In 2016, on the handful of settled islands in Tongan archipelago, those signs were everywhere: New cars jammed the roads, sand miners were stealing the island’s beaches and New Zealand loggers hauled giant trees by boat from the Kingdom’s last rain-forested island. Methamphetamine wasn’t just passing through Tonga, once a backwater transit hub for drugs en route to Australia and New Zealand, it was burrowed in. Youngsters were using it and crime was rising.

But underneath it all, the growing presence of the Chinese government in Tonga pumped tension into the life of the island nation that anyone could feel. This tension had started long before I arrived in 2014, the year the Chinese Communist Party’s brand-new leader Xi Jinping announced his “Asia-Pacific Dream” of cooperation and launched a tour of the South Pacific countries where he met with Tonga’s soon-to-be-crowned King George VI. Xi came to power in 2013, when Tonga signed the deal with Beijing for construction of the St. George Palace that the men in the blue jumpsuits were now building.

Chinese immigrants ran 80 percent of the shops, draining Tongan money back to China and pumping cheap exports through the islands. In 2006, pro-democracy riots tried to stoke local anger at Chinese and Chinese businesses, and yet in their wake, Beijing paid to rebuild and immigration had resumed.