One potential side-effect of the global coronavirus pandemic: Australia could see a historic reversal of its closeness with China.
As the pandemic continues, and even beyond that, we can expect policies favouring domestic manufacturing to be viewed far more sympathetically than they have for years. Our factories are all in China now and this offshore manufacturing of essential goods is starting to look reckless.
At the same time, global travel has screeched to a halt. The increasingly large flows of people between Australia and China have stopped. Will they recover?
It seems likely to be a long time before international jaunts become so easy and abundant as they were in 2019, and we may have to make do with a much smaller contribution from one of our biggest tourism partners.
But it’s not just these practical aspects of the pandemic that are driving China and Australia apart. There is a political aspect too.
Anti-China sentiment
China’s government has brought criticism on itself for failing to eliminate the wildlife markets where the virus first jumped to humans; and then for under-reporting viral spread.
These failures of Chinese governance should be prosecuted in multilateral and bilateral discussions. But they are also fuelling popular anti-Chinese sentiment.
China’s state apparatus deserves a good deal of criticism. It is an anti-democratic authoritarian regime that is slowly oppressing Hong Kong, imprisoning Uighurs in frightful “re-education camps”, building a cult of personality around Xi Jinping, and playing dangerous games of brinksmanship in the South China Sea.
We must take that into account when making foreign policy. But a popular upsurge of anti-China sentiment is a dangerous thing.
We have seen unsubstantiated rumours of “busloads of Asians” stripping supermarkets, and criticism in the Nine papers of businesses for sending medical supplies to China when it was the epicentre of the pandemic. There is even a wild petition on Change.org calling for the government to check every shipping container bound for China “and remove everything to do with groceries”.
That might sound crazy, but at the same time the Australian government has changed the law to permit five years jail time for anyone exporting hand sanitiser.
We are a small country and a trading nation. We are not America. Trade wars are likely to rebound and hit us hard. Ask dairy farmers if they’d like China to stop buying their milk powder.
Racism rebounds
The general upswing in negative sentiment towards China makes life very hard for Asian people in Australia. Around 2% of Australia’s population was born in China, and there are many more second- and third-generation migrants on top of that. Racial discrimination against this substantial group (and others) is already being reported.
Negative sentiment also increases the chance of a breakdown in geopolitics. People on Twitter are calling on their governments to #NukeChina and, while that won’t happen, the chance of a skirmish in the South China Sea is heightened when Sinophobia is peaking.
China is always pushing the boundaries. In February its jets flew into Taiwanese airspace. A month later, the US redoubled its commitment to Taiwan.
This should frighten us all. Any conflict over Taiwan, or other islets in the region is going to pose an enormous problem for Australia. Not so much because we will be torn between our old ally and our new trading partner. But because we will certainly choose democratic values over dollars and suffer economically.
For these reasons, we must engage constructively with China, while keeping racism out of the discourse and resisting knee-jerk reactions against trade.
Decoupling from China is a wise idea, but it must be done in a way that protects Chinese-Australians and avoids immiserating us all.
Decoupling from China is not wise, it is crazy. Like it or not the whole world is already globalized and dependent on other countries and we should continue to benefit from it once we get back to normal. The corona virus is no excuse to go anti China. Who knows that the next pandemic won’t come out of an Oklahoma tiger zoo?
There is very little to criticize in this article since it basically describing the realities we are facing or will have to face in the near future. The comments made below only illustrate how sensitive and complicated our future relations with China will be. One thing Jason and the rest of the commentators have neglected to point out is that the CCP has been decoupling China from the world, including Australia, for well over a decade now with its construction of the Great Firewall of China.
Nothing crazy about reducing our economic reliance on China. A diversification of our international trade makes economic sense. It’s crazy for a country like Australia to have one-third of its exports going to a single country. What if there was an economic downturn in China or it chose to no longer buy our raw materials for political reasons?
Of course Australia should trade with China, but we shouldn’t be so lazy that we only have meaningful trade relationships with a handful of countries. Let’s export more to Vietnam, India, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand etc.
This pandemic has demonstrated to the world how ridiculous it is to rely so heavily on one country for the majority of our manufactured goods. It’s even crazier when China isn’t even the cheapest place to manufacture many goods anymore.
Good luck “decoupling” from the free trade agreement (Chafta). Which seems to give us a bunch of conditions to observe, and China a bunch to ignore.
Just a couple of points. Similar wildlife markets exist all over Asia, and whilst the CCP may have been in denial initially, Trump was even more so.
What a vapid article!
Not only vapid, Zeno, but also based on claims of elements as ‘facts’ when they are, IN FACT, no such thing.
An example;
“China’s government has brought criticism on itself for failing to eliminate the wildlife markets where the virus first jumped to humans…”
There is not an objective and accomplished scientist in the field, in the world, who would make that claim. Plenty of shills dressed in lab coats who have, of course. But, to dent skepticism is to deny science.
Over at another bastion of mounting Sinophobia, I’ve been having something of a battle with the ‘easily convinced’ readership.
To claims, such as Murphy’s, that the first infection of a human with this virus came via the ‘wet markets’ in China, I’ve wondered how this might be explained away as a possible chink in the armour of such ‘facts’;
newshubdotcodotnz/home/world/2020/03/virus-may-have-reached-italy-as-long-ago-as-october-doctor.html
“…..Adriano Decarli, an epidemiologist and medical statistics professor at the University of Milan, said there had been a “significant” increase in the number of people hospitalised for pneumonia and flu in the areas of Milan and Lodi between October and December last year.
He told Reuters he could not give exact figures but “hundreds” more people than usual had been taken to hospital in the last three months of 2019 in those areas – two of Lombardy’s worst hit cities – with pneumonia and flu-like symptoms, and some of those had died….”
Then throw in some related facts, such as 1 in every 5 mammals on the planet is a bat, and not every last one lives in China, and further questions arise.
And, when such questions arise, follow the skeptical nose, and take a look around. For instance, the first return in a search for “bats in Italy” came up with this, just today;
bmcvetresdotbiomedcentraldotcom/articles/10.1186/s12917-017-1307-x
That’s from Dec ’17, is written by a group of mostly Italian veterinary scientists, and is headed;
“Coronavirus and paramyxovirus in bats from Northwest Italy”
It backgrounds, in part;
“….Our investigation was focused on CoVs and PMVs due to their proven ability to switch host and their zoonotic potential. Here we provide the phylogenetic characterization of the highly conserved polymerase gene fragments….”
Then mentions results, such as;
“….CoV RNA was found in 36 bats belonging to eight species, while PMV RNA in three Pipistrellus spp. Phylogenetic characterization have been obtained for 15 alpha- CoVs, 5 beta-CoVs and three PMVs; moreover one P. pipistrellus resulted co-infected with both CoV and PMV. A divergent alpha-CoV clade from Myotis nattereri SpA is also described. The compact cluster of beta-CoVs from R. ferrumequinum roosts expands the current viral sequence database, specifically for this species in Europe…”
Then concludes, in part;
“This study identified alpha and beta-CoVs in new bat species and in previously unsurveyed Italian regions. To our knowledge this represents the first and unique report of PMVs in Italy. The 23 new bat genetic sequences presented will expand the current molecular bat-borne virus databases. Considering the amount of novel bat-borne PMVs associated with the emergence of zoonotic infections in animals and humans in the last years, the definition of viral diversity within European bat species is needed. Performing surveillance studies within a specific geographic area can provide awareness of viral burden where bats roost in close proximity to spillover hosts, and form the basis for the appropriate control measures against potential threats for public health and optimal management of bats and their habitats.”
Would you like to find what they found in Spain? Just search “bats in Spain”.
Pardon my skepticism, but Murphy’s a hack.
I read the first para then checked the lineage. More AFR propaganda. Last time I checked the world was groaning under the weight of cults of personality leaderships. And how terrible of China to protect their immediate seas leaving the US with only most of the rest. Uighurs are being imprisoned not mass murdered after their terror campaigns. Should China have let a full blown insurgency and civil war develop so it could justify killing them ? I know it works elsewhere, especially with compliant media coverage, but maybe they’re showing a less awful way.
The main problem is you don’t make your case for this decoupling or how we would benefit. A few crocodile tears over racism is nice but where does that fit in with rest of your narrative ?
I’d be much more interested in a well thought out plan to decouple Australia from being coerced into wars that arguably make us less safe while costing a lot of blood and treasure.