Fiji is now all set to access a part of the US$600 million soft loan from China that has been set aside for development projects in the Pacific Islands nations.

It was Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, who first announced the loan during his visit to Fiji in April 2006, slightly over half a year before Commodore Bainimarama took over power after ousting Laisenia Qarase's government.

Last month, Bainimarama took the opportunity of Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping's visit to Fiji to convey to the government in Beijing that Fiji had now finished the preparatory work and was ready to access its share of the soft loan facility earmarked for the Pacific Islands.

The change in administration in Fiji has made little difference to the way the Asian behemoth looks at its relationship with the South Pacific nation, unlike the harsh treatment meted out to the coup plagued country by the western world-mainly Australia, New Zealand and most of the Commonwealth, not excluding the United States and the European Union.

While these western nations have slammed sanction upon sanction on Fiji in a bid to put pressure on the interim administration to hold elections and pave the way for the return of a democratically elected government, China has refrained from even so much as commenting publicly on Fiji's internal situation, let alone criticising it.

Its stance has been neutral and its leadership has left the Fijian situation for that country to sort out, going ahead with all the assistance that was planned much before the interim administration took the reins of the country. There has been no talk of any sanctions, pressure to hold elections or bring back democracy.

In contrast to the western nations' tough position that has banned Bainimarama, his military council, members of his administration, their families and even sports teams from travelling to, or even transiting through Australia and New Zealand besides several other nations, Bainimarama and his senior officials have travelled freely to China throughout these years.

For the past decade or so, western nations-more particularly the ANZAC neighbours in the South Pacific-have been watching the growing influence of China in a region that was under their sway for over a century. China and Taiwan's increasingly visible aid programmes in the islands even got the United States in 2007 to actively focus its attention on the region declaring it as the "Year of the Pacific".

Its plans to build one of the largest military bases in Guam has also been seen as a move to be in the thick of things in the Pacific Ocean as this Asian influence grows strongly to envelope almost all of the small independent states throughout the Pacific.

The western powers have come to acknowledge that tiny nations of the Pacific now have an alternative source of aid and that they no longer depend solely on them as they have for over ten decades.

Also in recent years, the quantum of aid provided by the western nations has not kept pace with the growing needs of the islands economies and they have had to look elsewhere to fulfill their needs.

The Asian economic powerhouses of China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have happily fulfilled that need to a large extent. But the western nations' continuing tough stand on Fiji will not only draw Fiji closer to the Asian powers, notably China, but also the other Pacific Islands nations that are eligible to draw down aid from the allocated US$600 million. And their stance on Fiji is only going to get stiffer in the coming months, if one is to go by the events leading to the special Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting convened in Port Moresby in January.

At the conclusion of that one day meeting, the Forum nations gave the Fiji interim administration a deadline to hold elections by the end of this year and asked it to come up with a schedule before May 1.

It remains to be seen if the interim administration will indeed come up with a plan before the said date. If it doesn't, it has been threatened with suspension from the Forum.

Whether the suspension will happen or not cannot be said at this stage. What is certain, though, is that the bloc of western nations that has been forcefully pushing for the suspension option on the Forum's agenda will find itself increasingly at odds with the rest of the Pacific Islands nations-and for their own very practical reasons-do not favour the idea of suspension with the same fervor and urgency as the western nations do.

So there is more than a chance that in their attempt to isolate Fiji, the western nations will instead find themselves isolated simply because of the practicalities of realpolitic facing the Pacific Islands nations. For suspending Fiji puts them at a severe disadvantage because of Fiji's prime status as both a logistics and commercial nerve centre of the region-no matter how much the western nations assure them to the contrary.

With the economic crisis plaguing much of the western world, there is little hope of any possibility of increased aid coming their way from that quarter-on the contrary, there is a distinct possibility of further aid cuts, if at all. While on the other hand, there is an assured, sanctioned sum of US$600 million available on tap from China.

If China agrees to release the first tranche of funds to Fiji soon-the rest of the Pacific nations will see that as a signal to align even more closely with the Chinese approach to the Pacific which is to leave the countries to sort out their internal problems without any external influence (other than, of course, the insistence on the One-China policy).

In the circumstances, the western nations have only themselves and their increasingly insensitive ways in dealing with the Pacific Islands to blame for their own rapidly waning influence in the region over recent years.

It is that very smugness and insensitivity that has in fact helped accelerate the growing influence of the Asian powers in the region.