Western alliance to combat Xi Jinping is of his own making

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

All is not going to plan for Xi Jinping and his comrades.

In 2014, he announced a New Asian Security Concept, declaring “it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia”.

It was a pitch to end the US alliance network in the Indo-Pacific – a bold call for Washington to let China take charge of the neighbourhood.

“These words were so shocking that some China analysts in the West dismissed the speech as an aberration – the unvetted product of a few unskilled Chinese diplomats,” writes Rush Doshi in his masterful book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order.

Among those dismissing the speech’s importance were senior sources of China advice in the Abbott government.

But that was another age.

As demonstrated by this week’s meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Scott Morrison to further upgrade military ties, Canberra and Tokyo are now actively working against Xi’s vision.

So, in a more quiet way, is fellow US ally South Korea, whose President Moon Jae-in was in Australia to discuss the region’s strained security environment three weeks ago.

In nearly every capital across the Indo-Pacific – from New Delhi to Hanoi to Taipei – all the talk is about Xi’s China and what to do about it. And in a disturbing development for Beijing, even capitals beyond the region are worried.

That’s why the UK is in AUKUS, a security grouping that would have been unimaginable only two years ago when the Johnson government was talking up China trade and investment.

Xi and the senior ranks of the Chinese Communist Party are the authors of this change. They have demonstrated that they will keep pushing until they hit steel. In doing so, they have dramatically changed America’s China policy: first, in an erratic fashion during the Trump presidency; and now in the more coherent approach of the Biden administration.

Doshi is now the China director of Biden’s National Security Council, working closely with his mentor Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Indo-Pacific tsar. They are key members of a team that has shelved the engagement era’s ideas of trying to change China.

The goal now, as Doshi wrote just before moving into the West Wing, is to work with allies and partners to create “external constraint on China’s ability to convert the sources of its power into political order”.

Canberra and Tokyo are two of the anchors of this approach, which has growing – but far from unanimous – support in the region.

It’s going to be a long game.