Three years ago, at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, Malcolm Turnbull said the quiet part out loud: “Some fear that China will seek to impose a latter day Monroe Doctrine on this hemisphere in order to dominate the region.”
The then prime minister was referring to the United States’ 19th century attempt to claw back territorial domination of the Americas from Europe. The speech is littered with warnings to China about coercion, and threats to peace and harmony in the region. The subtext was clear: China was a threat. Beijing needed to back off.
The Australia-China relationship really started to deteriorate that year, 2017. Just months earlier, foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop had chided Beijing about the need for democracy. It was the year our media became awash with stories about espionage and influence-peddling — stories that unravelled Labor senator Sam Dastyari’s political career and drove the Turnbull government to introduce foreign interference laws.
Three years on, things have arguably never been worse. “This is one of the lowest — if not the lowest — point in the bilateral relationship in the last 40 odd years,” Deakin University international relations associate professor Chengxin Pan tells Crikey.
Turnbull, who once spoke positively about China’s rise, hardened, and brought Canberra with him. Meanwhile China under Xi Jinping doubled down on internal repression, military posturing and authoritarian nationalism.
Then the pandemic hit. Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an international investigation of China’s handling of the pandemic, stoking Beijing’s fury. Since then the countries have walked on diplomatic eggshells. Beijing’s top diplomat trades barbs with politicians and reporters. Restrictions have been placed on Australian beef, barley and coal. There are fears international students might stop coming. Chinese Australians are being asked to declare their loyalty.
How did it come to this?
It wasn’t meant to be like this. For years the West clung to the assumption that China’s economic miracle would bring political openness. Nobody believes that any more.
“When Xi came to power, there was a lot of hope in the West that he would liberalise China,” China Policy Centre director Yun Jiang says. “Within a year it was clear that wasn’t happening. In fact it was the reverse.”
Under Xi, China has become an empire with a fragile ego, increasingly intolerant of dissent. The domestic surveillance state has expanded, and foreign policy has become more aggressive. Uyghurs have been put in forced labour camps. Intimidation of dissidents reaches all the way to Australia.
A more aggressive China led to a series of flashpoints in the bilateral relationship which crystallised into the current deeper divide. Peter Jennings, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), points to Australia excluding China from the NBN and emerging 5G networks and heightened cyber-attacks between the two countries.
“You see fundamental points of strategic difference starting to cause frictions in the relationship,” he says.
For academic Clive Hamilton, one of the toughest critics of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference, the chilling relationship is a sign Australia is waking up.
“The CCP has for 10 to 15 years been engaged in a sustained effort to interfere in Australian politics and infiltrate Australian institutions,” he says. “Australians, and the government, are finally starting to wake up.”
But in the past Australia has held its nose and kept a steady relationship in the face of CCP aggression and human rights abuses. One difference this time was that the rest of the world was changing too. US President Donald Trump, with his “America first” rhetoric, entered the White House as possibly the most openly isolationist president since the 1920s. That started to spook the spooks and, over time, more hawkish, national security-focused voices began to dominate.
“There’s a long-standing ‘fear of abandonment’ in Australian strategic and defence circles,” University of Technology Sydney’s Australia China Relations Institute director James Laurenceson says.
“The fact that China is slowly becoming the dominant power in the region is a traumatic event for parts of the Australian government and society in general.”
Trump’s pronouncements and his impulsive leadership style “induced a mild panic in Canberra”, University of Sydney China historian David Brophy says.
In response, Australia’s national security agencies got more vocal. In 2017 ASIO boss Duncan Lewis warned of “unprecedented” levels of foreign interference risking “our nation’s sovereignty”. It’s a refrain it has continued ever since.
The hawk ascendancy
Over time, a hawkish national security lens has come to dominate how Australia views China.
“There now appears to be a consensus between the policy departments and the security agencies on how the China relationship is managed,” University of Sydney historian James Curran says.
The security agencies didn’t deliver the China reset on their own. They’ve had plenty of help from the media who, says Laurenceson, have put out a “deluge” of stories about espionage and foreign interference. Part of that, of course, is that China’s activities have ramped up. But a lot of stories aren’t necessarily the result of diligent muckraking. Rather they’re strategic drops from the security agencies.
This has led some to question whether the relationship between the media and security agencies is getting slightly too close for comfort.
“Has the press gallery forgotten we’re not at war with China?” former Sydney Morning Herald China correspondent Hamish McDonald asked in May.
The closeness between the media and security agencies is exemplified by the story of John Garnaut. A former Beijing-based correspondent for Fairfax, Garnaut saw the mendacity and ruthlessness of Xi’s regime up close. After leaving journalism he worked for Turnbull, putting together a classified dossier on CCP interference in Australia. He wrote the Singapore speech, and was hugely influential in shaping how Turnbull saw China.
Jennings’ ASPI has also been very influential. Once a relatively unknown think tank, its experts are nearly always in the media. It’s done a lot of critical work on interference in Australia and Beijing’s repression of the Uyghurs. And Jennings says he wanted to change the way our relationship with China was discussed.
“Starting out I thought so much commentary and analysis came from an economic perspective, largely about the economic upside of engagement. That’s been the dominant paradigm for decades,” he says.
“My view was increasingly we were seeing downside risks emerging … from a defence and security point of view.”
To ASPI’s critics, they’re a bunch of hawkish Cold War warriors, funded by the US State Department and big weapons manufacturers.
But Jennings rejects that, telling Crikey such funding arrangements are pretty standard throughout academia and the think tank space.
“People say somehow this is going to skew our research, but where?” he says. “Give me examples that would suggest our independence has been compromised.”
Is there an alternative?
But perhaps the biggest reason the national security types have won the intellectual battle over China is that they don’t face much credible opposition. It’s a lot harder to articulate a more “doveish” approach to China. And it’s often pretty easy to dismiss some of those who do.
There are the business leaders, like Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest and Kerry Stokes, who have an obvious financial stake in a relationship where concerns around human rights are ignored.
Then there are the useful social media commentators, like YouTuber Jordan Shanks (also known as “FriendlyJordies”), who went on Chinese state media to complain about ASPI and later made a video blaming the Uyghurs for their own oppression.
Hamilton says those downplaying China’s threat are either tankies (the old Stalinist left) “preoccupied with identity politics” or “bought off by the CCP”. He says many lack the moral clarity to see China for what it is.
But others have tried to find a middle ground. Curran, for example, says the narrative of Chinese influence-peddlers posing an existential threat to Australian institutions is overblown.
“Some hawks, even some cautious realists, talk about it like they’re so vulnerable that the Chinese can come in and subvert them overnight,” he says. “By all means safeguard them, but I think we should have more faith in our institutions.”
Shaoquett Moselmane, the NSW Labor MP whose career ended after the AFP raided him as part of a security probe, is a case in point.
“That guy’s a nobody,” Laurenceson says.
If a rogue but unknown state opposition MP is the CCP’s best Manchurian candidate, is this really a sophisticated foreign threat about to usurp our democracy?
For Pan, the obsessive journalistic focus on stories about foreign interference is often a case of the media confirming pre-existing, racialised biases about China: “It’s like a self-licking ice-cream cone.”
But perhaps the biggest tragedy of the China debate is that things are becoming increasingly paranoid and hysterical. And it means many important voices aren’t willing to freely speak out.
Tomorrow: racism, pledges of allegiance, and spying — the human cost of geopolitics gone bad…
Does Australia need to rethink its approach to China? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
I find it remarkable how we get so dreadfully upset by allegations of human rights abuses by the Chinese government, but appear not to give a rats rectum about the ghastly record of human rights abuses by our great and powerful ‘friend’ which murders civilians across the globe and on a global scale. Our hearts are wrung with outrage and pity for Muslims in Xinjiang but not for Muslims in Gaza – nobody suggests we should beware of influence campaigns from the tormentor of that unhappy place.
Human rights is a useful propaganda stick with which to beat the enemy de jour and to deceive the gullible. However, when I hear it from the mouths of the mercenary shills at the ASPI, the rancid hypocrisy creates a stench which pervades our polity and media and diminishes my respect for anyone who allows themselves to be used as an uncritical echo chamber.
Not just “our great and powerful friend”, Ms Lamington. Us! Say, like, Afghanistan!
Or, the much less publicised Yemen, where around 100 Ozzie ‘fighting’ (and ‘logistics’) men, fill the ranks, up to and including the chief of the UAE Presidential Guard, so that the UAE may run the ‘ground war’ in Yemen, against the Houthi.
Seen as a very prospective market, the UAE, for Oz killin’ tech and services, as seen by Chrissy Pyne’s numerous ‘sales’ trips, while he was a gummint minister and, later, as a ‘private entrepreneur’.
Not to mention the asylum seekers locked up offshore and in detention in Australia, some 7 years after their boats were intercepted, families separated indefinitely.
And criminal deportees – men (generally) most of whom have not committed grave offences, who have lived in Australia since they were small children and have all their family here – being sent to countries where they have no support and sometimes don’t know anyone, occasionally even of aboriginal ancestry . . . There comes a time when they are ‘one of us’ despite their crimes.
China is a great power, maybe soon THE great power and it is going to want to be acknowledged as such. We can strongly condemn its actions against the Uighurs and Tibetans, we can politely but firmly be clear about our national interest and not tolerate interference in our internal affairs and still have a civil relationship with it. It is all how it is done, that matters. It is completely counter-productive and pointless to constantly be aggravating China, often with not much substance; or if there is substance doing it in a way that doesn’t create more tensions.
We could remember that the US has probably destabilised and destroyed a lot more nations than China ever has, often with Australian support.
Is there the slightest possibility of some input from someone outside that delusional circle jerk bubble?
Here, let me help. This is part of an interview from late April, with the now newly elected Bolivian Prez, Luis Arce, who took over from Evo Morales as head of MAS, after Morales had to flee Bolivia. MAS again used popular resistance to toss out the Opus Dei maniacs installed by yet another CIA coup in Latin America, just last year (OV is Oliver Vargas);
“OV: When you were finance minister, you would have had to work with many different countries, drawing up many different trade agreements. What was your experience with the United States, compared to countries like Russia and China? Did they provide more equitable cooperation?
LA: Well, we don’t believe in free markets, much less in free markets internationally. We believe in trade agreements that benefit people, rather than agreements based solely on free markets where price determines everything in the economy.
Whereas the United States wanted nothing more than free markets and free trade agreements. On the contrary, China, Russia and other countries like to make other types of agreements, in trade, investment, tourism, etc. Therefore, it is much more beneficial for the Bolivian economy to have agreements with these types of countries than the free trade agreements that the United States has with others. Yet [under the post-coup government], there is an effort to expel these kinds of Russian and Chinese investments.”
Further, back around August, the much lauded Elon Musk had this to say, after considering the prospect of an MAS ‘comeback’ in Bolivia:
“We will coup whoever we want”.
They have an awful lot of Lithium in Bolivia, and Musk needs an awful lot of Lithium. Let’s just say he was ‘talking through his kick’.
To quote a Matthew Rosza piece, at Salon, after MAS had trounced those installed by coup;
“Elon Musk becomes Twitter laughingstock after Bolivian socialist movement returns to power
“We will coup whoever we want”: the Tesla CEO’s braggadocious imperialism comes back to mock him”.
The lithium is a big deal for S.Korea and the PRC David. There are literally lakes of it. I was in Central and South America last year. EVERY developmental project, from the canal to refineries had PRC all over it – with, here and there, smaller flags of Japan and South Korea. True even in agriculture; coffee for example.
Not sure when my piece will appear (about 900 words) that that was applying considerable restraint. Irrespective of the topic being research, technology or international relations it is clear that N-R. hasn’t a clue.
Please take me apart if you disagree when the note appears; it will only improve my character!
Just had one, probably a few hundred words, sent off to ye olde; ‘Awaiting for approval’, Erasmus.
It began by asking where I should look for your 900 worder (I’m guessing probably in the queue in front of mine, p’raps?)
Then went on to ‘discuss’ the Chinamen being reported to be about to whack sanctions on the US weapons manufacturers who just sold a heap more gear to Taiwan.
The sanctions would be on supplying Rare Earths, without which it ain’t just weapons manufacturers who would grind to a halt.
The Chinamen control over 80% of global Rare Earths supply.
The move is desrcibed as being part of the Chinese idea of;
‘Winning without fighting’.
When the Soviet Union collapsed from internal forces (thanks Gorbachev) there was more than an idle question presented by the fat cats to the effect of “f..k what do we do now” because the Cold War was a reasonable money spinner for the fat cats – as money spinners go. The educated Russian, in general, perceives the game having changed but NOT their status OR that of Russia. Inter alia, the military skirmishers (Syria or closer to home) have been rather popular.
The, so called, unipolar moment (post Cold War) proved to be just that : ephemeral – so no joy there.
I have recovered my composure, somewhat, from reading this imbecilic article because it is a fair synopsis of what the average armchair expert on the PRC actually does think.
Tying the reference to Russia and the PRC together one DOES have to have lived in both countries in order to appreciate the national perspectives of both countries. Some informed friends from each country would come as a close second. The scary bit is that major players in the government, along with a few reporters, who have been no further than the bar of their golf or tennis club THINK that they have some comprehension of the matter.
There is no question that Xi’s China is a lot more assertive however I’d just like to see our intelligence services show a bit more intelligence and a bit more decision making on Australia’s behalf and not on behalf of the USA.
An old example being the debacle around WMD in Iraq (at the behest of the USA) and a recent example being Huawei and the 5G ban (at the behest of the USA). Obviously there were no WMD and there is clearly no security issue with Huawei equipment – even GCHQ said so after a long investigation. Which prompted the UK government to allow them until they too succumbed to US pressure.
The foreign interference reactions are just a bit hysterical and over the top. Why is it that foreign funded think tanks can be quoted in Crikey but no one appears to question the obvious foreign interference that that implies.
China’s growing power requires a sophisticated strategy, I’d just like it to be a strategy in Australia’s interests and not primarily the USA’s.
The Monroe Doctrine: “the United States’ 19th century attempt to claw back territorial domination of the Americas from Europe.”
Up to a point. Initially the USA had no such domination so it could not claw it back. The doctrine began in 1823 as a declaration that the USA would not allow further European colonisation in the Americas, while not interfering with existing colonies. By the late 19th C it had clearly extended to the USA imposing its hegemony on the rest of the Americas, see e.g. James G. Blaine’s ‘Big Brother’ policy. This included undermining and removing independent governments elsewhere in the Americas that did not suit its interests, which had nothing to do with European influence.