Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [2]
Nevertheless, I was more flabbergasted by their very presence on the island. Elder Ryan and Elder Leviticus I had come to expect. Not so Mr. Wu and Mr. Yang. At the time, I was living on Tarawa, a sliver of an island in the Republic of Kiribati notable for straddling that very wide chasm between cesspool and paradise. I had followed my girlfriend Sylvia to Tarawa because that is what I did—followed Sylvia around as she pursued a career in international development. In the peripatetic years that followed, we moved on from Kiribati to Vanuatu and onward to Fiji, and on every island we touched upon we were invariably struck by the presence of the Chinese. On Kosrae, in the Federated States of Micronesia, on a lonely windswept beach where herons plunged after crabs, I stumbled across Mr. Lu, an engineer from Beijing who had arrived on the island to bid on a building contract. In Vanuatu, where politics and graft are tightly coiled, entrepreneurs from China discovered that the country made for an excellent conduit to smuggle heroin. True, technically heroin smuggling is illegal, but it is most certainly a business. Even blighted Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and officially the Worst Place in the World, according to The Economist, was experiencing a boom in Chinese investors lured to the country by its natural resources.
More confounding—for me, in any case—was the scale of Chinese emigration to the islands. When I first alighted upon Suva, the capital of Fiji, in the mid-1990s, Victoria Parade was a venerable, though dilapidated, boulevard of colonial-era buildings. Nothing much happened in Suva except for the occasional coup. A few years later, Victoria Parade had become a veritable Chinatown, an avenue of Chinese shops, restaurants, and nightclubs catering to mainland fishermen and garment workers. Other islands, too, experienced a surge of Chinese immigrants, lured to a region where market competition is nonexistent. Sadly for them, they weren’t particularly welcome. Rampaging mobs in Nuku’alofa, the balmy capital of the Kingdom of Tonga, burned down thirty Chinese-owned shops. In Honiara, the blighted capital of the Solomon Islands, the Chinese navy had to rescue 300 of their citizens after locals set the predominantly Chinese business district ablaze.
Nevertheless, within a short decade, the South Pacific was well on its way to becoming a Chinese lake. The better hotels were often full of official delegations. Some were there to forge commercial links. Others had come with their checkbooks ready, doling out “foreign aid” to receptive governments, who in turn needed to do nothing more than acknowledge that despite appearances otherwise, Taiwan was not a country. By conceding that Taiwan was merely a quarrelsome province within the People’s Republic of China, governments in the South Pacific soon found themselves in the possession of fleets of high-end SUVs, which they drove to their new and considerably more lavish offices, where they could ponder the work being done on their brand-new stadiums. This was foreign aid, Chinese-style, and governments in the South Pacific discovered that they liked it very much.
It was the appearance of Chinese tourists in Fiji, however, that really got me thinking that something was afoot in China. Chinese tourists? In Fiji? I first came across some at low tide on a beach on the Coral Coast on the