If Australia’s closest Asian partners and allies are concerned about China’s escalating aggression against a smaller nation, they are keeping those worries largely to themselves.
While New Zealand, the US, Britain and France have all spoken out recently in support of Australia in the face of an onslaught of trade punishment from China and provocations from its anti-diplomats, the silence from Asia has been deafening.
Taiwan — a nation regarded by China as a breakaway province — is the only one to publicly express solidarity with Canberra this week after a fake image of an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child was tweeted by a Chinese foreign ministry official.
Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou told The Australian the two countries “enjoy a great relationship based on our common values of freedom, democracy and human rights”.
“Australia has recently come under attack by the People’s Republic of China, which spread blatantly false information and an altered image. The government and people of Taiwan stand with Australia,” she said.
On Wednesday the foreign ministry uploaded a picture of Australian wine to its Twitter account with the caption; “We stand in solidarity with #Australia by serving #FreedomWine at @MOFA_Taiwan”.
We stand in solidarity with #Australia🇦🇺 by serving #FreedomWine at @MOFA_Taiwan. #StrongerTogether pic.twitter.com/yrX1qPKxuB
— 外交部 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ROC (Taiwan) 🇹🇼 (@MOFA_Taiwan) December 2, 2020
But it is a lonely voice in Australia’s backyard. Requests for comment from Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean and The Philippines foreign ministers and senior Vietnamese officials have been declined or ignored as some of Canberra’s closest partners and allies seek to stay out of Beijing’s firing line.
Only The Philippines’ outspoken defence secretary, Delfin Lorenzana, responded, telling The Australian that Manila had for decades protested Chinese provocations in its own backyard, to little avail, and he did not expect China would back down in its dispute with Australia.
“They are now acting as a hegemon,” he said.
A reticence to intervene in other countries’ internal or bilateral matters is hardwired in many of our neighbours, and even enshrined in the organisational principles of the Association of South East Asian Nations.
It is hard to blame our neighbours for not wanting to poke their heads above the parapet, even if staying quiet in the hope the neighbourhood bully won’t pick on you next is an unreliable strategy.
But individually, and as a collective, they all have their own delicate balance to maintain with China, and never more so than now. Not only does the region’s economic salvation depend to a large extent on their powerful near neighbour, ASEAN’s largest trading partner, but its public health also.
Beijing has for months assured its neighbours that it will provide adequate supplies of any Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccines, even as wealthier nations have rushed to reserve the lion’s share of Western-developed vaccines for their own populations.
The quid pro quo is that everyone plays nice.
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