In early June, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gave the keynote speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. He warned of China’s ambition to become the region’s leading power, and called on the US and its allies in Asia to block this ambition and preserve the old US-led regional order.
This was the first time an Australian prime minister had plainly acknowledged the strategic rivalry between China and the US, which was long overdue.
However, Turnbull expressed great confidence that the US would prevail over China, and that Asia would therefore continue to flourish under US leadership. So the Australian government is still a long way from acknowledging, to the rest of us or even to itself, what is really happening between the US and China, and what it will mean for Australia.
Illustration: Lance Liu
For a long time Canberra’s refusal to admit either that a great strategic contest is underway between our major ally and our major trading partner, or that the contest might not go as we would like, has been symbolized by the bold assertion that “Australia doesn’t have to choose between America and China.”
This has become something of a mantra, intoned by leaders on both sides of politics whenever the question of US-China relations comes up. Turnbull even repeated it in his Singapore speech, though he made it perfectly clear why it was wrong.
It is a perfect example of the very human tendency to confuse a wish with a fact.
It is certainly true that Australia does not want to choose between the US and China. Our whole vision of Australia’s future assumes that we can avoid such a choice, so that we can keep relying on China to make us rich, while the US keeps us safe.
However, in recent years, as the rivalry has escalated, we have more often faced important choices about when to support the US and when to stay on the sidelines. We have not so far been forced to make an all-or-nothing choice to side with one and abandon the other, but that could come if the rivalry escalates further.
However, if the US steps back from Asia, the question of Australia’s choices becomes irrelevant. We will not have a choice, because the US will no longer be there for us to choose.
Whether it is false or not, the “we don’t have to choose” mantra reveals Canberra’s assumptions about Australia’s future.
If we will not have to choose between the US and China, it can only be because they are not serious strategic rivals, and if they are not serious strategic rivals, it can only mean that China has decided not to challenge the US for regional leadership, because it lacks either the power or the resolve to do so.
Canberra, then, is making the same mistake as Washington: It is underestimating China’s strength and overestimating the US’. That is the story we are telling ourselves to avoid facing what is really happening.
The pattern is clear. Under successive governments since 2011, Canberra has offered strong rhetorical support to the US’ leadership in Asia, but has refused to do anything practical, which can unambiguously be seen as directed against China.
Our aim throughout has been to convince Washington that we are supporting it against China, and to convince Beijing that we are not. It is, in other words, a policy of systematic duplicity. Some might say that such duplicity is unavoidable and even admirable when one is walking a diplomatic tightrope, but that is only true if the duplicity works.
Our problem is that it is not working: We are fooling no one, except perhaps ourselves.
Certainly the leaders in Beijing are not fooled, but nor are they displeased. They do not expect us to support them against the US. They just want to us not to support the US against them — to turn us into a neutral.
That is a big win for them, because we are the US’ oldest and closest ally in Asia. They therefore tolerate our lip service to the alliance so long as we do not give the US any tangible or significant support. So far they are getting what they want, so we have not been punished.
Former Australian prime ministers Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, as well as Turnbull, have all avoided doing anything that Beijing has seen as violating former Australian prime minister John Howard’s understanding with former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) — that Australia’s alliance with the US was not negotiable, but nothing Australia would do as a US ally would be directed against China.
However, they occasionally give us a flick of the whip to keep us in line, sometimes in private and sometimes in public. Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop received a famous dressing-down from her Chinese counterpart in 2013 after she condemned Beijing’s declaration of an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea.
In March, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) warned Australia not to take sides “in a Cold War fashion” after Bishop gave a speech in Singapore which in some ways prefigured the one Turnbull gave in June. We do not know how Beijing responded to Turnbull’s speech, but it would be surprising if it had not sounded a stern private warning.
The Chinese know how susceptible Australian political leaders are to anything that suggests trouble in the relationship, because our leaders keep reminding them of this.
Every time they say, “We don’t have to choose between America and China,” they remind Beijing how easily a diplomatic frown from China can create an acute political problem for any Australian government by disproving the mantra on which Australian foreign policy is based.
The point has not been lost on Washington. Not long before Obama left office, a senior official vented his frustration to me: “We hate it when your guys keep saying, ‘We don’t have to choose between America and China.’ Dammit, you do have to choose, and it is time you chose us!”
US policymakers have clearly been disappointed by our reluctance to displease Beijing. They are worried that Australia is being “Finlandized” — slowly slipping into China’s orbit.
Washington has mounted a sustained low-key diplomatic effort to counteract this and stiffen Australia’s spine. A steady stream of academics, diplomats and senior military officers has been sent out to remind Australians of how much we should fear China, and to encourage us to lean back towards the US.
Over the past year or two, Australian policymakers have become more anxious about China’s power and influence, and less confident that the US can handle this without clearer and more tangible Australian support.
Beijing’s flagrant conduct in the South China Sea has at last convinced many of Canberra’s optimists that China’s challenge to the region’s “rules-based order” — by which they mean the US-led status quo — must be taken more seriously.
Yet, it has been China’s conduct inside Australia that has really got people’s attention.
Areas of concern include espionage and cyberinfiltration, the vulnerability of major infrastructure, influence over Australia’s Chinese-language press, and surveillance and intimidation of Chinese nationals in Australia, including students. There have been allegations of threats to the academic independence of our universities, of attempts to buy influence over Australian politicians, and of efforts to sway Australian public debate and media coverage about China.
These are serious issues which raise important questions about China’s influence in Australia and how we manage it, though discussion about them has, perhaps inevitably, been tinged with populist xenophobia. They have nudged both government and opposition to start raising concerns about China’s growing power more frankly than they have been prepared to do before.
At the same time, US President Donald Trump’s presidency has undermined Canberra’s confidence both in the US’ future in Asia, and in Washington’s regard for Australia as an ally.
Policymakers were shocked when it became clear after the election that Trump would be as bad a president as everyone had feared, and that his commitment to Asia could not be taken for granted.
Even more shocking was the realization that Trump cared nothing for the alliance. His abusive first phone call with Turnbull soon after the inauguration in January overturned Canberra’s assumptions about how the two countries communicate, and raised real concerns that, for the first time in living memory, the US president simply did not care about Australia.
Canberra’s instinct has been to try to turn this around. This too has nudged the government to start talking more frankly about China than it ever did in Obama’s time. It seems that Trump has finally made those in Canberra realize how fragile the US’ position in Asia is, and so they have now decided to encourage Trump to stand up to China, and to see Australia as a valuable ally in doing this.
This explains Turnbull’s and Bishop’s more forthright remarks in Singapore earlier this year. It also explains the strange and sad spectacle of the Australian government trying to pretend that Trump is anything like a normal president leading a competent administration.
Most significantly, it might explain Turnbull’s extraordinary decision to offer Trump unqualified support in his threats to launch a war against North Korea. Such a war would probably and quickly become the worst the world has seen in many decades, and Trump is the last person in the world to be trusted with a blank check on such a matter.
The costs to Australia of encouraging Trump to launch such a war, and of joining in ourselves, could be immense.
So what now the much-anticipated Foreign Policy White Paper has been released? Despite everything that has happened since 2011, it seems we are still clinging to the idea that the US will remain the dominant power in Asia, that it will be there to shield us from China, and that China can somehow be convinced to accept this happily.
So our government has once again failed to come to terms with the full implications of the profound shifts that are transforming our international setting.
It is a triumph for wishful thinking over serious policy, and a further confirmation of the systemic failure in political and policy leadership that has afflicted Australia for at least a decade, and arguably since the turn of the century.
Of all our recent political leaders, Turnbull did at one time go furthest beyond wishful thinking and seriously discuss these questions, but that was before he became prime minister.
Labor in opposition has ventured a little further than the government. Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong has spoken quite seriously about our relations with China, but her words suggest that she too assumes that we will face no hard choices, and that the US will always be there in Asia for us.
It is perhaps understandable that none of our leaders wants to break the bad news, especially when the implications of that news are so unwelcome and unsettling. However, until we find leaders with the imagination to see what is happening and the courage to start talking frankly about it, Australia has no chance of adapting effectively to the new Asia into which we are being thrust.
That could well be disastrous for us.
This is an edited extract from Quarterly Essay 68 Without America: Australia in the New Asia by Hugh White, a professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University.
In an article published in Newsweek on Monday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged China to retake territories it lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. “If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?” Lai asked, referring to territories lost in 1858 and 1860. The territories once made up the two flanks of northern Manchuria. Once ceded to Russia, they became part of the Russian far east. Claims since then have been made that China and Russia settled the disputes in the 1990s through the 2000s and that “China
China has successfully held its Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, with 53 of 55 countries from the African Union (AU) participating. The two countries that did not participate were Eswatini and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which have no diplomatic relations with China. Twenty-four leaders were reported to have participated. Despite African countries complaining about summit fatigue, with recent summits held with Russia, Italy, South Korea, the US and Indonesia, as well as Japan next month, they still turned up in large numbers in Beijing. China’s ability to attract most of the African leaders to a summit demonstrates that it is still being
Trips to the Kenting Peninsula in Pingtung County have dredged up a lot of public debate and furor, with many complaints about how expensive and unreasonable lodging is. Some people even call it a tourist “butchering ground.” Many local business owners stake claims to beach areas by setting up parasols and driving away people who do not rent them. The managing authority for the area — Kenting National Park — has long ignored the issue. Ultimately, this has affected the willingness of domestic travelers to go there, causing tourist numbers to plummet. In 2008, Taiwan opened the door to Chinese tourists and in
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Thursday was handcuffed and escorted by police to the Taipei Detention Center, after the Taipei District Court ordered that he be detained and held incommunicado for suspected corruption during his tenure as Taipei mayor. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by the same court on Monday last week that ordered Ko’s release without bail. That decision was appealed by prosecutors on Wednesday, leading the High Court to conclude that Ko had been “actively involved” in the alleged corruption and it ordered the district court to hold a second detention hearing. Video clips
RSS