In June 2026, Lectures 88 through 91 of the “Adventus Amicorum” seminar series were held at Peking University’s Institute of Country and Region Studies. Prof. Paul D’Arcy of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and general editor of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, led discussions on Pacific regional order, history, and sustainable development, examining these themes from historical, ecological, economic, and humanistic perspectives. The lectures were chaired in turn by Prof. Zhai Kun of the School of International Studies, Peking University; Associate Professor Xie Kankan of the School of Foreign Languages, Peking University; Kong Tao, Director of the Research Department of the China Social Survey Center, Peking University; and Professor Bao Maohong of the Department of History, Peking University. Prof. Ding Dou of the School of International Studies; Prof. Wu Jiewei, associate dean of the School of Foreign Languages; and Lin Duo, assistant research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, participated in the discussions, along with scholars and students from Liaocheng University, the Ocean University of China, and other institutions.
In his opening remarks, Prof. Zhai Kun noted that Pacific studies in China is a growing field with a steadily expanding community of researchers, though it still lags somewhat behind the cutting edge of related scholarship worldwide. With the Institute of Country and Region Studies’ translation of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean nearing completion, the seminar series aims to build a bridge for exchange between Chinese and international area studies and to advance the development of Pacific studies in China, he said.
Colonial Legacies and the Development Predicament
On June 10, the first lecture in the series was held at No. 66 Yannanyuan, Peking University, chaired and commented on by Prof. Zhai Kun of the School of International Studies. D’Arcy outlined the spatial and temporal backdrop of China–Pacific cooperation across five dimensions: the stalled process of decolonization; the intergenerational ecological trauma left by colonialism and nuclear testing; island states’ commitment to neutral, multilateral diplomacy; the existential crisis posed by rising sea levels to low-lying atolls; and China’s model of cooperation without political conditions.
He analyzed two types of colonial legacy economy: the Melanesian “resource curse” model, exemplified by Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and the “MIRAB” model—Migration, Remittances, Aid, and Bureaucracy—of Polynesia and Micronesia, which are locked into labor migration, remittances, and foreign assistance. Drawing on Stewart Firth’s theory of sovereignty, he argued that small island states, with only de jure independence yet remaining economically subject to outside forces, cannot achieve full autonomy. He further argued that typhoons, tsunamis, sea-level rise, and other disasters compound this dual dependency and developmental fragility.
Turning to debates over development pathways, Prof. D’Arcy noted that traditional Western aid is constrained by a threefold affliction—ideology, information asymmetry, and bureaucratic inertia—and that the Washington Consensus’s advocacy of privatization and public-spending cuts readily gives rise to foreign capital monopolies in island states with sparse populations and small markets. By contrast, countries such as South Korea and Mauritius, which have successfully escaped aid dependency, did so through joint infrastructure construction, industrial diversification, and public-private coordination—an approach closely aligned with the logic of China’s external cooperation.
Scholarly debate has long been divided into two camps, the “Arc of Instability” and the “Failed State” schools: the former calls for stronger external supervision and conditionality, while the latter locates the roots of the predicament in colonial legacies and holds that cooperation should focus on building state capacity. The work of the Fijian parliamentarian Bain, the Vanuatu scholar Regenvanu, and Greenpeace’s field research in Marovo Lagoon all demonstrate that supporting traditional subsistence economies and community-based sustainable agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, along with fair trade systems, yields far greater aggregate returns than extensive resource extraction. On this basis, Prof. D’Arcy proposed three priorities for the Pacific Island countries: shifting from “small island states” to “large ocean states” to better manage tuna fisheries; establishing domestic downstream processing industries to avoid the raw-material export trap; and advancing climate adaptation projects, such as mangrove restoration and artificial island elevation, while collaborating to address non-traditional threats, including marine pollution.
Maritime Order and the Foundations of Peace
On June 11, the second lecture was held, with Associate Professor Xie Kankan serving as discussant. Prof. D’Arcy offered a long-durée perspective on Pacific maritime power, civilizational exchange, and conflict management. He opened by noting that, apart from a few periods of war, free trade has long been the keynote of the Pacific region, and that maritime military confrontation has been the exception.
He traced the history in which the ancestors of the great majority of Oceania’s islanders originated in southern China and, over several millennia of transoceanic migration, dispersed across the entire Pacific. He noted that the maritime trade networks of early indigenous peoples were tightly interwoven and rarely produced large-scale contests over resources, giving rise to a temperate indigenous order of maritime exchange. He then traced the evolution of successive conflicts: from the naval battle of Yamen and the Mongol invasions of Japan to the Imjin War, these events remained confined to Northeast Asia and never spread into the Pacific interior. After the Age of Discovery, European powers engaged in legal contests over questions such as “freedom of the seas” versus “closed territorial waters,” eventually converging on a consensus for a three-mile territorial sea. Relying on their ocean-going fleets, they progressively partitioned the Pacific islands and established a fragmented colonial maritime hegemony, even as indigenous island trading networks continued to operate.
D’Arcy analyzed two historical episodes that decisively shaped the Pacific order. The first was the Second World War, when the comprehensive modernization of the Japanese navy challenged the maritime order established by Britain and the US. Aircraft carriers, submarines, and related technologies transformed naval warfare and shattered the region’s peaceful order. However, because the China theater pinned down eighty percent of Japan’s main forces, pressure on the Allied counteroffensive in the Pacific was greatly eased. After the war, a wave of independence movements swept the colonies, giving rise to demands for national self-determination, and Pacific populations broadly rejected both war and colonial rule. The second was the Cold War nuclear arms race, during which the US, Britain, and France conducted nuclear tests in their Pacific colonies—Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia, and the Australian interior all became test sites—exposing local Indigenous peoples to radiation and forcing large numbers of people into permanent exile from their homelands. This humanitarian catastrophe ultimately propelled the rise of the Pacific anti-nuclear movement and the signing of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, establishing the world’s first nuclear-free maritime zone.
At present, several structural factors continue to shape the state of peace in the Pacific: the shift of the center of gravity of global trade toward the Pacific and the region’s deep economic and commercial interdependence; the decline of the traditional model of maritime hegemony; and the growing consensus among states that free trade and marine ecological protection should displace geopolitical confrontation—all of which help secure regional peace. In 2026, the new High Seas Treaty formally entered into force, providing a legal basis for the management of high-seas resources and the protection of biodiversity. Cooperative mechanisms among states will be further refined in the years ahead, jointly consolidating the foundations of peace and stability in the contemporary Pacific.
The Tragedy of the Commons and Blue Win-Win
The third session took place on June 15 at No. 51 Yannanyuan, Peking University, chaired and commented on by Kong Tao, director of the Research Department of the China Social Survey Center. Using the “Tragedy of the Commons” as his analytical framework, Prof. D’Arcy reviewed three major marine ecological crises in the Pacific. The first is plastic pollution: waste from North America and East Asia converges through ocean currents to form the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is ingested by 92.5 percent of seabirds and half of all endangered marine mammals. Plastics also degrade slowly, causing the ecological degradation of nearshore coral reefs and fishing grounds. The second is biological depletion caused by unregulated fishing. Driftnets came into widespread use in the 1980s, killing fish, dolphins, and turtles indiscriminately and resulting in more than seven million tons of marine life being discarded as bycatch each year. Although the United Nations issued a ban, enforcement capacity on the high seas remains weak, and illegal fishing persists. The third is the inherent difficulty of fisheries regulation: the ratio of land to sea area in Pacific Island countries can be as high as 1:3,000; satellite and patrol-vessel monitoring capacity is severely inadequate, and because species such as tuna migrate across the waters of multiple states, unregulated illegal fishing erodes the fisheries revenues of island nations.
On models of good governance, D’Arcy argued that the Nauru Agreement covering the western and central Pacific tuna fisheries has produced a mature regional management model that curbs overfishing and secures stable fisheries income for island states. He then turned to China’s distinctive advantages in ocean governance. China is the largest consumer market for Pacific seafood, and the campaign against shark fin consumption has directly driven a substantial reduction in global shark fishing. China’s deep-sea technology ranks among the top internationally and could support joint deep-sea resource surveys with island states. China leads the world in the scale of seaweed and marine fish aquaculture, which provides additional ecological benefits, including carbon sequestration and soil improvement. Its technologies could be transferred to island states to offset declining wild-capture yields. Building on this, D’Arcy proposed two practical pathways for cooperation: joint-venture fisheries projects that trade industrial cooperation for priority, compliant-fishing rights, replacing the single model of access fees; and ecological technical assistance focused on coral reef restoration, typhoon early-warning data sharing, and training for local marine conservation professionals, with the goal of jointly building a regional marine ecological monitoring network.
Green Growth and Models of China-Pacific Cooperation
On June 16, the fourth session continued at No. 51 Yannanyuan, Peking University, chaired by Prof. Bao Maohong of the Department of History, with Kong Tao, director of the Research Department of the China Social Survey Center, serving as discussant. D’Arcy began with colonial history, noting that colonialism plundered the island states’ resources and left long-term deficits in infrastructure and education, leaving their economies dependent on the former metropoles after independence. Following independence, differences in resource endowment set countries on divergent paths: resource-rich Melanesian states came to rely on the export of primary products such as timber, minerals, and fish, resulting in severe environmental damage and sharp conflicts between community and corporate interests, while resource-poor Polynesian and Micronesian states could sustain their “MIRAB” economies only through labor export and Western aid. In D’Arcy’s view, developing tourism is, under present conditions, the most feasible way to balance economic development with environmental protection, and China—with its formidable infrastructure capacity and enormous outbound tourism demand—is crucial to that effort.
D’Arcy reviewed four representative forms of tourism development: the mass tourism model; the community-led ecotourism model of Marovo Lagoon in the Solomon Islands; Fiji’s hybrid model; and the Chinese-planned mega-resort scheme in Yap. He held that Fiji’s hybrid model balances economic returns with ecological protection and can convert conservation into tourism value. As for the mega-resort planned for Yap by the China Exhibition & Travel Group, D’Arcy considered that it could have brought in substantial capital in the short term, upgraded public infrastructure, and generated spillover effects; the project nonetheless failed to materialize owing to its excessive scale, the speed at which it was pushed forward, and geopolitical factors.
In closing, Prof. D’Arcy assessed the question across four dimensions—economic returns, environmental sustainability, political trust, and cultural inclusiveness—and concluded that China holds marked advantages as a partner. He suggested that the best approach is a government-enterprise coordinated pathway in which governments drive bilateral policy alignment and preferential cooperation frameworks, while market actors lead project implementation. This would avoid the well-worn route of “pollute first, clean up later,” fostering a green and inclusive tourism model that achieves a triple balance among profitability, ecological protection, and community development.
Across four lectures on the historical origins, the construction of order, ecological governance, and industrial cooperation, D’Arcy repeatedly called for redrawing the world map with the Pacific at its center to counter the marginalization of island states by Atlantic-centered cartography. He also noted that mainstream Western media have long offered one-sided readings of China’s peaceful assistance to the Pacific and that there is an urgent need for a cohort of young professionals who command local languages, understand island cultures, and possess a genuine cross-cultural perspective—people capable of building bonds of cooperation grounded in equality and mutual trust.
