Framing China in the Pacific Islands

ABSTRACT How did many Australians come to accept that competition, rather than cooperation, with China was necessary in the Pacific Islands? We use discourse analysis techniques to examine the role that framings in Australian official discourse, media, and commentary over the last decade (2011–2021) played in constructing China’s presence in the region as threatening such that many Australians have accepted that policies aimed at competing with China are the most reasonable foreign and strategic policy response. We find that Australian official discourse was characterised by qualified optimism about China’s role until 2018, when a more explicit emphasis on competition emerged. Echoing this shift, while the media and (much of) the commentary framed China’s role in terms of threat and competition throughout the decade, this framing increased significantly in 2018. It is impossible to isolate the Australian government’s policy approach to China in the Pacific Islands from its broader understanding of China’s increasingly activist role in Australia, the Indo-Pacific, and globally. But our findings suggest that, by consistently framing China in terms of threat and competition, the media and – to a lesser extent, commentary – created an enabling environment for the public to accept changes to the Australian government’s policies.