Beijing may well have more trade punishment in store for Australia. Next week will be crucial, with the EU resolution calling for an inquiry into the origins and spread of the coronavirus going to the World Health Assembly.
Beijing has decided to teach Canberra a lesson. Unhappiness at the Morrison government’s call for an independent review of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic is part of this. Long-running Beijing objections to our quite minuscule (in the scheme of Chinese trade) anti-dumping procedures also figure.
But the real problem is that Australia has decided not to be intimidated by Beijing and not to abandon its national interests. When Beijing decides to teach someone a lesson, it often claims it was provoked by an unfriendly media or political tone. It favours highly technical actions, around some Customs or labelling pretence.
But mostly Beijing is acting with clear strategic intent. When persuasion fails, it routinely resorts to intimidation. Our relationship has been heading for trouble for a decade and involves both sides of Australian politics.
Beijing was furious at Kevin Rudd’s 2009 Defence white paper, with its call for 12 regionally superior submarines and straightforward acknowledgment of Beijing’s central role in the worsening strategic environment. It was apoplectic about Rudd’s advocacy of human rights in a speech in Beijing, his description of Beijing’s role in wrecking the Copenhagen climate conference, and his tough, private remarks about the need for the West to have a military option against China to Hillary Clinton, later revealed via Wikileaks. On these matters Rudd was right but Beijing objected.
Chinese politics changed when Xi Jinping became President in 2013. Since then, there have been four ways Beijing wants to interfere with Australian life, which Canberra has resisted, and which has led to much of today’s difficult atmosphere. Beijing wants to be able to buy and control any Australian company it wants, including critical infrastructure. It wants to interfere in our politics, and to be able to intimidate, interfere with and manipulate the Chinese diaspora population within Australia. And it wants veto rights over our foreign policy and our domestic political debate.
Prime ministers from Rudd to Scott Morrison have determined Canberra will not bow to these ambitions. But Beijing keeps trying to enforce them. Take the cases one by one.
We strengthened the Foreign Investment Review Board and gave it a national security dimension. Most investments are approved but in critical infrastructure some have been refused. Chinese companies, working hand in glove with the Chinese state, have often kept up their bids even though they have been warned in advance they are unlikely to be approved. This is in order to bring maximum pressure on our political system.
Similarly, it is bipartisan policy that Huawei, a company closely linked to the Beijing government, cannot participate in our 5G network. Yet Huawei, a foreign company, continues actively to campaign within Australian politics, hiring ex-politicians and the like to change our national security policy. Can you imagine that happening in reverse?
Having discovered egregious examples of Beijing’s interference in our politics we passed, with bipartisan support, tough legislation against foreign interference. Beijing hated that. To safeguard the diaspora community from Beijing’s interference, our parliament refused to ratify a proposed extradition treaty. Beijing was nearly livid over this.
On foreign policy, Beijing hated our support for the legitimacy of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which ruled that China’s claims and actions in the South China Sea were without merit and illegal. It would love to weaken our alliance with the US.
On domestic political speech, Beijing tries to coerce voices critical of Chinese communism at our universities. It tried to prevent the screening of a film sympathetic to Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer. Privately it tries, absurdly, to hold the Morrison government politically responsible for the tone and content of independent media commentators and backbenchers when they talk of China.
No Australian government should censor political debate in this country. Thank God US President Donald Trump, and before him George W. Bush, never exhibited such sensitivities. And of course the Chinese populist press such as the Global Times, which is controlled by the Chinese government, runs rancid campaigns of abuse of Australia.
The point of this little recitation, far from comprehensive, of the relationship’s woes is this. No self-respecting Australian government could possibly have taken a different view on any of these matters.
All the decisions cited here had bipartisan support in Australia. But it is these real matters of substance, not some question of alleged tonal imperfection on the part of the Morrison government, which have caused the problems. Unless we are willing to give up our national independence, we are bound to have problems with Beijing.
Of course, any Australian government still has the responsibility to manage the relationship with Beijing as well and as calmly as it can. Which is why Morrison, Foreign Minister Marise Payne and the other senior ministers have consistently spoken in measured, neutral, almost technocratic terms in their advocacy of an independent review into the origins and spread of COVID-19.
A critical point is that comprehensive, pre-emptive kow-towing does not guarantee you a quiet life either, as New Zealand amply demonstrates. Over the past decade, Wellington has abandoned almost all principle on issues such as human rights, foreign policy, even much of foreign interference. Yet its recent timid suggestion that there could be some value in Taiwan, which has handled the COVID-19 crisis brilliantly, participating in the World Health Organisation, has earned it furious denunciation from Beijing.
The criticism of the Morrison government on the proposed coronavirus inquiry is misplaced and serves Beijing’s interests. Why didn’t Canberra have more support lined up in advance? In fact, within days of the Morrison government initiative, the EU unanimously proposed its own similar initiative.
Beijing itself has now agreed in principle that there must be an international inquiry. Given that Canberra is not prescriptive about the form this takes, Beijing’s position is now in fact the same as Canberra’s. It is punishing us just for speaking out of turn.
Morrison furnished genuine, needed international leadership in what should be an unexceptional initiative, to inquire into the greatest pandemic disaster of our time. He has rejected Trump’s conspiracy theory about the virus beginning in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is solid, independent, good policy from Canberra. Those Australians who think it all shamefully provocative really want to give Beijing enormous power over our actions, thoughts and words. That’s wrong.
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