Piers Akerman: Australia has ignored China’s aggression for too long
The none-too-subtle installation of mainland Chinese law on the people of Hong Kong goes beyond anything any other totalitarian government has ever legislated, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Thousands of Hong Kongers offered safe haven in Australia
- Protesters gassed at pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong
The Morrison government’s realisation that China is belligerent and bellicose is long overdue — but better late than never.
The none-too-subtle installation of mainland Chinese law on the people of Hong Kong should have had the hokey-wokey folk here parading in the streets but, no, they’re more concerned with dropping their knees in obeisance to the Marxist-driven Black Lives Matter movement’s false narrative.
The Chinese Communist Party has effectively subsumed the population of Hong Kong and will apply the most extreme extraterritorial powers yet seen to police the views of people around the world — regardless of whether they are Chinese citizens or not.
The new law, designed to silence opposition to the CCP, goes beyond anything any other totalitarian government has ever legislated.
Formerly, totalitarian governments relied on secret service assassins to murder opponents seeking sanctuary abroad.
In future, the Chinese government will claim its muzzling of international dissidents is totally legitimate according to its law.
But China’s flagrant disregard for human rights and international law is not new. It’s just being ramped up now as the Communists attempt to distract their population from a serious economic slowdown caused in part, but not wholly, by the Wuhan virus lockdowns.
For the past 30 years much of the West has lived under the delusion that the fall of the Berlin Wall would see a surge toward democracy in Communist nations. When China opened its markets to Western banking, there was the vain thought it would also be open to Western cultural and social thinking but that was never part of the CCP’s plan.
MORE FROM PIERS AKERMAN
It’s time the urban jobless left their latte-laced comfort zones
Uni students need to be cured of ideological virus
Marching mindlessly to the future ignores lessons of the past
With the remnants of Hong Kong’s liberal democracy crushed, the dragon is now in plain sight.
A number of institutions have already kowtowed to the oppressor, bringing to mind the quote often attributed to Lenin: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
The acceleration of China’s expansionist activities in the Indo-Pacific area spurred the Morrison government’s decision to budget $270 billion for an armoury of advanced weapons. This is catch-up stuff. In February 1992, China announced that 80 per cent of the South China Sea would be formally considered Chinese territorial waters and actively began exercising its historical claims to the territory within what it called the First Island Chain.
This is the area contained inside a line that runs roughly from the Kamchatka Peninsula in the north to Borneo in the south.
China has also highlighted what it calls the Second Island Chain, which runs from Japan down to the tip of Irian Jaya, and there is a Third Island Chain on China’s strategic charts from the Aleutian Islands through Hawaii and on to Samoa and Tonga.
The Spratlys, the Paracels, Woody Island, the Scarborough Shoal and other islands on which the Chinese have been illegally fortifying are within the Nine-Dash Line — a chunk of ocean extending below Taiwan to Brunei and Borneo then back up the Vietnamese coast.
The world hasn’t seen such global bullying since 1938, when Hitler’s troops marched into the Sudetenland with the acquiescence of Neville Chamberlain, who aked why Britons should be concerned over “a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing”. Australians, and the rest of the world’s freedom-loving people, cannot afford to ignore what is happening. China’s aggression is unacceptable and in defiance of all international laws.
Australia’s defence chiefs have been negligent and so, for the most part, have our politicians in failing to address this ongoing challenge. The Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard compromised long-term defence strategy by putting off decisions, and the Turnbull government was too busy putting political correctness ahead of military preparedness.
While the coronavirus presents huge budgetary problems, the Morrison government is showing an inclination to meet the needs of national defence.
It should show a wholehearted commitment now by ditching the scandal-ridden French submarine contract and entering into a lease-sale agreement with the US for a nuclear submarine fleet.