Two of Canberra’s most important partners head to Beijing for Xi’s anti-Western extravaganza
Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are flocking to Beijing for two of Xi Jinping’s biggest diplomatic set-pieces. Troublingly, so are the leaders of two of Australia’s most important partners (along with Bob Carr and Dan Andrews).
The world’s dictators – Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and more – are flocking to Beijing for two of Xi Jinping’s biggest diplomatic set-pieces of the year.
Uncomfortably for Canberra, the democratically elected leaders of two of Australia’s most important partners, India’s Narendra Modi and Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto, are also China-bound.
Embarrassingly, for the Albanese government, so are Bob Carr and Dan Andrews.
“Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together,” Xi told Putin a few years ago.
And that was before the alliance chaos of the second Trump administration.
Modi’s trip to China will be his first since 2018. This Wednesday, days before the Indian Prime Minister was set to fly to Tianjin, Washington whacked India with 50 per cent tariffs. Xi and Putin were no doubt delighted.
During the epic breakdown of relations between the Turnbull and Morrison governments and Xi’s administration, many in Australia took comfort with the clear unpopularity of China among wealthy liberal democracies.
Surveys by the Pew Research Centre showed Australians were in good company: Japan, South Korea, America, Canada and most of Europe were similarly distrustful of Xi’s increasingly bullying Beijing. But those Pew surveys didn’t ask the same questions of the non-wealthy world, those countries where most of earth’s eight billion people live. In many of them, Xi’s China is viewed much more favourably.
In many of those countries, public sentiment doesn’t really matter because they are ruled by iron-fisted dictators. In those benighted places, the leader-to-leader relationship is what determines things, not public sentiment.
Among the dictators of Central Asia, for example, Xi is spoken of as one of the great men of history.
“One of the most important qualities of my friend Xi Jinping’s leadership is his ability to combine the finest traditions of China’s profound civilisation with the requirements of the times,” Tajikistan’s President, Emomali Rahmon, who has ruled for 31 of his 72 years, told Chinese state media in an interview published this week.
“In this sense, he possesses a unique style and model of political leadership that is widely recognised in the international community. Without doubt, he is a leader of global influence.
“Xi’s initiatives are of particular importance in the fields of global development and security, as they are aimed at addressing global challenges by promoting co-ordinated development and safeguarding both regional and global security.”
This weekend, the Tajik President – “Leader of the Nation” and “Founder of Peace and National Unity”, to use the titles bestowed on him by Tajikistan’s parliament – will meet in Tianjin, in China’s northeast, with a clutch of Central Asian leaders and some of the world’s most influential figures, including Modi.
They will be there to attend the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation’s annual leaders meeting, a gathering ridiculed for years by many in the liberal democratic world, but one which Xi and his most important partner on the international stage, Russia’s leader for life, Putin, believe is shaping the world in their favour.
The head of Myanmar’s military junta, Min Aung Hlaing, has also been invited as a special guest. He will stay on in China, along with many of the world’s tyrants, for a huge military parade in Beijing next Wednesday, nominally to mark the 80th anniversary of what the Chinese Communist Party calls “the Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War”.
It’s also reported former Labor premiers Bob Carr and Dan Andrews have been invited.
The People’s Liberation Army will use this celebration of “peace”, at which Russia’s warmonger is the guest of honour, to unveil its new stealth bomber, the J-20, along with potent new hypersonic missiles and uncrewed weapons.
The North Korean dynastic dictator will also join Xi to admire the new Chinese kit. So, disturbingly for Canberra, will Indonesia’s President Prabowo and Malaysia’s leader, Anwar Ibrahim.
No NATO nation’s leader will attend, nor any of its close partners, Japan, South Korea or New Zealand. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a recent lunch mate of Xi’s, is keeping well away.
But before the pomp and steel in Beijing, there will be the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation summit, another demonstration of the country’s increasing confidence on the world stage.
The SCO grew out of the Shanghai Five, a Chinese initiative formed in 1996 to co-ordinate dialogue with Russia and the central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Beijing and Moscow, even in the pre-Putin era, have long used it as a vehicle to push back on US hegemony, a shared anxiety for them both in the post-Cold War era as America’s power greatly surpassed that of all other nations.
In 2001, early in Putin’s first term as Russia’s President, the group was given its current name and Uzbekistan became its sixth member.
America tried to get observer status for the group, but was rejected in 2005. That same year, Putin’s long-serving Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, said the “Shanghai Co-operation Organisation is working to establish a rational and just world order”.
For decades, it has looked to be a quixotic mission. That has all changed in the Trump era.
Its most recent members are Iran and Belarus, reinforcing the group’s surly, anti-US credentials. Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (who had the rare honour earlier in the year of having lunch with Xi in Zhongnanhai) will both attend and stay on for the military parade.
Pakistan and India joined in 2017. New Delhi deemed it untenable to allow its greatest South Asian rival, Pakistan, to join a grouping led by its greatest Asian rival, China.
India’s inclusion has given the SCO bragging rights for representing “nearly half of the world’s population”, more than any other grouping. But it has also added to the already significant internal differences in the group.
In last year’s SCO leaders’ statement, all members but one praised Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative and “commended the efforts made by all parties to jointly implement” the more than $2 trillion Chinese infrastructure leviathan. The lone SCO member not singing BRI’s praises: India.
That’s hardly the only disagreement. At a meeting of SCO defence ministers in the east coast Chinese city of Qingdao in July, India’s Defence Minister, Rajnath Singh, protested the omission in a statement by the group of a mention of the Pahalgam attack this April, in which 26 Indian tourists were killed.
New Delhi nurses deep mistrust about China’s military and diplomatic backing of Pakistan. The increasing sophistication of Chinese kit – on display as Pakistan’s made-in-China planes shot down at least two French-made Indian jets in a fight earlier this year – weighs heavily on the Indian security establishment.
It seems to have contributed to Modi’s decision to mend, or as we say in Australia, “stabilise”, relations with Xi after they nosedived following a deadly border clash in 2020 during China’s pugnacious Wolf Warrior summer in the first year of the Covid pandemic.
While India has a myriad of deep disagreements with many of its fellow SCO members, particularly Pakistan and China, it comfortably signs up to much of the Beijing-headquartered group’s agenda.
Last year in the leaders’ joint statement, “the member states reaffirmed their commitment to building a more representative, democratic and just multipolar world system”.
Trump’s ongoing slights towards Modi, a leader with an ego to rival that of his American counterpart, should only encourage the Indian Prime Minister to sign up to similar wording, or more, in the SCO’s Tianjin statement.
However, in some good news for Canberra, Modi headed to Japan before his China trip to meet Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and other top Japanese officials to “build greater resilience in the relationship”. Modi will also not be hanging around for next week’s PLA pageantry.
For Japan and Australia, who have for more than a decade nurtured India as a crucial partner in thwarting China’s domination of the Indo-Pacific, the rupture in US-India ties is alarming.
And with Trump treating Modi so shabbily, is it any wonder Prabowo and others in the region are looking to hedge?
Australia’s ongoing Trump turbulence – spotlit again with Washington’s digs this week at Defence Minister Richard Marles – can only reinforce their assessment, confirming long-held doubts about American reliability in Southeast Asia and beyond.
For decades, it has been easy to mock the SCO’s annual gathering and the internal tensions within the group.
But with the three non-American members of the Quad alliance – India, Japan and Australia – all squabbling with Trump’s White House, this week may be Xi and Putin’s time to laugh.
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