This towering symbol of Global China is raining debris

At the heart of Fiji’s capital city, a 28-storey skyscraper towers above all around it: palm trees, a hotel and the vast ocean beyond.
Suva’s WG Friendship Plaza, billed as the South Pacific’s tallest building, was meant to be a totemic tribute to the power of Chinese investment and a demonstration of the benefits of welcoming in Beijing.
Seven years on from its inception, however, it looms unfinished, a cautionary tale that shows the cracks in China’s expansionist plan for the region, which has emerged as one of the fiercest battlegrounds in America and China’s intensifying geopolitical competition.
China has encouraged private investment in, and directed significant government aid to, the South Pacific. In 2013 President Xi travelled to Fiji to invite it and other Pacific nations to ride on the “express train” of his One Belt, One Road initiative.
Since then, some Chinese projects in Fiji have been delivered successfully, including a new sports complex in Suva, a “Friendship Bridge” on the city’s waterfront and roads throughout the country’s more remote regions.
Others have fallen apart. Fiji’s deputy prime minister has said that a hospital built with Chinese aid is “a complete disaster”, with broken electrical and water systems that have prevented it from providing basic services. The Friendship Plaza is a particularly high-profile case.
In 2017, when Hu Xiaolong, a Chinese property developer, began the project, he hoped it “could be a good emblem” that would “boost confidence in Chinese investment” in the region. But when the wind rises in Suva, teachers at Holy Trinity Anglican School rush to bring their pupils inside. Their school sits next to the construction site. As the gusts grow, unsecured debris rains down. Metal poles have pierced the school’s playing field, clouds of concrete dust coat the classroom walls and this year timber bounced off the school vicar’s roof.
“We always feel insecure when they are constructing this,” said Johnson Rura, the school’s principal. Meli Taucilagi, the school’s caretaker, worries that, “sometime, somebody is gonna die”.
The Friendship Plaza has been plagued by scandal. One of the project’s workers died in an accident, Hu was ousted and construction is half a decade behind schedule. Instead of a gleaming symbol of success, the project has come to embody China’s difficulties delivering on some of its promises.
“There are pervasive concerns throughout the Pacific about the quality of Chinese projects,” said Riley Duke, an analyst at Australia’s Lowy Institute, a foreign policy think tank. “Failing projects can loom very large, and in public perception the lines between the Chinese state and commercial sector are blurred, so projects like the Friendship Plaza become a symbol of Chinese engagement.”
When construction began on the Friendship Plaza, the project was enthusiastically welcomed by both Fiji and China. In 2017, the groundbreaking ceremony was officiated by Parveen Bala, then Fiji’s minister for infrastructure. In the audience were Qiao Chuanxiu, a Communist Party (CCP) official from the province of Zhejiang, and Zhang Ping, the Chinese ambassador.
Soon, however, engineers raised concerns about the quality of steel beams used in the building. Then, in 2019, Suva’s city council issued a stop-work order after the project began building on land owned by Holy Trinity.
In 2020 a 36-year-old foreign worker without a harness plunged down an unfinished lift shaft to his death. Workers at the site often failed to secure building materials: the following year, a local resident was almost hit by a cement block after it fell from the building on to a nearby road. The problems led to repeated delays as the project’s directors fought legal claims and scrutiny by regulators.
Upon returning to Fiji last year after the pandemic, Hu found that his Chinese partners had dramatically reduced his ownership share. He now blames the new directors, against whom he has laid lawsuits, for the project’s dysfunction. “It’s completely out of control now,” he said. “All the reputation accumulated in the last few years is totally ruined.”
During a trip supported by a grant from the Peter M Acland Foundation, a New Zealand-based media charity, The Sunday Times visited the building site, where Julien Yuen, the project’s operations manager, implied that Holy Trinity had invented accusations about falling debris and blamed the pandemic for construction delays. Yuen did not respond to further questions.
The pattern is repeating across the region, where the Chinese government issued $3.21 billion in grants and loans between 2008 and 2021. In Papua New Guinea government regulators have described a 23-storey Chinese skyscraper in the capital as “highly illegal”, with 75 defects ranging from rusting steel columns to exposed electrical conduits in fire zones. The building sits vacant, despite its prime location.
In the Cook Islands, the budget of a much-vaunted Chinese upgrade to the nation’s water system blew out by $50 million and more than ten miles of piping had to be replaced due to poor workmanship by the contractor, the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. In 2019 Tina Browne, the country’s opposition leader, said: “This must be one of the biggest disasters in our country.”
The country’s courthouse, stadium and police headquarters were also built by China and all have been plagued by complaints about quality.
In Port Vila, Vanuatu’s capital city, China built a lavish convention centre in 2016. Soon after, however, Vanuatu requested additional funds to retrofit the building. Within a few years, the centre had fallen into disrepair after it proved too expensive for the country’s government to maintain. Vanuatu subsequently handed over the building to a local Chinese company.
Even where Chinese projects in the Pacific have been more successful, they have typically been funded through concessional loans, leading to rising debt across the region. Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu are among the world’s most indebted nations, measured by debt repayments as a percentage of GDP, in large part due to large Chinese loans. Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Cook Islands are also suffering from large debts to China.
Jon Fraenkel, who lectures in Pacific politics at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, noted that western projects also have a patchy record. Nonetheless, the narrative about Chinese failures has prompted some scepticism towards the country from Pacific leaders in recent years.
In 2022 a new Fijian government under Sitiveni Rabuka took office and initially distanced itself from co-operation with China. But the grim economic picture has forced Rabuka to continue soliciting funding from China, despite the ongoing concerns. “Why do they keep going back? Because most of the time, they can’t get money from elsewhere,” said Fraenkel.
For the past few decades, it was less common for partners such as Australia and New Zealand to support infrastructure projects in the Pacific. That has changed. “Fear of China in the Pacific has prompted western governments to pivot their aid,” said Duke. “Countries like Australia are now incredibly focused on infrastructure.”
Even so, the ease of Chinese funding appeals. Earlier this year, Fiji and China announced a $135 million infrastructure program through which China would fund dozens of road upgrades and new bridges. Late last year Rabuka told Fiji’s parliament that Xi’s One Belt, One Road initiative “aligns with our nation’s development agenda”.
As projects such as the Friendship Plaza continue to face challenges, that funding is increasingly controversial. Amelia Vulitakayawa, who lives near the Friendship Plaza, said tiles occasionally fell from the tower and that she constantly heard rumours about the building’s safety.
“It’s quite scary for us,” she said, adding that she hoped Fiji would stop taking Chinese investments. “The kind of business that they’ve got in Fiji is corrupting.”