The battle of the Coral Sea: Australia’s response to the Belt & Road Initiative in the Pacific

ABSTRACT

Australia has not been alone in declining the opportunity to take part in China's Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). Instead, this article contends, Australia launched its own infrastructure initiative in the Pacific that has attempted to reduce the attractiveness of the BRI to the region. The article focuses on Australia’s intervention in the Coral Sea Cable System, an action which vastly reduced the role of Chinese firms such as Huawei in building telecommunications infrastructure in the Pacific. Informed by a postcolonial perspective, we explain Australia’s stance on the BRI in terms of its intimate but at-times problematic relations with Asia and the Pacific. This was reflected in Australia’s unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of the BRI as a foreign policy initiative, in its invocation of the ‘rules-based order’ to justify its intervention in the cable project, and in the design of its regional infrastructure program, which bore some uncanny resemblances to what Australian policymakers have depicted as the worst aspects of the BRI itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia-China relations
• Australia-Pacific relations
• Belt and Road Initiative
• Australia
• infrastructure
• Pacific Step Up

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Hewes

Simon Hewes is a PhD candidate at Deakin University. His research focuses on how states have responded to China's Belt and Road Initiative with rival initiatives.

David Hundt

David Hundt is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Deakin University. His research interests include the politics and political economy of Asia and the Pacific, especially in Australia and South Korea.