Kowtowing to China will only lead us to Hong Kong

We all knew Beijing was an authoritarian regime, but suddenly everyone in its orbit is buckling to its demands: the Hong Kong government’s ban on the HK National Party, Google’s “special” China arrangements, Pope Francis’s compliance with Beijing’s selection of bishops. What does it mean for the world? And Australia?

Beijing promised Hong Kong autonomy when it took control of the British territory in 1997. Ever since, the struggle to develop some form of democracy, never at the forefront of British thinking during its rule, has been a frustrating one.

The last British governor, Chris Patten, coaxed China into making the following pledge four years before the handover: “How Hong Kong develops democracy in the future is a matter entirely within the sphere of Hong Kong’s autonomy, and the central government cannot intervene.”

Did Beijing ever mean it?

The democratic struggle in Hong Kong these past 20 years might be summarised best as Beijing maintaining control of the executive branch of government while promising an increasingly sceptical population it would one day achieve some form of democracy. The HKNP, founded in 2016, was an outcome of the 2014 umbrella movement, which in turn was a response to Beijing’s refusal to permit meaningful political self-determination.

The HKNP’s outlawing on September 24 may have been inevitable. China’s crushing of the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, not to mention the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, should have alerted us to the fact the heirs of Deng Xiaoping would be interested in improving livelihoods but not increasing the degree of freedom.

One might have hoped that the entry of Google and other big tech companies into China would change that. But former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acknowledged last week that in the future there would be two internets: a US-led version and a China-led one. Big tech’s promise to create “one world, one people” has been revoked.

It’s not just that China desires to bend the world to its will but that the rest of the world is capitulating at such speed.

Even the Vatican is in on the act. The Pope announced last month that the Holy See would recognise Beijing’s appointments of bishops as legitimate. Thousands of Chinese Catholics have sacrificed everything through the years to uphold the autonomy of the church. That’s just water under the bridge now.

Last June, Chinese officials began demanding that three dozen airlines, including Qantas, remove any references in their businesses to Taiwan as a country. Frances Adamson, the secretary of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, blasted China’s directive as “economic coercion”. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders expressed a similar opinion: “The United States strongly objects to China’s attempt to compel private firms to use specific language of a political nature in their publicly available content.”

Four American airlines failed, in Beijing’s view, to go far enough in meeting its demand; Qantas quickly fell in line.

Before the world entirely yields to the whims of President-for-life Xi Jinping, perhaps we might take stock of the situation.

We could dispense with the fantasy that Western-fuelled industrialisation is going to lead to Western-style democracy. China’s social credit system, designed to engineer “correct” individual ­behaviour according to the Chinese Communist Party, is strictly totalitarian.

Xi Jinping “thought”, such as it is, owes more to the conformist precedents set by the Qin and Han dynasties than quaint Western notions of liberty.

Appeasing China only emboldens Xi at home and abroad. Westerners who sell themselves to do the bidding of Beijing are not necessarily, as they might suppose, building better relations with a friendly but misunderstood civilisation. They are, in too many cases, enriching themselves at the expense of their compatriots for the advantage of a latter-day Middle Kingdom.

Peter Schweizer’s Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and En­riches Family and Friends is a good introduction to the subject.

Opposing China at every turn, however, is no longer viable. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, China accounted for almost 30 per cent of our total exports or $110.4 billion for the period 2016-17. Moreover, China’s surging imports of our primary products cushioned Australia during the time of the 2007-09 global financial crisis. But how acquiescent must we be?

The Australian political class, across the decades, has deluded itself into thinking we can play off the US against China, or at least sit on the fence.

Former foreign minister Bob Carr claims in his memoir, Run for Your Life, that being too closely aligned with the US “might be a danger to Australian security, not a guarantor of it”.

Australia supposedly needs to learn from Julie Bishop’s mistake last year when, as foreign minister, she caused a diplomatic row by criticising Xi’s militarisation of the South China Sea. Signing up to a Chinese version of Japan’s 1930-45 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere might not the end of the world.

The Trump administration, as it happens, is the only world player willing and able to take it up to China. America’s interrupter-in-chief believes Xi’s Belt and Road economic program is far too artificial and overly dependent on the rest of the world keeping China’s top-down economy ticking over.

That is where President Donald Trump’s leverage-by-tariff policy comes in. Only a country with the power of the US can throw a large enough spanner into the works to compel China to reconsider the “emperor Xi” fantasy.

The People’s Republic of China, if Xi’s imperial vision is fully realised, might one day be guaranteeing us our independence with these words: “How Australia develops democracy in the future is a matter entirely within the sphere of Australia’s autonomy, and the government of China cannot intervene.”

The anti-American brigade has long complained about us being the 51st state of the US, but what is their alternative in the grand scheme of things? America, as ever, is our last best hope.

Daryl McCann is a political commentator and blogger.