Warning over China’s ‘hard power rise’

Labor MP Michael Danby has delivered a tough speech in Japan warning of China’s rise in “hard power”.

Michael Danby gives his speech in Japan. Picture: Rowan Callick.

Outspoken Labor MP Michael Danby has delivered a tough speech in Japan warning of China’s rise in “hard power”, and praising the “push-back by Australia’s democratic system” against soft power initiatives.

Speaking to a Citizen Power Initiatives For China conference in Tokyo, the member for Melbourne Ports and former chairman of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, said: “Many countries like Australia want to maintain good commercial and trading relations with China.”

But Australia’s push-back has resulted from China’s “blatant Comintern-like activity,” referring to the former Soviet Union-based international communist organisation.

Mr Danby welcomed the “tightened procedures and more strategic understanding by the Foreign Investment Review Board” of Chinese investments, as well as the bipartisan support for the barring of political donations from foreign individuals and organisations.

He told the audience in Tokyo that “Beijing’s rude interference in political donations, Chinese language and student organisations, have all been the subject of major media exposes.”

China now has the largest navy in Asia, Mr Danby said. He cited reports that China plans to operate up to six aircraft carriers. Its second carrier was recently launched but is not yet in service. Its destroyer and frigate numbers have more than doubled to a total of 64, in the last decade.

He said that the military modernisation under President Xi Jinping “supports the domestic goal of conveying to the Chinese public a sense of growing strength and rejuvenation, but it also serves as a way to attempt to decouple Washington from its regional alliances.”

It does this, he said, by raising doubts among America’s allies about the reliability of US security guarantees: “If, for example, states such as Japan, the Philippines and Australia begin to doubt the will and ability of the US to use force against China to defend their interests, they may become more willing to defer to China’s preferences.”

Mr Danby said: “The continuation of freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea will be a key test of US resolve.”

He said: “In addition to pursuing expansive actions in the South China Sea, Mr Xi has also stepped up repression within China, and strengthened reactions to events in Hong Kong and Taiwan.”

China has increasingly pursued efforts, he said, to influence the politics and economies of neighbours in south-east Asia and the Pacific, “as an aspect of Mr Xi’s overall program to compete with the influence of the US globally.”

He criticised efforts of China’s United Front Work Department to guide activities outside China, “working with politicians and other high profile individuals, Chinese community associations and student associations, and sponsoring Chinese language, media and other cultural activities,” as in the past, Soviet agents “orchestrated political movements across countries.”

This amounts, he said, to “a new level of ambition” in harnessing the overseas Chinese population for the Chinese Communist Party’s economic and political agenda.

Mr Danby said: “Of course, it is completely normal that the ethnic Chinese communities in each country seek political representation — however, this initiative is separate from that spontaneous and natural development.”

Foreigners with access to political power, he said, are being appointed to high profile roles in Chinese companies or Chinese funded entities in the host country, and credible academics, entrepreneurs and politicians are co-opted to promote China’s perspective in the media and academia.

Positive relations are built, he said, “with susceptible individuals via shows of generous political hospitality in China.”

Academic partnerships are set up with universities and publishers, “then China’s censorship rules are imposed as part of the deal.”