Which China do our Pacific Islands speak?

Along the awnings of Honolulu's Chinatown, one of the oldest Chinese quarters in the United States, the shop names answer to an older map. Cantonese speakers dubbed these islands 檀香山, the Sandalwood Mountains, after the fragrant wood their forebears shipped to Canton from 1792 into the 1840s. The name marks a trade. To weigh how the Pacific's Chinese associations view the rivalry between Beijing and Taipei, one must ask first which community, and which century, anyone means.

Zhongshan (中山), the Guangdong county once called Xiangshan (香山) and renamed in 1925 for its most famous son, gave Hawaiʻi roughly three quarters of its Chinese. Sailors from that coast came ashore by 1789. Behind them followed sandalwood dealers, then thousands of plantation hands under indenture. Those who outlasted their contracts opened stores along King Street. The label Chinese community, applied to them, hides a presence older than the People's Republic and older than the quarrel laid over it.

Still, neither one district nor one dialect defined that first population. The 本地 (Punti), Cantonese-speaking locals, shared the plantations with the 客家 (Hakka), who made up close to a third of Hawaiʻi's Chinese against a thin sliver on the American mainland. From the 台山話 (Taishanese) of the California quarters, their Zhongshan speech marked them apart. Some families kept the 隆都話 (Longdu), a Min island amid Cantonese, while others spoke the 石岐話 (Shiqi) of the county town.

Brought to Honolulu in 1879 by his elder brother Sun Mei (孫眉), a rancher who later bankrupted himself for the cause, the young Sun Yat-sen studied at Iolani School and Oʻahu College. On 24 November 1894, in a rented Honolulu hall, he founded the 興中會 (Revive China Society), the first modern revolutionary body in Chinese history. The revolution against the Qing was first plotted in that Chinatown. Historians of the islands name Hawaiʻi the cradle of the Chinese revolution.

Thus it was under that Nationalist banner, the one soon to be Taipei's, that the Pacific's Chinese associations first assembled, from mutual-aid lodges to native-place clubs. The society itself merged into the 同盟會 (Tóngménghuì) in 1905 and grew into the 國民黨 (Kuo Min Tang - Guómíndǎng). From Honolulu to the far archipelagos, bodies bearing the name Chinese community kept a letterhead older than Beijing. Their loyalties predated the People's Republic by decades, a calendar of festivals older than any consulate.

When William Stewart's cotton and coffee plantation at ʻAtimaono failed in 1873, the 337 labourers recruited eight years earlier turned to trade and craft. Their mutual-aid lodge became the 信义堂 (Si Ni Tong) in 1911, alive in Papeʻete a century later. Under the Kuo Min Tang, with Sun Yat-sen as patron, the community founded the National Chinese Union of Tahiti in 1921. Tahitians called these families tinitō, a word older than the embassies courting them today. As Association Culturelle Wen Fah puts it, their Huiyang (惠陽) Hakka, for its part, borrowed from the island around it, folding faʻahou (again) and oti (done) into daily speech while holding to its own script.

Fiji's chapter older still, Moy Ba Ling sailed from the Australian goldfields into Levuka in 1855 to trade sandalwood and sea cucumber among other commodities. By 2025 the community counted 170 years in the islands, Cantonese speakers forming roughly 80% of the older families. A handful of merchants grew into a thread of Fijian society, prominent in retail and the building trades as we know them. Their grandchildren scattered onward to Australia and North America.

In turn, gaining citizenship turned these families' politics inward. Across the 1960s and into 1973, the Chinese of French Polynesia won French nationality, ballots and passports together. Fiji's General Electors roll had enfranchised its community back in 1964. In Hawaiʻi, statehood made them full Americans in 1959. Heritage and mutual aid replaced the quarrels of a distant civil war. The lodges tended ancestral graves at the Qingming rite instead.

One generation after another, the village tongue receded. The plantation founders kept their Longdu, Shiqi, Cantonese or Hakka at home, while their island-born children took to English and to Hawaiian and married across the quarter. By mid-century the old dialects had retreated to the kitchen and the temple halls. What had once sorted Punti from Hakka thinned to a few phrases, a surname and a graveside rite.

Nowhere did the swallowing go further than in Hawaiʻi. The earliest sugar masters married Hawaiian women under Governor Kuakini (1789–1844). The kingdom's speech then rewrote them outright, the names turning Hawaiian, Tang Hung Sin (鄧行善) into Akina and Lum Jo (林佐) into Aiko. Their Chinese names survived in a handful of signatures alone, lost to grandchildren who knew only the Hawaiian. Which China a family spoke had, in these homes, dwindled to none.

What the later waves brought was the Cantonese of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, a city speech overshadowing Taishanese and the Zhongshan varieties. Mainland families and state-funded institutes came afterward, teaching Pǔtōnghuà (普通話), the common Mandarin of Beijing. Along the strait the script split as plainly as the speech, on the shopfront and the school blackboard. Heritage families and Taipei hold to the 繁體字 (traditional characters), while Beijing prints the 簡體字 (simplified characters).

There is a second population atop the older one, arrived within living memory. From the late 1980s, families from Fujian and Guangdong came to Fiji and its neighbours in waves. The Fijian cabinet approved, in 1995, a scheme for up to 7,000 Hong Kong Chinese, against F$30,000 to the state and F$100,000 in approved ventures. Scholars call the divide the old and the new Chinese, a rift of speech and memory.

It is telling that the two populations answer the strait in opposite keys. The newer migrants arrived after Beijing had won most of the region's recognition, their networks tied to the mainland. In Chinese state media, the older diaspora becomes a facilitator of friendship between China and the islands, a framing folding heritage families into present policy. This is the vocabulary of 僑務 (qiáowù), the state's word for overseas-Chinese affairs.

Though pressed to declare, the old families as a rule hold aloof. Robert Wan, the Chinese-Tahitian magnate who built an empire in the Tahitian cultured pearl business to French Polynesia, holds no tie to the Communist Party and a plain preference for stability under the French umbrella. Their commerce rests on local trust rather than foreign flags. Asked to choose Beijing or Taipei, most keep their attention on the shop, the school and the temple shrines.

Palau, closest of all to Taiwan, keeps its distance from Beijing regardless. The republic granted recognition to Taipei in 1999. Even the name divides, Taiwan writing it 帛琉 and Beijing 帕勞. Chinese arrivals to Palau climbed from a few hundred in 2008 past ninety thousand by 2015, until Beijing throttled the group tours in 2017 to pry the archipelago loose. An Austronesian kinship with Taiwan, older than either flag, bonds the islands.

Nearby, 關島 (Guam) and the Northern Marianas, flying the American flag, teach the lesson again. 塞班島 (Saipan) drew close to three quarters of its income from tourism in the years to the pandemic, much of it Chinese, alongside casino and garment money and mainland investment. On the second island chain, a short hop from Taipei, these United States territories answer to American law, Chinese capital arriving without a Chinese flag.

To grasp how far a small state can swing, look to Kiribati. It had granted recognition to Beijing from 1980. From 1997 a Chinese space-tracking station on South Tarawa followed the Shenzhou V flight of the country's first astronaut and lay within range of the United States missile grounds at Kwajalein. The atolls straddle the equator at a prized vantage for anything in orbit. For twenty-three years the dishes turned above their heads.

Yet a president was toppled in 2003 over the station's lease. The dispute had split the island's cabinet for months. His successor granted recognition to Taipei. Beijing dismantled the dishes within days. In September 2019, four days after the Solomon Islands, Kiribati returned to Beijing. Note how, here again, the country's name forks again, written 吉里巴斯 by Taipei and 基里巴斯 by Beijing.

At the start of 2019, Beijing and Taipei held ties with six Pacific states apiece. That September the Solomon Islands, a Taipei partner since 1983, crossed to Beijing, Kiribati following within days. Nauru cut its Taipei ties in January 2024, two days after Taiwan's election, having flipped already in 2002 and 2005. Beijing pledged fresh development funds within weeks of the Solomons switch.

That Taipei still holds three Pacific partners in 2026 owes much to a particular kind of aid. The Marshall Islands and Palau form the core of the group, with Tuvalu the third. Taiwan favours scholarships, clinics and grassroots grants over stadiums. Since 2019 it has dropped the constituency funds once channelled to elites. Analysts credit the loyalty of the three to democratic affinity and close ties with Washington.

Only the newest arrivals paid in full when rioters burned much of Honiara's Chinatown in November 2021. Families from Fuzhou bore the worst of it, while older trading houses watched decades of custom go up in smoke. Old grievances between Malaita and Guadalcanal, onto which the realignment had been grafted, fed the fire. Troops from Australia and Aotearoa arrived to restore order. For the Fuzhou newcomers, insurance and savings burned together.

Even so, the Suva end of the story looks steadier: In 2025 Fiji marked fifty years of ties with Beijing. The Confucius Institute at the University of the South Pacific in Suva teaches the mainland's Putonghua, a friendship pavilion having opened on a Suva street in 2017. Old Cantonese families and new mainland arrivals wear one label, their memories turned opposite ways. In 1975 and 1998, Sāmoa and Tonga crossed to Beijing.

Beneath the whole contest lies an older map, drawn by neither China. Linguists trace the Austronesian family, the stock of Fijian, Palauan, Gilbertese and Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi), to a homeland on Taiwan, its canoes fanning across the ocean millennia ahead of the Kuomintang.

For these associations, the answer to the strait is a daily matter of speech and script. Which China names the country, 帛琉 or 帕勞? Which Mandarin fills the classroom, Pǔtōnghuà or the 國語 (Guóyǔ) of Taipei?