U.S. efforts to counter China’s influence and bolster its standing in the Indo-Pacific region by advocating for a free and open press continued Saturday at the University of Hawaii, where officials participated in a roundtable discussion before heading to Fiji and New Zealand.

Assistant Secretary of State Bill Russo met with East-West Center President Suzanne Vares-Lum and faculty from UH’s School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

It is Russo’s first official trip since assuming the role of assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs. He spent Friday at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and is heading next to Fiji, where a law restricting the establishment of a free press has been lifted after 15 years.

Following work in Fiji, Russo and his team, which includes Senior Special Assistant Erin Cozens, who earned her doctorate in Pacific history in 2011 from UH Manoa, will travel to Auckland and then Wellington, New Zealand.

Saturday’s discussion came on the same day Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin vowed that Washington would not stand for any “coercion and bullying” of its allies and partners by China, while assuring Beijing that the United States remains committed to maintaining the status quo on Taiwan and would prefer dialogue over conflict.

Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, an annual forum bringing together top defense officials, diplomats and leaders, Austin lobbied for support for Washington’s vision of a “free, open and secure Indo-Pacific within a world of rules and rights” as the best course to counter increasing Chinese assertiveness in the region.

The U.S. has been expanding its own activities around the Indo-Pacific region to counter sweeping territorial claims by China, including regularly sailing through and flying over the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.

Russo told the roundtable in Manoa that the first section of the first pillar of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, released in February 2022, “is all about freedom of expression, it’s all about journalism, free and open media.”

“I think if you look, I counted, there were five different references just in that short first section to freedom of expression, to media, to journalism. I think the fact that is the first section of the first pillar really speaks to the importance of the work that our team is trying to do in creating a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Russo said.

The return of “great power competition,” such as a “resurgent Russia” trying to repurpose its imperial interests, particularly in Ukraine, and China, creates a new set of challenges and opportunities.

“In looking at this era we are in now, a kind of post-post-Cold War era … what is it going to be defined by? We’re in the middle of that moment right now and perhaps in a few years we’ll look back on this time right now and have a better actual sense of what was actually happening right now,” Russo said. “At the same time that we see that return of great power competition, we also see that there are a number of important … almost existential issues that we are confronting that are global, that are transborder … the solution to which will require a great degree of global cooperation, including with those same powers with whom we are increasingly in competition.”

Climate, migration and food and energy security are of global interest, and “you really see the intersection of both of those paradigms here in the region.”

Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, an associate professor in the UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies, said, “The U.S. tends to promise a lot and deliver less. And that’s in part due to the bureaucracies within the U.S. in terms of making decisions and having resources available, which is very different from China because their way of making decisions is very centralized, and if they say they are going to build a stadium they build it. Whereas the U.S., it has to go through Congress.

“A lot of Pacific Islanders, apart from the ones in the northern Pacific … do not understand that. When things are not delivered, it becomes a disappointment,” said Kabutaulaka, who hails from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

Quantifying and talking about U.S. investments in the Pacific, especially among Pacific island nations where China is building critical infrastructure such as roads, bridges and hospitals, can be difficult, Russo said. And the U.S. government doesn’t always do the best job of taking credit for the work it does in the region.

“The nature of U.S. investment vis-a-vis (China) investment is just different. We are not necessarily … out building roads or bridges or hard infrastructure that is tangible in the same way that (China) is,” he explained. “But we’re doing a whole lot in terms of governance, in terms of a lot of fields that are little less tangible.

“Federal government investment is a key part of it, but the private sector is a huge part of it, the U.S. academic sector is an enormous part of that. But the United States … is not necessarily getting credit for what Disney is doing, or IBM is doing, or Google is doing or the University of Hawaii is doing … so the messaging piece of this is a little more complex of a story to tell.”

China’s efforts to buy influence in Hawaii and throughout the Indo-­Pacific are a large part of what prompts U.S. engagement and investment in the region, Russo said in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

“There is, of course, an interest in being more engaged, being more involved throughout the region … ,” he said, and Hawaii would be no exception.

“There are … many vehicles for the government to understand and react to potential (China) state investments here in the United States and our industries and elsewhere,” he said.

Vares-Lum noted that Hawaii is that “foreign and domestic” policy bridge.

“We have a very complex nation and that includes us in the Pacific,” she said, highlighting the East-West Center’s efforts to educate the next generation of Pacific leaders through a newly funded resilient Pacific leadership program.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.