Australia's hawks rear their heads in China debate

It is becoming fairly obvious that there is a significant group within Australian government that is spoiling for a major confrontation, perhaps to skirmish level, with China. Or which regards one as inevitable because of things China will do, and therefore wants us ready for action. Ostensibly, it is at the moment because we think that they were beastly in letting the coronavirus get away. For many ringing the tocsin, however, that is at best a convenient, if illustrative, excuse for taking the relationship to a different place. We might do business with them - but they are not our friends.

I hope that things do not go as the Australian hawks seem to want or expect, and not only for their own sakes, reputations and perhaps lives, but also for my own and my grandchildren's. We can take it for granted that Australians do not want to live under the domination or complete shadow of a Big Brother surveillance state, whether under the control of Xi Jinping or Peter Dutton. That does not demand an Australian war of independence, nor membership of a coalition intent on keeping China in a box. Nor should it involve going out of our way to annoy or insult China and its leaders over matters in which we have no great stake, playing pig in the minefield for propaganda battles designed to humiliate, or, busily, imagining our armed forces in displays of repudiation of China's position as the big economy, and customer, in our region.

Only one of the examples of current hostilities involves biting China on the leg about the need for a searching, and searing, investigation into Chinese mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak, if that is what it was. That has certainly served the purpose for which it was designed, of seriously irritating the Chinese leadership and focusing its anger on Australia. But it sits alongside a steady drumbeat of Australian analysis, commentary, and advocacy reminding ourselves that China is a deeply authoritarian country, very nasty to many of its minority populations, and paranoid about the extension of freedoms to its citizens, whom it keeps under constant and ubiquitous surveillance. It is violently repressing and "re-educating" its western Uighur population, and has been, over the past year, in active conflict with the citizens of Hong Kong over their desire to control their own affairs, even if under the Chinese flag.

For those drawing up the bill of indictment, the list of reasons why China is a menace includes its marked increase in official bellicosity from Beijing directed at Taiwan, and the risk that this could lead to a major war. There's China's militarisation of the South China Sea, including the occupation and development of contested islands, now operating in effect as forward aircraft carriers. There are the tensions with Japan over islands both claim. There's China's development of an effective oceangoing navy, and its stated intention of pushing the United States navy back beyond the first island chains, well away from Chinese shores. Then, too, are the tensions with the United States, first over trade and tariffs, but also over a discernible American retreat from playing the enforcer of peace and its general will in the area. As America retreats, China intends to fill the space. Add in also the instabilities of North Korea, including a possible succession crisis, and failure to resolve arguments about nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, and its relationships with Japan and South Korea. These may not be China's fault, but they are factors making the area more dangerous and unpredictable, with active distrust of whether China will be peacemaker or covert encourager of mischief.

Throw in the effect of economic paralysis among its neighbours because of COVID-19, and the effective collapse of American world leadership caused by America's seeming lack of will and capacity to play the world citizen. American domestic government is itself in chaos, of course, but that is a different thing, other than for the fact that President Trump is seeking to blame China to distract attention from his own mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic. America is right now weakened, and in certain respects disabled, by lockdowns. But the presidential election timetable and Trump's own personality threaten a premature reopening of the economy in a way that worsen the effects of the pandemic.

China, the critics say, is trying to take advantage of American distractions by playing both bad guy - an ill-tempered bully, especially in its own immediate neighbourhood - and pretend good guy, not least in helping other countries with access to the health hardware and drugs with which to fight the virus. It is, of course, one of the ironies of the pandemic that the First World, with its dominance of scientific discovery and drug patents, had largely vacated the field of actually manufacturing and maintaining supplies of them, leaving China with a whip hand. But those cunning folk have been making them available to all comers, a diplomatic coup when, apparently, we ought to be angry at them for allowing the virus to jump species in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with thinking there would be an appropriate moment for an extensive international scientific review of the arrival of the 2019 coronavirus, its characteristics and mode of transmission, its epidemiology (when countries get around to that) and its strange aetiology, particularly among, on one hand, the young, and on the other, older people with compromised immune systems. That could and should involve critical review of how various countries, including China, dealt with the pandemic, including by quarantine, lockdowns, social distancing, and treatment, including ultimately, we hope, the development of a vaccine. It would also involve a review of the way that countries - including China - shared information, pooled resources, and used international organisations and facilities like the World Health Organisation, as well as local resources and pre-rehearsed plans. Even assuming there is room for criticism, if not as scathing as some suggest, of China's delays in realising it had a major epidemic on its hands, it is not all a bad story, even from China's point of view. Indeed, China seems to have acted more quickly, more decisively and more effectively than its chief critic, the United States, which had months to prepare for the onslaught and did very little.

Prime Minister Morrison, or our Foreign Minister Marise Payne - or, perhaps, the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt, who was our connection with the public health campaigns of China and the WHO - could well have had such an idea and taken it up with China privately before putting China on the spot. As it happens, we were at an excellent vantage to facilitate the provision of experts from here and abroad to work with China in such a review. But it was immediately clear that the purpose of the Australian "initiative" was not to conduct a review of benefit to the whole world, but to engage in political warfare with the Chinese state, using failures of organisation and leadership as a stick with which to beat the state. This was underlined by the way in which the first Australian public mention of the need for such an inquiry, along with some words about "accountability and transparency'', came from Peter Dutton, otherwise in a witness protection program avoiding any transparency or accountability for Commonwealth failures to screen several thousand passengers and crew from cruise ships. Marise Payne took the idea further, if with every appearance of playing to a pre-prepared script several days later, before Morrison took extra steps to make the proposals unacceptable to the Chinese by advocating the equivalent of weapons inspectors battering down doors to catch those with secrets to hide.

The Chinese, predictably, reacted angrily, with the Australian government seeming almost to bask in the abuse, affecting great shock that their modest proposal had gone down badly. It is, of course, possible that our politicians were too naive and ignorant to realise that they were but spear-carriers for a Trump disinformation campaign, having succeeded in making unlikely a proper review down the track. Why oh why, not least at a time when Australia (and New Zealand) were winning some international public credit for the effectiveness with which we were managing our containment measures? Why also, at a time when we were having to deal with China about critically needed pandemic supplies? The public blow-up may have given some slight solace to President Trump, and his chief China antagonist, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. Blaming China - or state governors, or Democrats, or the media - was intended to serve to distract from the administration's own failures to prepare to face the virus. But if it slightly served an American partisan purpose, it did Australia no favours, and reinforced views in China and the region that Australia, and Scott Morrison, are but puppies eager to please America, and almost impervious to our own interest.

In The Australian this week, Paul Kelly described the transformation of Australian official policy towards Beijing as being a decisive event under the Turnbull government. Turnbull, Kelly said, had become prime minister with a businessman's optimism in China's growth, not seeing it translating into a military threat. He argued that China had more to lose from the economic woes that a major conflict would bring. Australia could be a friend of both America and China.

But in due course, he says, he realised they were bastards. Utter bastards. First was the extent of spying and intelligence gathering - involving more resources than anyone else (perhaps, but they get only a fraction of the intelligence gathered by Five Eyes countries with signals intelligence). There were blatant attempts to interfere in our domestic politics. A shift to bullying tactics and demands for compliance, along with threats about trade deals. By this account, the new realism in Australia's dealings with China is a result of our being mugged by reality.

The banning of Huawei from participation in the 5G network came, apparently, after formal advice from Mike Burgess (then with the Australian Signals Directorate, now with ASIO) that "if a state-sponsored adversary has enduring access to staff, software or hardware deployed into a target telecommunications network, then they only require the intent to act in order to conduct [espionage] operations within the network".

Gee, I wonder what that says about the capacity, or will, of Western intelligence to penetrate a Chinese telecommunications network laden with Western hardware, software and silicon chips. Or why, somehow, it is not cricket for a China to spy on us as we spy on them - or even, for the benefit of our oil companies and former politicians, on nations such as East Timor? One is allowed the conceit of thinking that attempts to steal our secrets are wicked while our efforts to do the same are noble. But one can hardly claim to be surprised.

The supposed new realism about the relationship is the discovery that China is in it for itself, not us, and that it has long-term plans to exert a good deal more influence in the world, not least with its money. Many see its efforts to position itself in the South China Sea, and to shove a very pushy and far from benevolent US further from its coast, as being intrinsically sinister - a prelude to a plan of regional then global military conquest. Yet if China wants to be in a position to protect its lines of communication - and to have redundancy via its Belt and Road program - that is natural enough. It has shown few signs of moving outside its boundaries, except with stray real estate it has always claimed.

Should we read the entrails to say that war now would be better - because it is ultimately inevitable - but the longer it is delayed, the more disadvantaged we would be? And who is to make the call on heightened conflict or on heightened tensions given that Australia could not fight alone? Is it to be Donald Trump? If we are to sensibly decide that our economy would be better balanced if we were not so dependent on one customer with a capacity and a will to blackmail us, should we be virtuous immediately, by spitting in the face of the million Chinese in Australia? Or by showing no sympathy for the plight of overseas students whose fees have been propping up our universities?

Independent and thoughtful scholars have been examining Australia's relations with China over decades. But some of the commentators have become mere lobbies for one side or the other. We do have to continually re-evaluate the relationship and develop it according to changing circumstances.

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That involves a constant politic of balancing long and short-term hopes and interests, including the interests of those deeply enmeshed in trade and those adversely affected by the globalisation of our economy that this has involved. It involves deepening our understanding of China, its system and its people, and encouraging them to deepen their understanding of ours. It involves respect. It involves frank statements about matters that divide us. But what we have been seeing has been slanging off, insults and airtime given to people who actually want to damage, not improve, the relationship. China's talk of boycotts might have been blunt and threatening. But some of the Australian talk has been boorish and embarrassing. And some politicians, including ministers, have been dog-whistling to an unworthy history of fearing the yellow peril.

Will our security consciousness be enhanced if we encourage anti-Chinese rhetoric, suspicion of strangers and hostility to outsiders? Should we encourage populist alarm about Chinese investment in our country as a threat, in a way that British, or American, or Japanese investment is not? Should we expand the barbarism of our own concentration camps to re-educate Chinese visa late-stayers?

Or is the prudent response to an international problem -such as a pandemic - co-operation and the sharing of resources and information? This is what China has, by and large, done, and not only with us but with all the countries of the world. The alternative is for us, or for China, to behave with extreme caution, suspicion, terror of secondary agendas, and fear of the passage of some unintended advantage, perhaps the exposure of some vulnerability.

In most diplomatic war games, the superior strategy is not out-bastardising the bastards and cheating the cheaters. Better to be honourable, respectful and decent, and to take people, more or less, at their word - if perhaps with an understanding of the Jack Lang saying, much quoted by Paul Keating: "In the race of life, always back self-interest: at least you know it is trying".