James Morrow: What does China really want?
Having offended everyone from the European Union to the US, and now Australia, China has few real friends left. So just what is their game plan, asks James Morrow.
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Is there a bigger question right now than what, exactly, does China want?
Is it just looking for regional security, or is it bent on world domination?
Is it now strong enough, as one study this week suggested, to take on the United States and win in any military conflict in the Pacific?
Or is it a paper tiger with an economy that’s been king hit by coronavirus sitting on a demographic time bomb set by their one child policy?
And why, more than anything else, is the Chinese regime so shouty?
The answers to the first two questions are probably pretty straightforward: China’s ambitions are big, probably bigger than its bank account can cover.
But to answer the third, it might be helpful to look at the wisdom of a couple of great American philosophers: Will Rogers, and Krusty the Klown.
Will Rogers was an American cowboy philosopher, humorist, actor, and columnist who made his name a century ago – and who once famously said, “diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.”
Krusty the Klown, of course, needs no introduction, but it’s worth remembering his famous lament when he accidentally admitted to taking a bribe at a film festival: “Ugh … I said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.”
Is there a bigger question right now than what China, and President Xi Jinping, want? Picture: AP Photo/Andy Wong
Beyond China’s brute obnoxiousness – all but exterminating Hong Kong’s freedoms this week being only their latest outrage – what seems so puzzling is that in the world of power politics, Xi Jinping is at the end of the day far more Krusty the Klown than Will Rogers.
Not since Nikita Kruschev slammed his shoe on the podium at the United Nations has the world seen a leader with global ambitions say “the quiet part loud” so boldly.
All the more remarkable is the way Xi uses his global propaganda machine not to say “nice doggie”, but rather as a metaphorical rock.
Take the way China has used their media to put their spin on trade disputes with Australia, firing off “news” reports and commentary shot through with racism, nationalism, and xenophobia.
While there are a number of official Chinese mouthpieces, one of the most entertaining has to be the Global Times, which is part of the stable of outlets run by the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily.
But for a local analogy, it might be more accurate to imagine it as the Daily Mail as edited by Xi Jinping.
Devoted to bigging up the achievements of the totalitarian Chinese state while at the same time presenting the West as an irretrievable hellhole of disease and inequality, the paper has lately developed a special fondness for Australia.
“Australia maintains a political prejudice against China and other Asia-Pacific countries due to its long-term identity crisis,” the paper suggested earlier this month.
We are also, thanks to our close relationship with Washington a “giant kangaroo that serves as a dog of the US”, according to an article published on the 20th.
And, suggesting that the Global Times has more in common with news outlets like the ABC than either would care to imagine, the paper called this newspaper out for publishing an intelligence dossier on the coronavirus outbreak.
As if auditioning for a gig as a Media Watch producer, the paper said “Western media outlets”, including The Daily Telegraph, “have lost their self-proclaimed journalistic professionalism and independence, as they rushed to hype up an unverified “Five Eyes” intelligence report that clearly seeks to smear China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.”
And its editor, Hu Xijin, has referred to Australia as the “gum stuck in China’s shoe”.
This is a one-way street, naturally. When Australian media worry about well documented Chinese interference, China’s media machine is quick to call Australians “paranoid” and “racist”.
Of course, it is not just Australia that gets the special Global Times treatment.
Regular readers have lately been treated to headlines like, “Brazilian politicians tricks to hype Taiwan question doomed to fail”, “India should eschew Western views of China for border peace”, and “US virus death toll a new stain on its human rights record”.
The Global Times is kindly invited to bounce that last one off imprisoned Uigyurs, culturally cleansed Tibetans, and Hong Kongers fighting to preserve their democracy for a laugh.
Much of this over the top rhetoric appears designed for domestic Chinese consumption, to whip up nationalist sentiment at home.
And with Xi’s goal of turning mainland China into a “moderately prosperous society” threatened by his government’s failure to properly contain and manage COVID-19, this might make tactical sense. But this has been going on for far too long for it to be that.
A decade ago Hu told an Australian interviewer that the Global Times represents “the true heart of the ordinary Chinese people”.
Maybe, maybe not.
But what it does represent is a strategy that is ultimately more dangerous for Xi than it is for the West.
That’s because now all but the most unreformed Chinese money addicts have woken up and realised that no matter how much investment capital they might provide, the communist regime in Beijing could never be a long-term partner with freedom-loving democracies.
And having offended everyone from the EU to the US to India to its neighbours in the Pacific to us down here in Australia, China has few real friends left as the new cold war gets chillier or, worse, hot.
In the meantime, it might be time to start keeping an eye out for a good rock.
Originally published as James Morrow: What does China really want?
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