It’s all shadows and ambiguity. The one thing that seems clear is that China is still doing what it wants in Fiji.
In its March 24, 2024 story, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project stresses the partial nature of what it can report: one certainty, that “prominent Fiji-based businessman Zhao Fugang is a trusted advocate of China’s interests in the Pacific”; one supposed mere possibility, that he is also a criminal (i.e., apart from his connection to the criminal Chinese Communist Party).
In any case, “he has not yet been charged with a crime.”
The suspicion is not an idle one. According to OCCRP:
Since mid-2023, Australian law enforcement and intelligence agencies have secretly designated Zhao Fugang a top international organized crime figure.
Zhao is alleged to be a senior member of a syndicate involved in drug smuggling, money laundering, and human trafficking. There is no record of Zhao ever being charged in Australia or elsewhere. Authorities have not publicized any evidence against him and he denies any wrongdoing.
Australian law enforcement officials have shared intelligence on Zhao with Fiji in an effort to get local authorities to move against him.
If Zhao has a career as a gangster apart from his work for the CCP, this would fit an established pattern. When thuggish work is required, thugs come in handy; and the CCP, one of the biggest gangs in the world, has proved routinely willing to work with gangsters who operate overseas. China’s far-flung goals often entail harassment and intimidation of Chinese nationals and others, the kind of thing many thugs are good at. The gangsters are happy to serve the Chinese state as long as the CCP pays them off.
Meanwhile, according to The Age, “Fiji’s prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka has called on China to retreat from the South Pacific and warned that Beijing’s ‘unwarranted influence’ risks the region’s stability” (“Raided, hooded and flown to China: Secret Fiji video reveals Beijing’s ‘rendition’ tactics,” March 4, 2024).
Rabuka’s comments—his most forthright on China since his election in December 2022—came as Australian researchers unearthed an extraordinary Chinese security agency video, casting new light on a controversial police operation in Fiji that has become a case study of Beijing’s desire to operate beyond its borders.
The video, obtained by 60 Minutes, to be broadcast tonight, shows dozens of Chinese police flying to Fiji in 2017, conducting raids and arresting and hooding 77 mostly young male and female Chinese alleged cyber scammers, who are then loaded onto a charter plane bound for China as Fijian police observe passively. [A still image from the video is shown above.]
It always good to hear heads of state utter forthright criticisms of China and forthrightly plan to ensure that their country will no longer be compromised by China. Is the Fiji prime minister being forthright? The Age also reports, in the same article:
Hours after Rabuka called on Australia to provide more policing and security assistance to Fiji, and said he was resistant to reviving a controversial police deal with China that he suspended after being elected, his home affairs minister revealed Suva had relaunched an “extensive” security accord agreed between the former Bainimarama government and Beijing.
The usage is metonymical. Suva is the capital of Fiji; if “Suva” has renewed its “security” agreement with China, this means that the Fiji government has renewed it. Rabuka is the prime minister. As prime minister of this national government, did Rabuka not have the power to prevent a renewal of the “security” agreement with China? Is he only pretending to oppose this renewal?
On June 6, 2023, Associated Press reported:
Fiji’s leader indicated Wednesday his nation is reconsidering its security ties with China at a time that geopolitical tensions in the Pacific are rising.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said Fiji was reviewing a contentious police cooperation agreement it signed with China in 2011 that has allowed Chinese police officers to be stationed in Fiji.
At one point during a news conference in Wellington with his New Zealand counterpart Chris Hipkins, Rabuka appeared to go one step further by referring to Fiji’s “discontinuation” of the agreement.
“If our systems and our values differ, what cooperation can we get from them?” Rabuka said, referring to China.
Yeah, okay. But here we are in March 2024. And we are simultaneously learning that the prime minister “resists” the reviving of the “security” arrangement with China and that Fiji has in fact renewed this arrangement.
The Age says that “the disparity in the two leaders’ comments [those of the prime minister and the home affairs minister] points to the difficult diplomatic tightrope Fiji is attempting to walk as it tries to satisfy Western and Chinese interests.”
What balancing act? If the “security” arrangement with China has been renewed, this means that the don’t-renew-it side of the debate has lost, assuming that this side of the debate actually exists.
Assessing the 2017 video that he recently unearthed, Australian National University China specialist Graeme Smith says it shows Chinese security officials in Fiji “behaving as though they are in China.” The Fijian police, though present, are “only really in the background, and they are, to all intents and purposes, treating Fijian soil as Chinese soil. It is absolutely a ceding of sovereignty and…a very bad precedent that was set.”
Despite the prime minister’s meaningless or ineffectual objections to the presence of Chinese “police officers,” Fiji has yet to disown this bad sovereignty-ceding precedent. We probably shouldn’t expect Fiji to take action against triple-busy Zhao Fugang—businessman, agent of China, and maybe-criminal—anytime soon either.
