‘Unspeakable consequences’: Kevin Rudd’s warning on China war

Kevin Rudd has painted a grim picture for Hong Kong’s future as a US-led coalition seeks to counteract Beijing’s growing military and economic might.

Kevin Rudd. Picture: AFP

Kevin Rudd has painted a grim picture for Hong Kong’s future as an increasingly “Leninist and Marxist” Chinese Communist Party erodes the island’s freedoms and US-led coalition seeks to counteract Beijing’s growing military and economic might.

In one of his first public remarks as ambassador to the US, Mr Rudd also said the US, Australia and other democracies were united in an “active campaign of expanded deterrence to cause Xi Jinping to think twice and thrice about whether [China] could get away with any unilateral military action against Taiwan”.

“The fundamental reality here is the actual conduct of a war between the United States and its allies over Taiwan would spell unspeakable consequences for the world, and not just the Indo Pacific region”.

The former Labor prime minister, who took up his position as ambassador earlier this year, was a guest speaker at a Financial Times conference in Washington on Saturday (Sunday AEST).

“In terms of a message to the Hong Kong people it should be one of continued solidarity but the act to directly assert China‘s effective sovereignty over Hong Kong through the National Security Law in 2019 and 2020 has fundamentally changed the game and we cannot ignore that. It’s just a reality,” he said.

The US Congressional Executive Commission on China last week urged the Biden administration to sanction Hong Kong’s national security judges personally for their role in ignoring legal freedoms China had promised the UK under the terms of the 1997 handover, which were meant to last until at least 2047.

The number of political prisoners in Hong Kong, a former British colony with a population around 7.5m, has exploded from 26 in 2014 to 1,459 (including one as young as 13), mainly as a result of arrests made during and after the pro-democracy protests, according to the CECC.

“If you speak to people in the private sector, the ability to stick your head up and say anything, even criticise the legal system, which ultimately is the linchpin of Hong Kong‘s international commercial reputation, is now at stake,” Mr Rudd said, in answer to a question about complaints in Hong Kong that the west was deserting them.

Mr Rudd said the US and China should ensure “guardrails” so the two nations were not drawn into a cataclysmic war unintentionally, given the growing Chinese military presence in the Indo-Pacific at the same time as the US expands its naval presence in the Philippines.

“Neither of them has an interest in accidentally crossing trip-wires into crisis conflict and war by accident,” Mr Rudd said.

“I sometimes think as I read the general literature that a crisis over Taiwan is a bit likely the Falklands crisis. It‘s going to happen over there: some ships will go bang and hop and there are casualties on the ground. It ain’t like that.”

The ambassador’s remarks came as the leaders of the G7 nations, meeting in Hiroshima, condemned China’s “economic coercion” and militarisation of the South China Sea, two major bones of contention with the US alongside Beijing’s ongoing efforts to drawn Taiwan into its own political orbit.

“Xi Jinping has decided to take the Chinese Communist Party towards the Leninist left in politics and that means infinitely more power for the party over all aspects of Chinese life, society and public policy and national security and foreign policy too,” Mr Rudd, who recently completed a PhD on Xi Jinping’s philosophical disposition, said.

“He has also for ideological reasons, decided to take the centre of gravity of Chinese economics towards the towards the Marxist left”.