Solomon Island signs a security pact with China

Solomon Island signs a security pact with China

Subject : Geography

Section: Mapping

Context: Solomon Island signs a security pact with China

What is in the Solomon Islands-China pact?

According to a leaked draft of the agreement, Chinese warships will be permitted to dock on the islands. Beijing will now also be able to send security forces “to assist in maintaining social order”.

Why Solomon Island matters?

With a population of less than seven lakh, the chain of hundreds of islands is located near Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean — a politically volatile region that has been at the centre of a long-running diplomatic power struggle between the West and China. It was here, in the capital city of Honiara on the island of Guadalcanal, that some of the fiercest battles of World War II were fought between the US and Japanese troops.

• Three major groups of islands in the Pacific Ocean are Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
• The indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific Islands are referred to as Pacific Islanders.
• The Pacific Island region covers more than 300,000 square miles (800,000 square km) of land—of which New Zealand and the island of New Guinea make up approximately nine-tenths—and millions of square miles of ocean.
• Most Pacific islands are coral formations, although all of these rest on volcanic or other cores.

It excludes the following –

• the neighbouring island continent of Australia,
• the Asia-related Indonesian, Philippine,
• Japanese archipelagoes, and the Ryukyu, Bonin, Volcano, and Kuril island arcs that project seaward from Japan
• the Aleutian chain or such isolated islands of the Pacific Ocean as the Juan Fernández group off the coast of South America.

Melanesia

• The great arc of islands located north and east of Australia and south of the Equator is called Melanesia (from the Greek words melas, “black,” and nēsos, “island”) for the predominantly dark-skinned peoples of New Guinea island, the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu (the New Hebrides), New Caledonia, and Fiji.

Micronesia

• North of the Equator and east of the Philippines are the islands of Micronesia, which form an arc that ranges from Palau, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands in the west eastward through the Federated States of Micronesia (the Caroline Islands), Nauru, and the Marshall Islands to Kiribati.

Polynesia

• In the eastern Pacific, largely enclosed within a huge triangle formed by the Hawaiian Islands to the north, New Zealand to the southwest, and Easter Island (Rapa Nui) far to the east, are the many (“poly”) islands of Polynesia.