Was Biden’s ‘hot mic’ China warning OTT? New footage of this mid-air bullying suggests not

While the Australian government speaks reassuringly of the “improved” and “stabilised” relationship with Beijing, China’s national broadcaster portrays a very different state of affairs.

A new documentary celebrating the founding of the People’s Liberation Army showcases a high-stakes, mid-air intercept of a Royal Australian Air Force surveillance plane over international waters.

The incident took place two years ago but the video footage is new. At the time, the Australian government complained that the Chinese air force manoeuvre was “very dangerous”. But China Central Television last week cast it as rather glorious.

To a soundtrack of stirring martial music and with the urgent intimacy of cockpit dialogue, the encounter is played once at normal speed as the intercepting jet flies across the path of the Australian P-8 aircraft and releases a cloud of aluminium chaff in front of it. And then the climactic moment of danger is played once more, lovingly, the chaff spraying out in slow motion to threaten the Australian craft and the lives of its crew.

“You must draw your sword when you meet the enemy,” intones the pilot who flew the Chinese fighter in a voiceover. CCTV said it produced the documentary to “educate and inspire” China’s military personnel.

Australia is not named in the video, which has been posted on China’s equivalent of YouTube, BiliBili. But internet commentary makes the plane’s nationality clear.

Illustration: Dionne Gain

At the time, Beijing said that it was the Australian side acting recklessly, but the Chinese pilot’s voiceover makes plain that he was the aggressor: “I gradually get closer to it, force it away from our territorial line. After I did that, it changed direction, it continues to hover, it’s coming back towards our territorial waters.”

The Australian Defence Department says that it was a standard patrol in international airspace.

The Chinese pilot continues: “Facing a strong enemy, a tough opponent, you can’t be afraid – beat the enemy from the sky above, I have a better understanding of that.” He then cites an adage from a general of the third century BC, Zhao She: “When confronting the opponent on a narrow path, the boldest will prevail.”

This is the spirit guiding the Chinese forces daily in their intimidation campaigns against a dozen or more nations. Australia has experienced this only a handful of times so far, including the most recent known encounter when a Chinese navy vessel injured several Australian navy divers by directing sonar pulses against them in international waters near Japan last year.

But a few days before the interception of the Australian P-8 on May 26, 2022, China’s air force intercepted a Canadian Air Force surveillance flight in similar circumstances over international waters.

The US last year said that the Chinese Air Force had conducted more than 180 “coercive and risky” mid-air encounters with US Air Force aircraft over the space of two years.

Joe Biden made news on the weekend in a “hot mic” moment of candour when he told the leaders of Australia, India and Japan at their weekend Quad summit: “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region, and it’s true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South China, South Asia and the Taiwan Straits.” But there’s no news in that. It’s Beijing’s established policy of the last decade. Indeed, the Quad only exists because of the four nations’ shared concern at China’s expansionism.

What should Australia and its allies do in response, I asked Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan. His reply: “I think we need to be very clear that we are going to continue to operate consistent with international law in international waters, assert freedom of navigation and overflight, maintain the nature and frequency of our operations, and we will not be deterred or pushed off course by it.

“And we need to be clear and transparent about that, and essentially show the PRC that there’s no profit in continuing this,” he said in an interview a few weeks ago.

But there are a couple of problems with this. First, Malcolm Turnbull explained in his memoir that Australia was more cautious than the US in conducting naval “freedom of navigation operations” in the South China Sea because Canberra couldn’t be certain of American backup in the event of a clash with China’s navy and “we don’t have the capacity to escalate”.

In other words, Australia’s armed forces were too small and weak without US reinforcement. And Australia could not rely on US reinforcement. “It wasn’t a risk worth taking,” concluded the former prime minister.

Second, another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, sets out a serious dilemma that Australia and its allies now confront. The US and China both operate policies of deterrence. Sounds like a formula for stability, right, a mutual checkmate?

But in a speech earlier this month at the US National Defence University in Washington, Australia’s ambassador to the US pointed out that China has a distinctly different definition of deterrence from the West’s.

“China’s view of deterrence differs from the US in one major respect: it sees deterrence and compellence as a single continuum rather than as separate strategic concepts. As a result, this is likely to encourage China to move more seamlessly up the escalation ladder in a manner that the US would see as incompatible with its own notion of deterrence.”

In other words, while the West thinks of deterrence as “all measures short of war” in order to prevent war, China’s Xi Jinping is prepared to use war itself as a kind of deterrence. As Rudd puts it, China embraces the idea of using “small war to constrain large war”.

“This risk,” says Rudd, “may be compounded by Xi’s underlying sense of ideological self-confidence and secular missionary zeal.”

Rudd’s analysis implies that China is readier to take risks and more willing to wage war than the US and its allies. It’s not necessarily bluffing. “When confronting the opponent on a narrow path, the boldest will prevail.”

China is narrowing the path. Eventually, everyone’s boldness will be tested.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.