Chinese ambassador Xiao Qian’s accusation last week that Australia has violated the international rules of sovereignty was more than a little preposterous.
The communist regime he represents in Canberra had no regard for the rules when it occupied and militarised the South China Sea, imprisoned our citizens without rights, launched cyber attacks and stole intellectual property from our businesses and universities.
Nonetheless, Ambassador Xiao has a point on Taiwan, the sovereignty of which was ceded to Beijing by Gough Whitlam in return for the normalisation of relations with China less than three weeks into his prime ministership.
The December 1972 agreement recognised the People’s Republic of China “as the sole legal Government of China”. It acknowledged the Chinese government’s position that Taiwan is a province of the PRC and committed to closing the Australian embassy in Taipei the following month.
US president Richard Nixon had made his peace with communist China 10 months earlier, vowing to end official recognition of Taiwan and withdrawing military forces from the island.
In a joint communique, the US acknowledged the communists’ assertion “there is but one China” and reaffirmed Washington’s “interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves”.
William F. Buckley Jr described Nixon’s deal as a “staggering capitulation”, writing that the US had “lost — irretrievably — any remaining sense of moral mission in the world”.
It was the start of half-a-century of diplomatic doublespeak, dissembling and hypocrisy. It has been a breeding ground for absurd moral equivalence in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island is described by Beijing as a provocative threat to peace, even as the People’s Liberation Army staged a deadly fireworks display off Taiwan’s coast with live ballistic missiles.
When Xiao lectured the National Press Club about the misuse of the word invasion, he was arguably correct under the terms of the Whitlam agreement. Yet the moral imperative to defend Taiwan against incursion from the People’s Republic of China has not weakened.
The ambiguity was more easily dodged in the early 1970s when barely 3 per cent of our exports went to China, less than 1 per cent to Taiwan. Imports from both countries were negligible. China was on the verge of opening its economy and rejoining the world and the horror of Chairman Mao Zedong’s murderous atrocities had yet to lodge in Western minds. Taiwan had been under martial law for more than 20 years and its autocratic leader, Chiang Kai-shek, was hardly a champion of democracy.
Yet things have changed considerably since then, making Western abandonment of Taiwan unconscionable. Expectations that economic freedom would open the way for other freedoms in communist China were dashed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It turned out that new communists were no different from the old ones, driven by a desire for command and control, a conviction that the welfare of individuals was subservient to the welfare of the state and prepared to sacrifice the lives of citizens if that’s what it took to stay in power.
Taiwan, on the other hand, has made a glorious journey in the sunlit uplands of liberty. The first direct presidential election in 1996 was a turning point. Taiwanese voters took to the streets with exuberance in a peaceful and fair election that defied the Chinese Communist Party’s claim that the Chinese people are not suited to democracy.
The only violence in that election was perpetrated by the PLA which marked the occasion by firing ballistic missiles inside Taiwan’s territorial waters off the ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung. From that moment, there could be no doubt about whose side we were on.
Meanwhile, China has achieved enough military might to make it a threat to the global balance of power. The communists in Beijing seek not just incorporation of Taiwan but an enlarged sphere of influence that would subjugate Japan and nations in the Pacific. Should the PRC succeed in crushing Taiwan it would be emboldened to pursue its goal of overturning the liberal world order that has held firm since the 1940s.
It would result in the domination of a power hostile to Australia’s interest for the first time in its settled existence. It has been part of the Anglosphere since 1788, when the British Admiralty succeeded in colonising Australia before it fell to the French.
It was the reason Imperial Japan had to be defeated in World War II. It is the reason we must be prepared to defend our strategic interests in coalition with other free nations while hoping that the CCP might come to its senses and settle matters peacefully.
Australia’s best approach to dealing with the PRC can be summed up in an eight-word aphorism: hope for the best, prepare for the worst. We’ve become pretty good at the hoping part since 1972 but have done precious little preparing, Senator Jim Molan writes in a new book, Danger on our Doorstep: Could Australia Go to War With China?
War is not inevitable or even likely, but it cannot be dismissed as impossible just because the thought is so appalling that it could never occur, writes Molan.
“It is more likely than most Australian commentators, and indeed most world leaders, are saying,” he writes. The CCP does not accept the security that stems from open trading relations and has no respect for international law and conventions, says Molan. It must reduce US power and increase its own.
We’d be foolish to imagine that China’s indignation at Pelosi’s visit was not genuine or that President Xi Jinping does not sincerely believe that Taiwan, an island that has never been part of China, must be restored to the motherland.
This delusion has been baked into the narrative and fed an expansionist ambition that will not be easily deterred. The West has indulged Chinese thinking by pretending that Taiwan is not a state, downgrading representation in Taipei from ambassadors to trade officers and bowing to pressure to change its destination board at airports to read “Taipei, China” not “Taipei, Taiwan”.
The pivot towards a more robust and realistic engagement between Australia and China that began under former prime minister Scott Morrison will be incomplete so long as we continue to mince our words about Taiwan.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
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