Analysis: Taiwan, China and the Pacific Islands Forum

First of all, it's a question that many people, even in Taiwan, might have, is what role do these non-Pacific island nations taking part in this forum have? Are they just observers? Look, primarily the non-Pacific island countries that come in, they are observers, but they are primarily development partners. Now, the scale at which they are sort of considered as development partners is varied. You have the really big development partners that reach across the whole region and provide sort of regional support. You think you, well, Australia is a Pacific island country, right? But you think of the United States, you think of China as well. And then you have other smaller countries external to the Pacific Islands region, which also provide support, which is necessary, but maybe targeted towards particular countries. Now last year, as I understand it, none of these outside countries were invited. Could you explain once again why that was and why countries like Taiwan are coming back this year? This was a decision of the host government at the time, Solomon Islands, at the time was under the leadership of Prime Minister Manassas Sogavare. And the desire of Pacific island countries were noting that in the past few years, five to 10 years, there's been an increase of external middle power and major power engagement into the Pacific. The problem, of course, is that Pacific island countries are relatively smaller than these external partners. So they don't necessarily have the capability to engage concurrently with all these development partners while also trying to meet amongst specific leaders themselves. So the idea and the thinking at the time was that no other external partner would come in and that would allow the sort of breathing room. Are there likely to be some sort of tensions this year with Taiwan back and presumably China as well? We see the tension not only amongst, not sorry, looking externally towards either Taiwan or China in their attendance, but I think there's going to be friction in reaching that consensus as well on sort of the regional stability, sort of regional position around the missile test and also the regional approach to security. We know also on the cards, not formally on the agenda, but what has been discussed has been the region wide security treaty that's being championed by Prime Minister Matthew Wale of Solomon Islands. So that could be another area as well, which needs to be agreed to. And a lot of these things, it's not necessarily always going to be external influence causing these frustrations in reaching a consensus. But I think it speaks to the model in which the Pacific Islands Forum operates. It's very much a consensus based model. And when you're trying to get consensus among 17 different parties together, it's always going to be a challenge. You've just mentioned this debate over whether or not to condemn a recent Chinese missile test among these Pacific Island nations. And notably, some of the ones that blocked the condemnation were former, until recently, allies of Taiwan. Do you read anything into that? And what does it say about the direction the region may be heading? I wouldn't say that it's heading in a particular direction, but I think it reveals more the current state of play. Where there is external actors coming into the region, either whether this be United States, China, Australia's bolstering their position being part of the Pacific family as well. But I think it also speaks to the fact that while it would be nice to have a regional position on security and sort of that oceans of peace narrative that's being pushed forward, each country in the Pacific has an equal voice in the Pacific Islands Forum. And bilaterally as well, they have cultivated their own relationships.