Clear china policy needed

We can’t let disagreement and distance become Australia’s official strategy for China relations by default.

We can’t let disagreement and distance become Australia’s official strategy for China relations by default.

Canberra is starting at long last to step tentatively towards an identifiable position on China, with the federal government and opposition agreeing on new parameters for foreign interference through two new pieces of legislation, and that’s a big plus.

A strong degree of bipartisanship is crucial for meaningful foreign policy, otherwise it risks being trashed every three years — the worst of all worlds for our international partners, for whom predictability is so important.

The Turnbull government introduced a new foreign affairs white paper late last year that manifested cautious common sense.

But it’s time now, after our prolonged debate about Chinese interests, core values and strategic priorities, to cast a policy document on China that can be endorsed by both major parties, and that can be explained carefully and respectfully at senior political levels between our countries.

For the more benign elements of the Beijing side, Canberra appears to have pushed hard for a comprehensive strategic dialogue role — agreed under Julia Gillard — then an unusually comprehensive free trade agreement — agreed under Tony Abbott.

Since then, though, what has Australia sought to achieve through the relationship?

It makes sense to start work now on an ambitious China platform that Labor will also be prepared to endorse.

Stephen FitzGerald and Linda Jakobson of the think-tank China Matters have made a good start with a punchy paper of their own, pointing out the need for just such a “realistic narrative … to serve as a guide for politicians and public servants to explain the People’s Republic to the public”, and to our business community, and as importantly, to Beijing itself.

They explain that “Australia needs a robust and realistic policy to respond to” China’s assertiveness as it steams ahead in the New Era declared by Xi Jinping to replace that of Deng Xiaoping.

It’s important, as they rightly say, “that Australia is not marginalised as the PRC strives towards its goal of being the dominant power in the region” — whether that goal is actually realised or not.

Unacceptable PRC government interference in our society must be met head on, they say — but especially through “low key but intensive diplomacy”.

As a small country, they add — “medium-sized” would be more appropriate, given that our economy is the size of Russia’s — “Australia must care about international rules, and demonstrate this consistently and not ignore rules when it suits … The PRC now wants to alter some of the rules more to its liking, as large powers do”. A realistic China narrative will “find mutually acceptable rules that all will abide by”.

In framing this new China policy, business leaders whose sole income stream comes from China or Chinese connections should be heard, but we can’t let their voices alone dictate, for obvious reasons.

It may be prudent for them to investigate options for diversifying revenue sources, too. China’s appetite for our iron ore, coal and gas continue to loom especially large in the relationship. Long may this last. For our own dependency on this trade continues to increase as the surge in energy costs prevents us from increasing the extent of our transformation of raw materials.

Tourism from China still has room to grow as long as we continue to develop the appropriate infrastructure and human skills, but students — the other major export — are reaching, and may in some institutions have surpassed, the maximum assimilable for all our benefits, including those of the parents who sacrifice to send them here.

Leaving to one side a few especially strident voices, Australia’s business community remains (from my own experience, especially from talking extensively in recent weeks on Xi’s core “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”) commendably open-minded, even while expressing overall concern about the responsible direction our China policy should take, in reviewing the comprehensive connections developed in recent years.

My experience also points to the desire of the Chinese ethnic community in Australia — a million strong and extremely diverse in its outlook and origins and in the reasons the families have settled here — to address the official-level relationship not only responsibly but also realistically.

That community knows better than the rest of us that the recent intensity of this topic in Australia has primarily been driven not by changes here but by the extraordinarily relentless and rapid transformation of China, and of its regional and global ambitions, under Xi, its most powerful party leader since — some would say including — Mao Zedong.

It’s important in developing this China policy that the drafters explain frankly not only to the business and Chinese ethnic communities, but also to state governments and oppositions, and to university leaders — both groups have pursued their own especially close relationships with official China — the need to understand the challenges involved in a more comprehensive context.

For while people-to-people links are booming, and will surely provide the central, most enduring element in the China relationship, institutional connections come with connotations, especially as China is being restructured under Xi to ensure the party’s role is central in all areas of life.

It’s important also to note that other countries have also in recent years felt even colder winds blowing from Beijing — most palpably, South Korea, which retains the antimissile defence system China opposed so strenuously, claiming it could “see” into its own defence infrastructure.

The Qantas controversy underlines the need for this new document.

It would address issues such as “the” One China policy in relation to Taiwan, explaining clearly ­Australia’s own One China policy.

It is important, in drawing up a China document, that it underlines the need to understand China, its wonderful cultures and peoples, its extraordinary history, its diversity, as comprising more than the People’s Republic party-state — for all the latter’s undeniable confidence, drive and successes at home and increasingly abroad.

If our links with China in this broader sense were truly stagnating, this debate would have tailed away long before.

Its liveliness underlines the comprehensiveness and significance of that relationship — whose formal shape now needs to be articulated.