed an agreement removing all biosecurity barriers to PNG imports. This is a “landmark decision,” according to PNG’s Post Courier, that will have a substantial impact on the nation’s economic health – which has been the source of so much domestic turbulence of late. By comparison, Australia’s strict biosecurity regulations remain in place, as do the barriers to other lucrative markets for PNG’s agricultural products.

China also has made significant gains in PNG’s resources sector. In April 2024, PetroChina bought the first shipment of Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) produced by the PNG state-owned Kumul Petroleum Holdings Limited (KPHL). A second lucrative LPG project is unstable due to French financiers’ wavering support, but it could provide an opportunity for China’s intervention or that of a U.S. operator.

The economic boost China is bringing to PNG could not come at a more opportune moment for Marape. Although Port Moresby has returned to a state of normalcy, the impacts of the January riots linger. Over 2,000 workers in the retail space may soon be displaced as cashflows for the many affected businesses continue to be squeezed. The promise of government support has come in the form of grants and there was, at one stage, a proposal of loans that was rejected by businesses; mass layoffs are still on the near horizon.

Perhaps the most evident impact is inflation. Many goods have doubled in price and even though the central bank is controlling pricing on several key products, like rice, the cost of living has skyrocketed. Port Moresby’s saving grace is that it remains the consumption capital of PNG. Goods and services still flow in this expensive city and the large workforce is buying it up, yet the economy remains a vulnerability for Marape and his government.

When he came to power in 2019, Marape formulated a political ideology to position PNG to be the “Richest Black Christian Nation” over the next 10 years. While the economic prosperity side of this ideology has been unevenly realized – a few have prospered while the vast majority have not – Marape has moved forward with enshrining Christianity in the nation’s constitution. In 2020 he began inquiries into the process for achieving this and many believe he will fulfill this ambition in 2024. For Marape, embracing Christianity is a means to overcome PNG’s substantial divisions. He has said that “in our nation of a thousand tribes, I believe Christianity can bind us together as one nation.”

Marape’s embrace of Christianity plays to a distinct U.S. advantage in the geopolitical contest with China. Even before Marape took power, the United States was working these faith connections to bolster its PNG relationship. In his 2018 APEC speech in Port Moresby, then-Vice President Pence capitalized on his own faith and drew lines of connection to PNG’s devout Christian population in deeply impactful ways.

These connections through the Bible and religious institutions have grown substantially under Marape. As a Seventh-Day Adventist, Marape has a very personal connection to U.S. religious institutions that was amplified by the April 2024 visit of the Global President of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Ted N. C. Wilson. He conducted a seven-day tour of the nation that drew millions of people to his preaching. He brought Port Moresby to a standstill. American religions carry great geopolitical capital in PNG, though the most populous denomination, Catholics, are expecting a visit from Pope Francis in September.

Christianity is just one area of PNG-U.S. relations that is powering relations forward. Since its reengagement with PNG from late 2018, the U.S. government has taken additional actions to strengthen relations. This included PNG being the only Pacific nation named in the Global Fragility Act of 2019 intended to address causes of instability and “chronic violence” with economic and development assistance. This has been augmented by the interagency Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability involving USAID and the Treasury, State, and Defense Departments.

In 2023, the U.S. government committed to a suite of initiatives addressing climate and disaster relief, illegal fishing, and criminal activity. These initiatives were announced at the time the U.S. sought to upgrade defense relations, which included undertakings to upgrade PNG Defense Force equipment, training, and facilities. Most significant was the signing of bilateral Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) in May 2023.

The United States got an unpleasant surprise in the intensity of public sentiment opposing the agreement, which was brokered outside of public view. In particular, the language that the DCA would allow the U.S. “unimpeded access” to six key ports and airports caused alarm, with protesters arguing it violated PNG’s sovereignty.

Added to this, pushback against the U.S. took other forms, like anger over the flying of the Pride Flag over the U.S. Embassy in June 2023. This exposed a cultural faultline between the U.S. and PNG, and within the United States. With its conservative social and religious beliefs, PNG is far more aligned with “Trump country” than the progressive social agendas of the Biden administration, a reality that has forced the U.S. government to recalibrate.

The Biden administration’s missteps were not helped by the diplomatic own-goal of April 2024, when Biden said his uncle, who perished in New Guinea territory during World War II, was eaten by “cannibals.” This comment was met with a strong rebuke from Marape, who encouraged the United States to conduct recovery work of their serviceman’s remains and remnants of the war – not least the mass of unexploded ordinance that still litter PNG almost 80 years since World War II ended.

The hand that the United States plays in the geopolitical contest in PNG extends well beyond government. Resource giants like ExxonMobil lead a deep corporate field that is also pioneering a model for community capacity building, agricultural projects, community health, and workforce development. PNG will also be the beneficiary of a Google undersea internet cable project announced in 2023, a project directly competing with China’s initiatives, principally through Huawei. It is in the U.S. interest to ensure the information superhighways of the Pacific needed for defense, economic, and human development purposes do not get commandeered by Beijing. Similarly, U.S. companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Cisco, and Oracle are all prominent in PNG and serve the purpose of ensuring orientation to the United States in numerous vital forms.

The immense uncertainty that is the future of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB) could also potentially substantially redraw PNG’s borders. Bougainville’s future, held in abeyance by the PNG Parliament since the region’s overwhelming vote for independence in December 2019, is about to move in an as yet undetermined direction. On top of the agenda for the PNG Parliament, which resumed its work in mid-May 2024 following its post-riot suspension, is making decisions about how it is going to respond to Bougainville’s fervent desire for independence.

With copper reserves estimated to be worth $60 billion, the geostrategic contest is already running hot. In late 2023, ARB President Ishmael Toroama courted the United States to accrue support for the ARB’s ambition of independence from PNG. Toroama’s political opponents instead would like to see China develop the region’s vast natural resources, a scenario that alarms Australia and its allies and partners.

Australia’s support of the PNG Defense Force during the brutal ten-year war with Bougainville rebels, which ended in the brokered peace agreement that allowed for the 2019 independence vote, lingers over its role in the present. The heavy baggage Australia carries in this aspect of geostrategic contest in PNG is not a handicap that either China or the United States contends with.

While the geostrategic contest in PNG is currently dominated by China, Australia, and the U.S., other nations coalescing against China’s regional hegemony will increasingly play important roles. Neighboring Indonesia and India provide immense markets for PNG goods, and Japan too is making its presence felt in fishing and marine agriculture. The landscape of geopolitical competition in PNG is fluid and, it can safely be predicted, will only grow in intensity and complexity.

It will also continue to heavily impact domestic matters and the political fortunes of current and future leaders. Although the stream of offers coming to PNG in these times of heightened geopolitical contest promise stability, greater security, and benefits for PNG’s citizens, it is unclear that this will be the result.