No half-measures as we join the tech Cold War

China’s angry response yesterday to Australia’s support for Washington’s co-ordinated accusations that China was behind widespread global cyberhacking is another sign of Australia being drawn into a technology-driven Cold War that will strain ties with Beijing.

While the federal government has been working hard to improve relations with Australia’s largest trading partner, China hit out at Australia and other countries yesterday, saying they were backing the US allegations and publishing “rumours”, which were “purely out of thin air”, and warning them that they risked damaging bilateral relations.

Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said these countries should stop their “deliberate defamation” of China, to prevent damage to “co-operation in important areas”.

Yesterday’s co-ordinated attack from Washington drew Australia deeper into the new US-led Cold War being fought in cyber space.

China and the US plan to resume talks on a new trade deal next month but the allegations throw the negotiations into question.

Australia will have to tread carefully as a determined US moves on many fronts to contain the rise of an increasingly confident, more nationalistic China.

As a country whose 27 years of uninterrupted economic growth has been highly dependent on ties with China, Australia has far more at stake than the US by being drawn into the new Cold War and its cyberhacking allegations.

China’s comments rejecting the US allegations and warning of the potential for “serious damage” to China-US relations raise serious questions about whether there can be any goodwill in future China-US trade talks, particularly if Beijing believes they are part of a broad containment strategy.

Yesterday’s unprecedented global criticisms of China — accusing its Ministry of State Security of being behind two Chinese hackers, Zhu Hua and Zhang Shillong, who have been charged with conspiracy to hack into more than a dozen companies and government agencies around the world — come as China’s President Xi Jinping has been celebrating his country’s 40 years of opening up and reform.

He said China’s economic growth in the past 40 years, from a weak economy in 1978 to the second-largest in the world, was unprecedented. The growth had taken almost 800 million people out of poverty and fuelled global economic growth.

Washington’s accusations against China yesterday — which were backed in the joint statement by Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton — were designed to well and truly rain on his parade.

They are a sign that regardless of the outcome of next month’s trade talks, the Trump administration will be driving a hard line against China well into the 2020 presidential election campaign, which will inevitably draw Australia in.

Decisions around the world, including in Australia, to ban Huawei from the next generation of 5G networks, on cybersecurity grounds, are just one battlefront in a larger war.

“The unprecedented mass condemnation marks a significant effort to hold China to account for its alleged malign acts,” US-based China commentator Bill Bishop wrote in newsletter Sinocism yesterday.

“It represents a growing consensus that Beijing is flouting international norms of fair play to become the world’s predominant economic and technological power,” he said.

Yesterday’s attack from Washington and allies will only confirm the view by some inside China that overt nationalism fuels determination by China’s critics to constrain its global influence.

“China is a big country with more than 5000 years of civilisation and more than 1.3 billion people,” Mr Xi said this week in his speech at the Great Hall of the People. “There is no golden textbook for us to follow. No one should be there to preach to China about what to do.

“China’s achievements were not gifted by others.”

The comments were widely seen as a rebuke to US Vice-President Mike Pence’s speech in September, which said the US helped China’s modernisation.