China’s economic offensive against Australia is partly designed to warn countries against vocally opposing Beijing’s interests, particularly with US president-elect Joe Biden looking to unite Washington’s allies. Yet it is already showing signs of backfiring.
China on Friday last week imposed anti-dumping duties of up to 212 percent on Australian wine, the latest in a slew of measures curbing imports from coal to copper to barley.
Tensions escalated further on Monday after a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official posted on Twitter a fake photograph of an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child.
Illustration: Mountain People
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison quickly called on China to apologize for the “repugnant” tweet.
The ministry, in turn, questioned whether Morrison lacks “a sense of right and wrong,” and said that overall ties deteriorated because Australia “took wrong measures on issues bearing on China’s core interests.”
To Beijing, the attacks on Australia are meant to deter others, like Canada, the EU and Japan, from joining a US-led campaign to counter China’s rise.
Chinese Communist Party officials see Morrison’s government as one of their most vocal critics and an easy target: China accounts for about 35 percent of Australia’s total trade, three times more than the next highest country, Japan. Australia accounts for less than 4 percent of China’s commerce.
“It is only natural that China wants to sound some precautionary alarm” to warn countries off building an anti-China alliance, said Zhu Feng (朱鋒), an international relations professor at Nanjing University. “After all, confrontation is the least wanted by the world now.”
China is betting that most Western countries will avoid provoking Beijing and risking the kind of trade retaliation Australia is experiencing, particularly with their economies weighed down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the same time, it has sought to strengthen ties with Japan, South Korea and nations in Southeast Asia, in part by offering more trade, investment in 5G networks and access to COVID-19 vaccines.
Yet China’s moves are adding to worries about its use of economic coercion and could end up pushing middle powers closer to the US camp.
Biden has vowed to rebuild relationships with allies damaged by US President Donald Trump’s “America first” policies, which in turn would make it more palatable for some allies to align more closely with his administration.
“Biden is planning to resume US international policy after a four-year hiccup,” said Jeff Moon, assistant US trade representative for China in former US president Barak Obama’s administration, adding that the scope of China’s actions against Australia was “breathtaking.”
“The leverage is to work together. That is what they most fear, and they see that coming,” Moon said.
While it is still unclear how exactly that would work, several key groupings including the Quad — the US, Australia, India and Japan — as well as the “Five Eyes” — the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK — have been revived in the past few years.
New initiatives have also been floated, including one that would give countries an alternative to Huawei Technologies Co for 5G networks and another that would find alternative supply chains to China.
The Wall Street Journal last month reported that the Trump administration was formulating a joint retaliation plan that would allow the West to push back against the kind of economic coercion China is inflicting on Australia.
The EU also plans to call on the US to seize a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to forge a new global alliance that would counter China, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing a set of draft policy proposals.
For its part, the Trump administration is continuing to pressure China with moves to prevent some of its biggest companies from accessing US technology.
Senior US officials have also stepped up visits to Asia ahead of Biden’s planned inauguration on Jan. 20: Following a visit to Japan last month, US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien said that leaders in Tokyo saw the Quad as a “game changer.”
“China against any individual country, including quite powerful countries like South Korea or Thailand or even Japan, China would be dominant,” former British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs Malcolm Rifkind said. “But in the real world, when you have such a situation, your potential victims join up to ensure a collective and coordinated response.”
While China has adopted a more aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy epitomized by the ministry official’s tweet on Monday, it has also used different levels to punish countries that step out of line.
Earlier this year, the state-run Global Times said that Beijing should deliver “public and painful” retaliation to the UK for banning Huawei, but avoid a full-fledged confrontation because it saw Britain as the “weak link” in the “Five Eyes.”
In a telephone call with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) last week sent a tacit warning that the bloc should think twice before strengthening alliance with the incoming Biden administration, as the two sides look to complete an investment treaty by the end of the year.
“Strategic autonomy is a necessary character for staying independent,” Wang said, adding that it involves “opposing man-made decoupling, opposing confrontation among different blocs and a new cold war.”
Australia, on the other hand, has faced China’s unabashed wrath ever since Morrison’s government called for Beijing to allow independent investigators into Wuhan to discover the origins of COVID-19.
Chen Hong (陳弘), director of the Australian Studies Centre at East China Normal University who said that he earlier this year had his visa to Australia revoked because he was labeled a national security risk, said that Australia’s actions differentiated it from New Zealand, which maintained relatively good ties with Beijing.
“Australia has been purposefully echoing Washington’s anti-China policy and coordinated with Trump’s strategic intentions,” Chen said.
However, Australian officials have said that Morrison’s government is speaking out for its own interests regardless of the US on issues like China’s increasing grip over Hong Kong and assertiveness in the South China Sea.
Morrison himself has also sought to portray Australia as stuck in the middle between the US and China — a view also shared by Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍), who last month in an interview said that many nations in Asia are not keen to join an anti-China bloc.
Even after he called on China to apologize for Monday’s tweet, Morrison again sought to restart talks with Beijing with no conditions.
“Countries around the world are watching this. They are seeing how Australia is seeking to resolve these issues, and they are seeing these responses,” Morrison told reporters on Monday. “This impacts not just on the relationship here, but with so many other sovereign nations not only in our own region, but like-minded countries around the world.”
The spat has only hardened attitudes toward China within Australia, to the point where even business groups have stopped pushing for warmer ties, said Natasha Kassam, a former Australian diplomat who worked in China and is now a research fellow at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute.
However, it is “impossible to imagine” China apologizing to Australia, Kassam said.
“While there may be an emboldening of countries in the region responding to China, it’s equally likely that a number of countries will see the way in which Australia’s export industry has been punished and think twice about making their own criticisms,” she said.
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