“The Chinese are not buying your stuff because you are all very good-looking people,” Bilahari Kausikan, the former head of Singapore’s foreign ministry, told me.
“They are buying your stuff because they need your stuff – your quality is good, your price is right. It’s not a favour they are doing for you.”
We were talking in October 2020. By then, Beijing’s coercion campaign was in its sixth month. Strikes had been launched on barley and beef. Threats had been made that more was to come.
The bad headlines were almost spot-on. By November, Beijing had sanctioned – mostly unofficially – Australian copper, cotton, lobster, timber, wine and coal.
All up, Australian exports previously worth more than $20bn a year were black-listed. They still are.
This is the “broadest, deepest and highest profile instance of contemporary Chinese economic coercion”, a team of Australian researchers concludes in an excellent new paper on the subject in the Review of International Political Economy.
The Ardern government and the numerous New Zealand industries highly vulnerable to Beijing’s next Tasman tantrum should give the paper a close read. In it, Victor Ferguson, Scott Waldron and Darren Lim outline how Australian industry responded.
Most exporters found new markets. For copper, cotton and coal that wasn’t hard.
Live lobsters were tricker. Many ended up being smuggled through Hong Kong – not an ideal outcome as gangsters and corrupt officials pocketed the fat profits that previously went to Australian fishermen, but it was still a way of diminishing the impact.
Australian timber was banned, but wood chips weren’t. What happened? Wood chip exports to China increased by 270 per cent. Again, it was far from ideal for the Australian industry – but it reduced the bite.
Chinese authorities have indicated they will soon allow Australian coal to be unloaded once again at China’s ports, albeit in much-reduced volumes.
Australian public sentiment will be much harder to adjust. However you ask the question, most Australians want a lot less of Xi Jinping’s China in their lives.
Fewer than a third want the Albanese government to support China’s entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, according to a pre-election survey by the University of Technology Sydney’s Australia-China Relations Institute.
That same survey found only 13 per cent of Australians would oppose Anthony Albanese if his government were to force Chinese company Landbridge out of its 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin. Most Australians want this to happen.
Australia is not the first country to experience a vindictive China. Japan had that formative experience a decade ago. It was scary stuff as anti-Japanese violence swept through China after a dispute over some small islands in the East China Sea.
South Korea, a fellow US ally, encountered an angry China in 2016. Seoul’s crime was the installation of a US-made antimissile system, an attempt to protect its citizens from ballistic missiles shot from North Korea, China’s only formal ally.
Beijing launched a sweeping campaign of trade coercion against Seoul. It held the record as China’s most ferocious – until it set a new personal best with its effort on Australia.
Japan and South Korea have since managed moderately to improve their relationship with China. As with Australia, Beijing waited until each had changed their government.
But public sentiment hasn’t improved. The Pew Research Centre recently found 80 per cent or more of South Koreans, Japanese and Australians share an unfavourable view of China.
I expect the reset in Australian public sentiment will be as durable as it has been in Japan and South Korea.
It is often said in Australia’s China debate that we should learn from these countries. I agree.
We have different histories. We speak different languages. We have profoundly different strategic geographies.
Still, most people in Australia, Japan and South Korea can agree on at least one point: China, with its current settings, is a difficult country to deal with – particularly for a formal US ally in the Indo-Pacific.
Both Japan and South Korea have strained but important relationships with China. They offer examples for the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and the rest of the government as they continue the difficult work of stabilising relations with Beijing.
It won’t be easy. But the failure of China’s economic coercion campaign offers hope.
And as Kausikan, that wise voice in Singapore, told me: Australia’s tension between its biggest security provider and biggest trading partner is far from unique.
“Have a bit more confidence in yourselves,” he advised.
Will Glasgow is The Australian’s North Asia correspondent.
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