Just a few hours earlier, Chinese President Xi Jinping touched down for a state visit with the Pacific neighbor where Japan and Australia met in a bloody struggle across the highlands that became known as the New Guinea campaign. Xi stepped onto a red carpet at Port Moresby's Jackson International Airport on Friday as Chinese flags flew across the Papua New Guinean capital to welcome him and China's commitment to this resource rich, but socially impoverished Pacific nation.
While Jackson Airport is surrounded by billboards for Chinese banks, the airport is named for John F. Jackson, a pilot and squadron leader who died in combat 75 years ago. This history is part of the complex backdrop to the APEC summit and it's the history that Australia's new Prime Minister Scott Morrison was happy to lean on when he called the Pacific Australia's "backyard.
Morrison said in his first landmark Pacific policy address, that Australia will commit anew to the Pacific, setting up a multibillion-dollar infrastructure bank to fund projects in the region and appointing a series of new diplomatic posts.
Now, a new contest is opening up across the Pacific from Port Moresby to Tahiti. The weapon of choice: money and the major players from the US to China, Japan, and Australia will face off this weekend.
The Pacific's annual regional economic summit takes place in the heart of APEC's poorest member country , Papua New Guinea, which has itself become the keystone in an accelerating struggle for influence.
