This might explain why China is apparently displeased with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat who has worked hard to develop better relations with China. Rudd’s mistake is that he, like US President Barack Obama, takes human rights seriously and has made frank comments in China about Tibet, the arrest of Chinese dissidents and other touchy subjects.
Rudd has stated that it is important for Australia “to have a calm, measured, proper framework” for handling its relationship with China.
However, the prime minister also said: “There could well be further bumps in the road ahead. Our challenge in managing these relationships is simply to negotiate those bumps in the road as they occur.”
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party want three things. They want China to become a wealthy and modern state. They want China to be become a great and respected power. And they want to retain complete power for themselves and their successors forever. These things are not ultimately compatible, but the Chinese leaders, blinded by the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy they grew up with and by traditional Chinese nationalism, refuse to face this fact.
China’s rapid population growth and urbanization, its endemic corruption, secrecy and inefficiency, its increasing energy and environmental problems, its underpaid workers and over-taxed farmers, its restive intellectuals and activists and its repressed ethnic minorities all add up to a recipe for trouble — if not now, then sooner or later.
The tighter China tries to screw down the lid on these problems, the bigger the eventual explosion will be. Blaming exiles and foreign governments for China’s troubles only makes the urgent task of reforming China’s system of government more difficult. In this context the release of key Chinese human rights champion Xu Zhiyong (許志永), one of the founders of the non-governmental organization Open Constitution Initiative and an active rights lawyer, is especially propitious.
Since Kadeer’s visit, relations between Australia and China seem to have settled down. Beijing has downgraded Hu’s charges from espionage to the lesser offense of commercial bribery, and several enormous gas trade deals worth tens of billions of dollars have been announced.
China’s economic self-interest in garnering Australian resources underlines the reality that economic facts trump politics in communist China. Although Taiwan’s position is far more complicated than that of Australia, perhaps more heed should be given to this economic reality before Taipei pre-emptively bows to Beijing’s demands in relation to dissidents such as Rebiya Kadeer.
Michael Danby, an Australian Labor Party representative, is the member for the federal electorate of Melbourne Ports and chair of the Australian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee.
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