edited. doing a whole rundown to have it saved. reminder that this is really all about china ending australian/NZland neocolonial chokehold in the pacific. seriously i looked up like all the entities in the region, and almost all of them have some sort of neocolonial ties with them, even big guys like papua. asymmetric influence, military pacts, military installations and bases, migrant torture camps.. then there's the three subjected to american military sovereignty. recently some of them, solomon island, vanuatu and tonga managed to play off chinese commercial interests. australia got mad and tried to win them back, and in the case of vanuatu, constructed a narrative about debt traps. "free association" military suzerainty in:

us: palau, micronesia, marshals

australia: nauru, papua (not a free associations like the rest but peppered with installations)

nz: samoa. have previously freely moved troops to tonga, which used to be economically glued to aus and nz, bot now have shifted to china.

both aus and nz: kiribati, which switched from taiwan to china in 2019. they also control several remote islands each. and fiji is economically glued to them. solomon island have not long ago been overrun by troops from both, but switched from taiwan to china in 2019 so things are moving there.

tuvalu is purely western-oriented, recognizes taiwan. vanuatu on the other hand is staunchly anti-imperialist. one time a gov did a backroom deal to switch to being pro-taiwan, and the cabinet was immediately toppled. china is the main guy there.

taiwan recognition is an excellent tell of neocolonialism, as only some weak central american, caribbean and pacific states do it. include: tuvalu, nauru, marshall island, palau. thats 2 down from 2019.

also worth mentioning remote territories boosting the eez's of the western powers. australia have several islands (including christmas island which is inhabitated by chinese ppl, im just mentioning that to underscore the irony of the conflict in the south china sea, not only is the entire coastal edges filled with chinese diaspora, they live on islands west of java too!) on the indian side of the java gap. which along with the andaman gap thats militarized by india can close off the sea trade almost completely. the NZ EEZ is much bigger, and amounts to an entire control of the far or south pacific. NZ also successfully pushed the UN to recognize an extended continental shelf which ballooned their EEZ even bigger. australia seems to be doing the same, which will (or already does) mean this monstrosity

it also looks like there is bigger EEZ politics playing out with these pacific proxies, in which fiji, vanuatu, solomon islands and tongo are trying to acquire extended shelves. if new UN conventions on extended continental shelfs starts to form, the implications for the imperialist game could be enormous... so the de facto world map looks somewhere between this and this.