Scott Morrison inflames China tensions over doctored Tweet outrage

Damned if I know, however, what he is expecting to gain, either in the domestic or the international sphere by his play on China. Just why did he take up as Prime Minister, the gibe of an unimportant middle-level Chinese bureaucrat about the involvement of some Australians in Afghan war crimes? Leave completely aside any offensiveness, and intention to offend, and readily discard the fact that the cartoon, showing Australian soldiers slitting an Afghan's baby's throat, appears on a government website. The preconditions existed, perhaps, for any proud Australian to be provoked. But prime ministers choose when, and by whom they will be provoked, particularly when it is clear that an official reaction of some sort is expected. Not necessarily from a prime minister, of course. Or even from a foreign minister given that the insult came from a pipsqueak, would-be tiger or not. An angry formal note from a minor diplomat at the embassy - not the Ambassador - would probably have been appropriate.

Morrison has been more than a decade in high-level politics, and has been insulted by experts. No doubt he loves the country he leads - though his career has been full of occasions in which he has shown himself very careless of its reputation. But he has never been accused of being an emotional hand-on-the-heart Tennessee type who completely loses it when someone spits on the flag or disrespects the military. There is absolutely nothing spontaneous or out-of-control about any political anger he confects. His reaction to the provocation was deliberate and intentional. He knew that he was responding in a predictable way to a stimulus applied for just that effect. He cannot have done it unconscious of the likelihood that a furious response, particularly at his level, could only aggravate serious existing tensions that some, at least, were trying to cool down. He must have considered the possibility - even the probability - that the ratcheting up of hostilities would lead to a widening of the categories of goods now facing discrimination from Chinese markets. He would have known that the damnable thing about that sort of retaliation was that the form that penalty would take was entirely out of Australian control. He could not even expect it to be proportionate to any rage expressed.

Beyond that, of course, he knew China was pitching the ball right at a tender wound. The implication of the gibe - that the murder of innocent Afghans had been conscious Australian policy - was false, and to many people, including thousands of ADF veterans of Afghanistan, very offensively so. But the sore point was that Australia had just published to the world a report showing credible evidence that suggested some Australian soldiers had murdered Afghan civilians. It may be a tribute to our open society - and a rebuke to China's closed one - that the allegations, facing further investigation, were now on the public record. But it made Australia vulnerable. Many an Australian cartoonist - indeed many an Australian politician - has, over the years, extrapolated from an incident far more hurtful generalisations than in the Chinese Tweet.

Usually an over-reaction of this sort - often with trade penalties, or some terrorism - would follow some alleged insult to Islam, criticism of the personality of a Malaysian prime minister, or the deliberate humiliation of a PNG prime minister by a Border Force official. That would usually cause our politicians to tell the "victim" to grow up, or take a pill, or, ruefully, to remark that being pilloried and mocked was part and parcel of Australian life, only occasionally shared with foreigners.

Morrison is not usually reckless or crazy-brave. One has to assume that he had weighed and considered the consequences of any sort of Australian response, including one by him personally. He is simply not impulsive, in the manner that Tony Abbott was when he wondered aloud about an Australian invasion of Ukraine after the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner containing Australian passengers. Nor is he given to applying the onion, in the manner of a Bob Hawke, after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

He may well understand the attraction, to Cronulla and RSL types of ostentatious clutching of the heart and the flag when we can pretend the honour of the nation has been impugned. But that can be managed without intent to damage the Australian economy, or to portray us as some victim.

Even for domestic consumption, and allowing for his patriotic fury that the Chinese tweet had "gone too far", he had just been through a difficult domestic balancing exercise over the Brereton report discussing the alleged war crimes. He warned the nation the report would be very disturbing, confronting and damaging. He told the ADF through the CDF General Angus Campbell that he expected a searching examination of officer responsibility as well as criminal investigations and prosecutions against the small number of non-commissioned soldiers actually accused of murder. He had to arrange the disappearance of himself and any relevant ministers while the ADF had a bucket of shit poured over it. He then had to carefully monitor the media, especially the Murdoch tabloids, for any popular reaction, particularly within the wider defence community, or even among the many special force soldiers who had never been accused of anything.

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A pathetically loyal media faithfully reports that some other nations have noticed that Australia is being bullied by China, with the implication that they care deeply about it. Some leaders have suggested that they might buy our wine, or perhaps look over our barley or our lobsters, as a gesture of solidarity. No doubt some will speak approvingly of plucky Scott Morrison putting his finger in the Chinese dyke. Such gestures are as nothing compared with the real consequences of his actions.

Perhaps (I'm giving 1000-1 against this) the Chinese will realise they have horribly overstretched. They may give in and apologise for everything back to the invasion of Tibet. Perhaps some China-sized new customer will sign one of those terribly effective free-trade agreements to sop up our excess production. This could make Morrison seem the great statesman. In the real world, however, it would be interesting to see if there's a "good" outweighing the loss of the 10 per cent of our GDP that our China relationship is worth in a typical year. That's bigger than the damage done to our economy this year by the coronavirus.

It's hard to escape the feeling that most of the heat and light generated by Scott Morrison's fury at a cartoon by a middle-level Chinese tiger cub was designed for Australian, rather than Chinese consumption. Had Morrison wanted any Chinese movement in our direction, it is unlikely that he would have "demanded" a Chinese apology he must have known would never come. Indeed he must have known that the form of his protest could only lead China's senior leadership - as opposed to its surrogates - to double down.

Could a worsening of the trading relationship - or merging an increasingly tense economic dispute with the US-China tussle over power and influence in south-east and north Asia - be in Australia's interest? Only, one might think, if one had concluded, or knew, war between China and America was inevitable, or that China had determined on a major breach of the regional peace, for example by the invasion of Taiwan, the unleashing of North Korea, or the complete incorporation of Hong Kong. After any of these, relationships could never be the same again. Anything is possible, I suppose, not least with the Trump legacy in the US. But it is hard to see why Australia, alone of the nations likely to ally themselves against it -- is moving so decisively towards the front. It is not behaviour we are seeing from Japan, South Korea, or India, let alone by any of those of the nations of South East Asia who view Chinese expansion -- if and when it occurs -- with trepidation. It is even more difficult to understand our apparent compulsion to spit in the Chinese face.

It is that compulsion, rather than our stout defence of human rights that seems to have caused China to show its displeasure through trade punishment. We are, on the one hand regarded by them as a pipsqueak in international affairs, with little in the way of a moral stump allowing us to lecture them, least of all about human rights. We are also, on the other, an ungrateful nation that has benefited enormously from privileged access into trade with China, in a way that has worked to benefit both countries.

Our recent prosperity has been tied to China's rise, whether in iron ore, coal and other mineral exports or as a premium destination for Chinese students and tourism. China never initially complained strongly that Australia was closely allied, in defence terms, to the US, though it often chided us for meekly supporting American trade grievances, or posturing in North Asia, as being directly against our own interests.

Progressively, China has been signalling its increasing displeasure by arbitrary cuts to trade in particular goods - cuts that hurt Australia far more than China. That might be described as bullying - a little less convincingly as part of a Chinese pattern of dealing with any country that displeases it. It may be one thing to be determined not to be bullied, or to be seen to be bullied. It may also be important that Australia show that it has a continuing concern for human rights and democratic forms of government - concerns it will not lightly sacrifice on the altar of trade. It is another thing altogether to go on picking new fights and inviting fresh forms of retaliation as the Morrison government appears to be intent on doing.

The Tweet "meme" - whatever that means - seems to have invited a conga line of loyalty oaths, and claims that "my outrage exceeds thine" from all who engage in such lemming-like activities- including, predictably, the Labor leadership. It seemed to take Labor a while to wonder whether over-egging the outrage pudding was really in Australia's interests. Meanwhile Morrison seemed to keep raising the ante. If I were China, I would not have apologised, but congratulated myself on the arrow hitting the bullseye. Morrison, indeed, seemed to start playing both sides of the fence, calling for a resumption of ordinary trade and of civilities even as he was making it impossible. It was even seeming to dawn on coalition figures from the Treasurer down that the short and medium term of any escalation would be disastrous to the economy. That's the risk of unforced error when playing diplomacy in the Twittersphere. If he felt he had to say something, lest he be damned for silence, he should have waited until he could condemn the Tweet in more moderate and non-threatening terms, as a comment on a more hysterical response by another.

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The past fortnight has seen a good many usually cynical political journalists rally around the flag, understanding at last that the Chinese are beastly, that there is no long-term reasoning with them, and that we may as well take the tough medicine of reducing our dependence on the Chinese economy - sooner rather than later. Perhaps they are getting privileged briefings that have inspired such conversions, but if so, those explanations must be confidential. John Howard was the first of any number of coalition leaders to understand that Australia did not have to choose between China and the United States - and nothing much over the past five years has materially changed that. The idea that we must make choices and choose sides, and the notion that China is now suddenly more dangerous to us is an ideologically-led, not evidence-led conclusion. The threat is that ideologues, most not open to any form of public account, have an enormous capacity to cause the fulfilment of their own prophecies.

The latest deterioration in the relationship began when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull decided that the Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei could not participate in the 5G rollout, and otherwise instituted a more suspicious and transactional business relationship. The Chinese irritation seemed to be aggravated by a feeling that Australian was playing pig in the minefield for a more general "five-eyes" isolation of Huawei, and a belief that Australian commercial policy over China was too much influenced by Australia's perception of a need to march in close step with the United States, even when our interests differed.

The latter perception was becoming more of a problem because President Trump was becoming increasingly protectionist and isolationist, and blaming China's economic success for the loss of American manufacturing jobs. Trade war, with the imposition of American tariffs and Chinese retaliatory tariffs, saw both sides posture about the threat from each other if the struggle for hegemony in the western Pacific and the South China Sea became war. But it has never seemed that war was inevitable, that either nation could "win" or, indeed, that conflict was going to be binary. A growing China was investing in its own defence. So have most of its neighbours. And Australia.

It is not clear that the worsening has been the horse or the cart, but we have suddenly seen an explosion of folk agitating for action, or pontificating about new-found dangers of appeasement. Some of these folk have discovered, mostly recently, that China is a totalitarian nation, notionally communist, which oppresses many of its subjects, including Tibetans and Uighurs. Moreover, it has systems of mass surveillance that our Department of Home Affairs envies and plans to copy. It constantly threatens two of its prodigal provinces, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and gave not-so-secret encouragement to North Korea and Iran. These discoveries, assisted by generous US sponsorship of the "independent" think tanks publishing this research and spruiking war, came generally from scholars hitherto blasé about human rights generally, and still deeply unconcerned by their absence among allies and customers such as Saudi Arabia.

Expect in due course further Chinese journalism on our treatment of minorities, including Aborigines, our international actions in nations such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam, on missions almost impossible to describe, but certainly unachieved. Our history of marching to American military music, after a century of marching to British music. Our history of racism and exclusion of Asians. And other military atrocities, back to Breaker Morant.

None of this may be news to most Australians. Or about anything of which Scott Morrison is ashamed. But wrapped up in a Chinese marketing effort to vilify and discredit Australia to its own population and a wider Asia, it could generate and justify inspired consumer revolts against Australian goods, a turning away from Australian education, and a rejection of any idea that we are a citizen of the region. I think the Morrison government should be more open with its strategy.

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