Josh Frydenberg’s China warning after ICBM nuclear discovery

Josh Frydenberg has warned Australia is living with a “very different China” than we have had to deal with in the past

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has warned Australia is living with a “very different China” than we have had to deal with in the past, just days after intelligence photos were released revealing Beijing is building a massive nuclear ICBM complex.

Speaking after a roundtable with business leaders about ways to speed up and increase vaccine uptake, Mr Frydenberg said that “China remains a very important economic partner for Australia.”

He said “Xi Jinping’s (China) is very different to the China that John Howard had to deal with,” but despite Australia’s strong trade ties with the would-be superpower, Australia will always put the “broader national interest” ahead of pure economics.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg MP holds a press conference at Parliament House on Wednesday July 7. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Mr Frydenberg added: “we will not put economic interests first, we will put the broader national interest first and that means standing with a very clear and consistent sense of where our national interest is and that is what we have done under Prime Minister Morrison.”

Mr Frydenberg’s comments come amid growing concern about China’s nuclear ambitions.

Earlier this week the Washington Post revealed China had begun building more than 100 hundred nuclear missile silos in the Gansu Desert in the country’s north near the border with Mongolia.

While China has previously maintained what analysts have called a “minimal deterrent” nuclear capability, analysts suggest that the more aggressive posture may be designed to thwart any American attempt to defend Taiwan against a possible invasion.

Researchers in the United States have identified the construction of 119 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos in a desert in northwestern China.

“Just this deployment alone will provide China over one thousand new on-alert warheads — 1,450 — almost double the day-to-day U.S.A. on-alert force and by itself a nuclear force roughly equal to the entire current U.S. nuclear-deployed force of 1,490 sea- and land-based missile warheads,” Peter Huessy of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies told the American defence intelligence journal 1945.

At recent commemorations marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping said anyone who tried to thwart China’s ambitions would be met with tremendous force, a possible reference to the country’s growing nuclear arsenal.

“Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a ¬collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” he said.

Military vehicles carrying DF-21D ballistic missiles roll to Tiananmen Square in 2015. Picture: Reuters.

This has not been the only such posturing from the Chinese government.

Last month the editor of communist party newspaper Global Times, Hu Xijin, fired off a series of messages in Chinese on the Weibo social media platform saying: “We must be prepared for a high-intensity showdown between the US and China … Our nuclear missiles must be so numerous that the US elite will tremble at the thought of military confrontation with China at that time.”

Any thought of improved relations between China and Australia were further dampened Wednesday when Kurt Campbell, key Asia advisor to the Biden administration, told an Asia Society forum that we must be prepared for a “long haul” with Josh FrydenbergBeijing.

“I’m not sure that they have the strategic thinking to go back to a different kind of diplomacy towards Australia right now,” Mr Campbell said.

“I see a harshness in their approach that appears to be unyielding.

“I would have thought that we were basically settling in for the long haul, in terms of tensions between China and Australia,” he added.

Originally published as Josh Frydenberg’s China warning after ICBM nuclear discovery