South Pacific islands seen as a soft touch by Chinese gangsters
They are renowned for their palm-fringed atolls, crystal-clear lagoons and laid-back lifestyle, but the islands of the South Pacific are fast gaining a reputation as a haven for Chinese criminals.
Poor standards of governance, rampant corruption and lax border controls have made Pacific nations such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea a soft touch for well-organised crime syndicates.
People smuggling, drug trafficking, illegal gambling rackets, identity theft and prostitution are on the rise, with South Pacific nations seen as stepping stones towards Australia and New Zealand.
'The Pacific islands are a soft target because they don't have the screening devices or passport databases that developed countries have,' said Grant McCall, of the Centre for South Pacific Studies at the University of New South Wales.
'Australia has recently woken up to that fact and is tackling it.'
The Australian Federal Police this week said it would hold regular talks on policing with its counterparts in China over the issue.
The new initiative to fight transnational crime in the Pacific, as well as Southeast Asia, was announced by Australian federal police chief Mick Keelty in Beijing.
'The Pacific is an area of concern and vulnerability,' Mr Keelty said, adding that Australia was looking to strengthen ties with police forces through the Pacific Transnational Crime Co-ordination Centre in Fiji.
Fijian, New Zealand and Australian police last year closed down a massive, Hong Kong-financed factory producing crystal methamphetamine, or Ice, on the outskirts of the Fijian capital, Suva. The $4.38 billion operation was the biggest of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and its disruption led to arrests in Fiji, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Investigators believe the drugs were almost certainly destined for Australia.
'We also had a tonne of cocaine come through Tonga last year,' Mr Keelty said.
Chinese criminal infiltration of the Pacific is partly being fuelled by the growth of the mainland's economy and its insatiable appetite for raw materials.
Last week, the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency said Chinese criminals were behind a US$1 billion trade in illegally cut timber from Indonesia's remote Papua province.
The agency said the rampant smuggling was threatening the last remaining intact tropical forests in the Asia-Pacific region, with 300,000 cubic metres of highly prized merbau timber being shipped out of Papua each month.
Syndicates were paying officials and Indonesian military officers bribes of up to US$200,000 per ship to ensure safe passage, it said.
Papua forms the western edge of what Australian strategists have termed an 'arc of instability', stretching all the way through PNG and the Solomon Islands to Fiji, Vanuatu and Nauru. It is a region in which Chinese criminal influence is swiftly growing.
Last month, a government minister in the Solomon Islands was arrested over his alleged involvement in the corrupt granting of citizenship certificates to Chinese.
Meanwhile, 220 Australian police who were sent to PNG late last year in a bid to stamp out crime and corruption learned of illegal gambling operations being run by gangsters from Fujian .
In Fiji, there are allegations that Chinese women are arriving in the country on student visas to work as prostitutes, with a view to reaching Australia or New Zealand with false passports.
Most Pacific countries have sizeable Chinese communities who first settled in the Pacific a century or more ago.
Dr McCall said: 'Australia needs to recognise that with its local knowledge and language skills, it could be a valuable ally in the fight against organised crime.'
