“ At least China's aid (including the Asian countries such as Japan) targets primarily the immaterial dimensions of Pacific societies, notably education, art and culture and language, now slowly expanding to the material infrastructures of society, such as buildings, roads, foreshores and wharves. In doing so, the combined emphasis on both the immaterial and the material readily provides a total rather than a partial approach to such things as (capitalist) economic development and (democratic) political governance, where the conception of things takes the lead over the action upon things, which fairly yet responsibly giving people both the capacity and capability of having a true sense of freedom of how they think and of what they do.
This is in reverse to the perception of, and preoccupation with, giving aid to the peoples of the Pacific for the sole purpose of material development, where immaterial development is largely ignored for a variety of reasons, including the political one (which is both perilous and dangerous), This was most obvious in the results of the last parliamentary election in Tonga, where the material rather than the immaterial benefits, i.e., the individual rather than the collective good of the whole of society, overly dictated the sad political course and outcomes (the political enforcement of technical, vocational education over critical, classical education as a condition of aid-giving is partly responsible for this rather unfortunate state of affairs). ”