regional perspectives Elite Communication between the Pacific Islands and asia a new Paradigm Evolving

one This paper is about two related topics. The first is the evolution of print and broadcast media in the fourteen independent Pacific Island nations. The essence of that story is that they were set up, owned and operated in the 1800s and 1900s, by small-scale European individuals and organisations based in the Islands in the colonial era. Following independ-ence from the 1960s to the 1990s, independent Pacific Island governments, and individual indigenous Islanders, began to own and operate various media. The most recent trend, however, is for the role of Islands govern-ments and individuals to be constrained and in some cases marginalised, due to much greater large-scale international control and production of the growing range of media that reach Islands audiences. Whereas this was almost one hundred per cent from Western sources, now an increasing proportion is from Asian sources. The second topic is what drives Asia-Pacific media, because media is secondary. The primary drivers include trade, investment, aid, diplomacy, strategic issues, sources of education, information, religion and external cultural influences, including languages. This paper does not look at those in detail, but at two aspects of elite communication between Asia and the Pacific Islands that both reflect and create the primary drivers, and are in turn reflected in the media. These two are: (a) communication between political power-brokers between the Pacific Islands and Asia; and (b) a new network—the 750 or so new Asia-Pacific regional organisations that bring elite Pacific Islanders from all walks of life into contact with counterparts in Asia. Two of that 750 are among the sponsors of the conference at which this paper was first presented, AMIC, which now covers the Pacific Islands as well as Asia; and UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific regional programme and its Pacific Island branch in Samoa, and we should acknowledge the tremendous con-This chapter is based largely on Crocombe’s latest extensive research on this topic that has been published in his book, Asia in the Pacific Islands: Replacing the West