Defence department could learn tricks of China’s trade

Australia needs to shape relationships to further self-interest, as Beijing does.

Brass could learn China trade tricks

Timing is everything when it comes to delivering a trouble-free Australian visit for a four-star Chinese general, and the same is true for managing relations between the Department of Defence and the Canberra press gallery.

These conflicting priorities produced a less than perfect outcome this week when Fang Fenghui, Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army and a Central Committee member of the Chinese Communist Party, briefly touched down in Canberra for the 18th annual Australia-China Defence Strategic Dialogue.

A bevy of attentive Chinese journalists accompanied the general on Monday to film his welcome parade at Defence’s Russell Offices, but the Australian media was not notified about the event or was given the dialogue media statement in Mandarin, which was handed to the general’s press cohort.

It was only a day later when the wheels were up on Fang’s departing plane that a short English language statement from Defence reported that an “open and frank discussion on issues of common concern” had been held between the two delegations.

There were notable differ­ences of tone between Chinese and Australian media coverage. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the discussions had apparently been “robust”, “direct and blunt”.

This contrasted markedly with the report of the Chinese Xinhua News Agency, self-described as the “information organ of the central government”, which reported Australian Defence Force chief Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin as “touting the agreement on joint counter-terrorism operations, peacekeeping training and exchange of personnel as a massive win for peace in the region”.

Such is the theatre of Australia-China defence relations. Both sides aim for highly managed exchanges in which any outcomes have been agreed weeks before the meeting.

The limited military to military contact agreed to at these meetings is claimed to point to a deepening strategic relationship, but is often superficial in terms of practical exchanges.

Success for China is measured by the degree of status accorded the visit: was the general brought to Canberra on an air force plane; were his greeters senior enough; did he meet the Defence Minister or the PM? For Australia, success is avoiding the type of negative media coverage that the latest visit generated.

As a senior Defence official, I attended several Australia-China strategic dialogues and, with Binskin, then vice-chief of the defence force, hosted the 14th dialogue in 2011.

In some respects, the dialogue has been a remarkable achievement. No country — certainly not the US — has had such a sustained engagement with the People’s Liberation Army.

One Chinese general told me the only country China engages with more deeply than Australia is Pakistan.

Why is the PLA so interested in the comparatively tiny Australian Defence Force?

Because the Australian military is a highly capable, technologically sophisticated force and — not unconnected — because of the strength of our ­alliance with the US.

In some ways China also thinks it’s safe to co-operate with the ADF. It can test ideas about engagement that later may be applied to its relations with the rather more fearsome US military.

It’s important to understand just how isolated the PLA is from engaging with peer armed forces. It was not unusual at the Australia-China strategic dialogues to meet three-star PLA generals in their 60s who might have had only one or two trips outside of China.

Chinese contact with foreign military forces is highly controlled and limited to a specialist group run by a three-star general, a deputy chief of the PLA general staff. While this is slowly changing, the rest of the PLA is mostly off limits to external contact. It’s as though engagement itself is seen to be a risk to the PLA’s core purpose.

For years, almost any Australian defence statement about China used the word transparency to argue that China needed to be more open about its strategic intentions. Openness, it was thought, would lead to greater understanding and would lower misapprehensions.

It was a rather naive hope. When Guo Boxiong, then vice-chairman of the Chinese Central Military Commission, visited Canberra in May 2010, he quickly dismissed the transparency argument, observing accurately enough that all military organisations had their secrets to keep.

Guo sported the jet-black dyed hair that is the mark of senior Chinese leaders and spoke Mandarin with a thick accent that one translator described as being like Glaswegian.

It turned out that he had a few secrets of his own to keep. In July this year he was expelled from the Communist Party for accepting bribes.

Guo has become the most senior military figure thus far to be caught in President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.

­According to Xinhua — the “official organ”, remember — the Chinese Politburo said Guo’s “acts seriously violated party discipline and left a vile impact”.

Guo’s fall from party favour points to the complete opacity of the Chinese military. There is ­almost a 30-year gap, for example, in the publicly available English language information about Canberra’s most recent PLA visitor, Fang.

We know nothing about the general from the point he joined the PLA in 1968 to his emergence as a deputy commander of a PLA unit in 1997.

As with all his senior colleagues, Fang’s experience of the Cultural Revolution will have been formative in shaping his views of how China engages with the world.

China doesn’t need to issue faux defence white papers for Australia to realise that the PLA’s single most powerful motivator is pursuing the interests of the Communist Party and the Chinese state, in that order.

That realisation should inform a tougher-minded Australian approach to defence and strategic engagement with China.

Our dialogue with the PLA is important and must continue, but the manner of our engagement shouldn’t compromise our own interests when it comes to publicly explaining policy.

Some recent events point to the need for Australia to rethink how we manage our strategic interests concerning China. These include the 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company; a raft of Foreign Investment Review Board decisions; our failure to physically assert our interest in freedom of navigation through the South China Sea; and the latest Chinese cyber-attack, this time on our Bureau of Meteorology.

The common denominator is a failure to appreciate just how tough-minded and strategic China is when it comes to maximising its self-interests.

Australia is every bit as capable of doing that, but a clear starting point must be to define what our interests are — such as accepting, for example, that the Port of Darwin has both strategic as well as commercial value and shouldn’t be sold.

Canberra needs also to ditch the reflex action of wondering “how does that get read in the Chinese embassy?”. We have Bob Carr’s diary to thank for the phrase.

It is possible to balance pragmatically our trade and investment interests with China and our defence, trade and investment interests with the US along with many other key relationships.

First, though, we need to have a clear sense of where our strategic interests lie and how these link to important national values about openness and transparency, the rule of law and democratic government.

Peter Jennings is executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.