Wesley-Smith - China in Oceania

Abbreviations

ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations

AusAID, the Australian Government's Overseas Aid Program

EEZ, Exclusive Economic Zone

EPG, Eminent Persons' Group

ESCAP, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Social and Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific

FSM, the Federated States of Micronesia

FTA, Free Trade Agreement

GDP, Gross Domestic Product

GNI, Gross National Income

G8, Group of Eight

ICBC, the International Commercial Bank of China

ICDF, the International Cooperation and Development Fund

IMF, International Monetary Fund

MOU, Memorandum of Understanding

MCC, Metallurgical Group Corporation

MHLC, the Multilateral High Level Conference

ODA, Overseas Development Aid

OECD, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

PIF, Pacific Islands Forum

PNG, Papua New Guinea

PRC, the People's Republic of China

PSB the Pacific Savings Bank

RCDF, the Rural Constituency Development Fund

RMB, renminbi, the currency of the People's Republic of China

ROC, Republic of China/Taiwan

WTO World Trade Organization

UNCLOS, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

UNDP, United Nations Development Program

About the Contributors

IATI IATI is a consultant and lecturer in political science, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. A 2007 PhD graduate in political science from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Iati's dissertation engages popular ideas about civil society and political accountability, using Samoa as the case study. Framed by considerations of the tensions between tradition and modernity, his research interests are civil society, governance, and land issues in the Pacific. Iati was a 2007 Macmillan Brown Center Research Scholar and the 2008 recipient of the Pacific Cooperation Foundation Samoa Treaty of Friendship Fellowship.

TARCISIUS TARA KABUTAULAKA is an Associate Professor in the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa. His research interests focus on issues of governance, development, conflict, peace-building, post-conflict development, international intervention, and AsiaPacific Island relations. He has written extensively on the Solomon Islands civil unrest and regional intervention there. He is the co-editor (with Greg Fry) of Intervention and State-Building in the Pacific: The Legitimacy of 'Cooperative Intervention (Manchester University Press, 2008). Kabutaulaka has a PhD in political science and international relations from the Australian National University. He comes from the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

KOBAYASHI IZUMI is a professor of political science at Osaka Gakuin University and executive director of the Japan Institute for Pacific Studies. His academic field is international relations, and his publications Studies for Pacific Island Countries and US Confidential Paper and Termination of UN Trusteeship were awarded the Ohira Masayoshi Memorial Prize in 1994. He has organized many international symposium and exchange programs between the Pacific and Japan.

PALENITINA LANGA'OI holds a B.Sc in mathematics from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and an MBA from the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. In March 2008 she became the first female PhD graduate from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan. Her doctoral research focused on economic, administrative, and political reform in Tonga. Dr. Langa'oi was a senior official in the office of Tonga's prime minister for five years before joining the Tonga Public Service Commission Office in 2004. In 2008 she was a research fellow in the Asia Pacific Leadership Program of the East-West Center in Honolulu. In August 2009 she was appointed acting chief executive officer for the Tonga Public Service Commission.

HYLAND (HANK) NEIL NELSON was born in Boort, Victoria, Australia, in 1937 and graduated from Melbourne University. Trained as a teacher, he taught in high schools and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology before joining the staffs of the Administrative College and the University of Papua New Guinea in 1966. On return to Australia in 1972, he became a research fellow and finally a professor of history at the Australian National University. Now professor emeritus, he has retained particular interests in Papua New Guinean and Australian history, World War II, and contemporary regional politics. He has produced books, films, and radio documentaries.

EDGAR A. PORTER serves as dean of academic affairs at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Japan. Previously he served in several capacities in the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawai'i, including interim dean. He is the author of The People's Doctor: George Hatem and China's Revolution (University of Hawai'i Press, 1997), Foreign Teachers in China: Old Problems for a New Generation (Greenwood Press, 1990), and editor of the anthology Journalism from Tiananmen (Gannett Foundation Fellowship Program in Asian Studies, University of Hawai'i, 1990).

MICHAEL POWLES has headed New Zealand diplomatic posts in the Pacific (as high commissioner in Fiji) and Asia (as ambassador in Indonesia and then China). He was deputy secretary of New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and then ambassador to the United Nations. He writes and lectures on international affairs. He edited Pacific Futures (Pandanus Books, Canberra, 2006) and is currently completing a book called China's Rise: A Pacific View. He is currently an adjunct research fellow at the Institute of International Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai, visiting fellow at the New Zealand Asia Institute, and senior fellow at the New Zealand Centre for Research Studies.

TAKASHI MITA is a researcher at Osaka University's Global Collaboration Center, Japan. His research interests focus on issues of state-making, globalization, and social changes in the Pacific Islands. He served as researcher/advisor at the Embassy of Japan in Palau as well as associate professor of social sciences at Palau Community College. Mita has a master's degree in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and recently completed a PhD in political science at the same university.

SANDRA TARTE is associate professor and the head of the School of Social Sciences, University of the South Pacific, Fiji. She specializes in the international politics of the Pacific Islands region and is the author of Japan's Aid Diplomacy and the Pacific Islands (1998). She has written widely on regional cooperation in the Pacific, with a focus on fisheries management and conservation. She has also consulted for the South Pacific Forum Fisheries Agency, the South Pacific Regional Environment Program, the International Development Centre, Tokyo, and Greenpeace Pacific.

TERENCE WESLEY-SMITH is associate professor and graduate chair in the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. A political scientist with degrees from Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Hawai'i, he is editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs. He directed the Ford-Funded Moving Cultures research and teaching initiative at the University of Hawai'i from 1997 to 2002. His recent journal articles have addressed conceptual issues associated with self-determination and failed states in Oceania, and he is co-editor (with Jon Goss) of