Joe Hildebrand: Australia needs to look to India instead of China for its future prosperity

Australia is beholden to China as our No. 1 trading partner, yet – as the latest unprovoked aggression has once more shown – it is a dysfunctional and abusive relationship. It’s time for us to move on and forge greater ties with an emerging super power.

China’s disgraceful quasi-attack on an Australian aircraft proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is not morally fit to be a global superpower.

There has already been abundant evidence of this, but the PLA jet’s flare assault on an RAN helicopter over international waters has literally written it in the sky.

The problem, of course, is that morality doesn’t have much to do with global politics.

The greatest land empire in history was that of the Mongols, who made mountains of the skulls of those who dared resist them.

Genghis Khan believed he was divinely ordained to conquer the world.

People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping likewise believes in “tianxia” – Chinese dominance of “all under heaven”.

Unfortunately, as with the conquests of Khan, this will not be decided by a democracy sausage.

In decades past, as China gradually liberalised over the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, this was not seen as an existential threat to the West – especially if the US and China formed a new bipolarity in which each kept the other in check.

But the shameless authoritarianism of Xi, who has already effectively made himself dictator for life, combined with the farcical desecration of American democracy at the hands of two demented old men, has created a monstrous geopolitical shitstorm.

The only question is what to do about it?

If neither China nor America is fit for purpose as the next global leader, then to whom do we turn?

I recently heard a historian describe Western and Chinese thought as the two poles of the human condition.

In other words the very nature of humanity, what it means to be human, cannot be fathomed unless you understand both world views.

What we in the West take for granted as fundamental human traits are completely different to, and sometimes in direct conflict with, attitudes that have likewise evolved over centuries in China and its sphere of influence.

An obvious but crude example is the Western focus on individualism and liberalism compared with the Eastern focus on collectivism and social order.

Thus these two mighty forces that produced, shared, stole and harnessed such seismic change engines as paper, printing and gunpowder were doing so with completely different mindsets.

The results were therefore as starkly different as Confucianism and Catholicism.

Industry didn’t matter as much as ideology.

That is where we are today.

Despite the optimistic assumption that economic liberalisation would bring China into a shiny happy new world order, all its economic strength has instead been directed towards a new hyper-nationalist and expansionist authoritarianism.

That is hardly the fault or the will of its people but the very nature of authoritarianism dictates that the people’s will doesn’t matter.

And in the absence of Chinese democracy – which only exists as the name of a rogue Guns N’ Roses album – the world needs a new solution.

And Australia needs it even more. We are completely beholden to China as our No. 1 trading partner, yet – as the latest unprovoked aggression has once more shown – it is a dysfunctional and abusive relationship.

As the old bar room joke goes, we can’t live with them and can’t live without them.

So again: What do we do? Where do we turn?

The answer is staring us right in the face.

The answer is India.

While most of us were worrying about our power bills and mortgage payments, India recently overtook China as the biggest nation in the world.

This means that for the first time in history the biggest nation in the world is a democracy.

That is a milestone for humanity which is impossible to overstate.

India is also an intensely multicultural, multi-class and multi-faith country which has had to balance all those competing forces from brutal and bloody beginnings.

If democracy can survive in Delhi, it can survive anywhere.

The price of this is that India is not yet as industrialised as China – the government cannot flood villages for dams or set up forced labour camps at the stroke of a pen – but that is also its strength.

For all the faults of the British Empire, it left its most prized jewel with the gift of liberal democracy and the values we hold dear.

One and a half billion people on the subcontinent now share them.

Now that empire is in rags, there would be nothing better for the world than for that great nation to take up the torch of freedom and fairness – in direct contrast to another superpower that treats such pillars of humanity with open scorn.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Australia needs to look to India instead of China for its future prosperity