The Pacific Games: come for the rugby, stay for the geopolitics

ATHLETES FROM around the Pacific have descended on Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, for the Pacific Games. Most of the sports in the quadrennial event, such as athletics, boxing and swimming, would not look out of place in the Olympics. But there’s one more local discipline: racing in an outrigger canoe called a va’a (also known as a vaka). And rugby, which the region is mad about, will be played in no fewer than three different forms.

The tournament serves as an Olympic qualifier for some sports. But other than in rugby the competing nations are not known for their sporting clout. Many are poor and have tiny populations. Between them, island states have won only a handful of Olympic medals. New Caledonia, a French territory that won the most medals at the games of 2019, does not even compete in the Olympics. The region’s sporting heavyweights, Australia and New Zealand, joined the tournament in 2015, but have sent only small delegations to the Solomon Islands to avoid trouncing their smaller neighbours.

As a result the games attract less attention for their sporting merits than for the geopolitical competition that surrounds them. And in that contest, China tops the medals board. The Solomon Islands, which is hosting the games for the first time, is poor even by the standards of Pacific islands, and needed donors to bankroll the event. Taiwan had planned to help pay for the games. But in 2019 the Solomon Islands prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, cut long-standing official ties with that democratic island in order to establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan’s geopolitical rival, China, which itself promised grants for tournament infrastructure. China has since splurged around $120m on a 10,000-seat stadium (the largest in the Pacific), a swimming pool and tennis courts, and enrolled dozens of Solomon athletes in a training camp. (It had some work to do: in 2019 tiny Nauru got three times as many gold medals as the Solomon team.)

The friendship worries America and its biggest regional partner, Australia. China’s influence in the Pacific is growing—and it has no more fruitful relationship than with Mr Sogavare. The new stadium represents “a demonstration of the value of partnering with China” in a region long dominated by the West, says Meg Keen of the Lowy Institute, a Sydney think-tank. The Chinese-backed tournament sends the message “that the relationship with Australia is not exclusive, and that the Solomons will hedge donors against each other”. Australia, for its part, has plugged A$17m ($11m) into the games as part of a wider diplomatic offensive. Others, from New Zealand to South Korea, have chipped in.

Mr Sogavare’s promises of a lasting sporting legacy are probably overblown. The Solomon Islands struggles to equip hospitals with basic provisions. Its new stadium may well fall into disrepair when China stops paying the bills. And if the games show how much tiny Pacific states can extract from big powers jockeying for favour, they also highlight other risks. The biggest, of being militarised, is evident from the competing security contingents that are policing the tournament.

A security coalition led by Australia has long kept the peace in the Solomon Islands. However, last year Mr Sogavare signed a security agreement with China, which America and its allies fear could pave the way for the building of a Chinese military base. Several more co-operation agreements have followed, including one on policing. Both China and Australia have security deployments in Honiara and have bolstered them for the games. Australia has sent more troops to the tournament than athletes.

The games were billed by Mr Sogavare as a unifying event for his country. They also served to delay national elections. Mr Sogavare postponed them from this year until next, claiming that the Solomon Islands could not afford to hold the tournament and a vote simultaneously; an excuse, as opposition parties saw it, for a power grab. A long tradition of electoral violence predates China’s security presence in the Solomon Islands. If the election proceeds next year, warm memories of the games are likely to have faded. ■