Australia yesterday openly mocked a senior Chinese diplomat’s warnings about its plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, saying they were “so silly it’s funny.”
The Chinese embassy’s charge d’affaires, Wang Xining (王晰寧), said Australia would become the “naughty guy” if it procures the submarines, which are capable of stealthy, long-duration missions.
In an interview with the Guardian, published yesterday, Wang said that a nuclear submarine deal jeopardized Australia’s “peace-loving reputation.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
He said that people of his age in China saw Australia as a peace-loving country, “but nowadays people know that a nuclear-powered submarine is designed to launch long-range attack against a target far away.”
“So who are you going to attack? You are no longer a peace lover, a peace defender, you become a sabre wielder in certain form,” said Wang, who is China’s top representative in Australia since the previous ambassador’s departure last month after a five-year term.
Wang said Australia had “zero nuclear capacity” to deal with any trouble affecting the submarines and asked if politicians were ready to apologize to people if an incident occurred.
Australian Minister for Defence Peter Dutton derided the “inflammatory” remarks, describing them in a television interview as “provocative, sort of comical statements, really that are so silly it’s funny.”
Dutton said the acting Chinese ambassador “is probably reading off a script from the [Chinese] Communist Party, but I think most Australians see through the nonproductive nature of the comments.”
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced in September that he had decided to obtain the nuclear-powered vessels in a new defense alliance with the UK and the US.
Besides angering China, the deal infuriated France, which discovered at the last moment that its own multibillion-dollar diesel-electric submarine contract with Australia had been scrapped.
Canberra has defended the trilateral deal, with Morrison saying he did not regret the decision “to put Australia’s national interest first.”
In his interview with the Guardian, Wang cautioned Australian politicians not to do anything “destructive to the relationship.”
He also signaled that Beijing would not take the initiative to end the freeze on calls between the two countries, saying speculation about engagement in a military conflict was “not a conducive environment” for high-level talks.
Dutton said over the weekend that he could not conceive of a situation in which Australia would not support the US in the event of armed conflict with China over Taiwan.
Icy relations between Australia and China have led to a freeze in high-level diplomatic contacts for almost two years.
China has imposed stiff sanctions on some Australian exports, a measure seen in Canberra as retaliation for Australia banning telecom tech titan Huawei from key contracts and for questioning how the Covid-19 pandemic began.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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