Australia’s focus on China security risks ignoring economic potential

Anyone expecting clarity from the fog of Sino-Australian relations should prepare to be disappointed.

The Australian’s Defence and National Security Editor, Paul Maley, Senior Fellow at US Studies Centre, John Lee and former secretary of the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson speaking at The Australian’s Strategic Forum. Picture: Nikki Short

Anyone expecting clarity to emerge from the fog of Sino-Australian relations should prepare to be disappointed.

Disputes over trade, human rights, foreign interference — as well as the occasional point of common interest — are not bumps on the road to a normalised relationship with China, they are the relationship with China.

If there was a single point of agreement among panellists at The Australian’s Strategic Forum on China on Monday it was this: the China of today is vastly different from the China of a decade ago.

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China in the twilight of 2019 is richer, more powerful and more politically self-assured than it has ever been.

That self-assurance is evident in China’s willingness to assert itself in ever more robust ways, witness its militarisation of the South China Sea.

But Beijing’s frailties and in particular its relative inexperience in operating within the international system, have also been on display.

The Chinese government’s decision to deny visas to Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and James Paterson on the grounds that they mildly criticised Beijing’s human rights record and questioned its strategic ambitions, says much more about China’s political immaturity than it does about the quality of Australia’s foreign policy debate.

Their foolish demand that the MPs “repent” if they wish to be taken out of the freezer also suggests that while the rest of the world has gone to great pains to understand China, China remains astonishingly ignorant about the basic unruliness of western democracies.

There is a latent sense in the Australian conversation around China that once Beijing fulfils its economic and military potential, relations will stabilise.

Martin Parkinson, who until August was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, a job that put him right in the wheel house of policy formation, told the Strategic Forum’s audience that in laying down the law on things like foreign interference, Australia was effectively laying down the boundary markers in a new relationship.

“Essentially we are engaged in a negotiation with China about our future sovereignty, that is, about the limits of where our interests and values will be protected,” Mr Parkinson said.

This is true, but it would be a mistake to assume that once that process is complete relations will begin to follow a more predictable course.

What is more likely is that Australia is in for decades of complex, often fraught diplomacy in which a range of issues like trade, higher education and strategic jostling are litigated separately and without reference to each other.

The risk throughout this is that Australia gives too much weight to the legitimate security concerns associated with China’s rise and ignores the economic potential, to say nothing of the Chinese government’s phenomenal achievement in lifting some 700 million people out of agrarian poverty and into the urban middle classes.