The good times with China are over. Get used to it

Why can’t our leaders just repair relations with China? If only Canberra toned down its rhetoric, restored a dialogue and rebuilt trust with Beijing, all would be well. Instead, the federal government needlessly provokes our largest trade partner by implementing foreign interference laws, rejecting the Huawei 5G network bid, and calling for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus.

Security trumps prosperity in international politics.Credit: Matt Davidson

Many Australian academics, business leaders and former diplomats are deeply invested in this perspective. They believe China can rise peacefully and, when there is trouble, it is invariably the fault of either Washington’s hawkish policies or inept Australian diplomacy.

This line of thinking is unsurprising since so many of us came of age in what the prominent American columnist Charles Krauthammer called in 1990 the “unipolar moment”. The dangerous bipolar world of the Cold War had been replaced by a unipolar world in which the US had no serious rivals. Thus, Washington was ideally situated to help shape a rules-based liberal international order.

Indeed, a year earlier, in 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama had declared “the end of history”, which meant the world had entered a liberal and democratic epoch, which was likely to bring peace and prosperity all across the planet.

Although Krauthammer and Fukuyama had their critics, their theses profoundly shaped Western public discourse about international relations for the first 25 years after the Cold War. It was widely believed that the old zero-sum game of power politics (where one country’s gain is another’s loss) was rapidly giving way to a new world characterised by mutually beneficial dependence.

“In a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march,” Bill Clinton declared in 1992, “the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute. It is ill-suited to a new era.”

This history helps explain the West’s deep engagement with China following the collapse of the Soviet Union. From an Australian perspective, it made perfectly good sense. The extensive trade relationship that developed helped make Australia prosperous. Many of us assumed that China’s integration into the liberal world order would help turn it into a liberal democracy and, to use US Republican policymaker Robert Zoellick’s words, a “responsible stakeholder” in that peace-producing order.

Regrettably, things didn’t work out as planned. We’ve been mugged by reality. With the rise of China and the resurrection of Russian power, unipolarity has morphed into multipolarity, which means the return of great-power competition.

The Pax Americana no longer exists. Witness America’s costly misadventures in the Middle East and its foolish policies towards Russia – especially expanding NATO up to its border – which antagonised Moscow and pushed it closer to Beijing. Nor is democracy triumphant: according to Freedom House, last year was the 14th consecutive year of democratic backsliding, with 64 nations experiencing a loss of liberties.

As for China, its love affair with the West is over. Having emerged from two centuries of economic and military weakness to finally master sophisticated Western technologies, a more authoritarian China is growing rapidly and converting its economic might into strategic clout.

Unsurprisingly, China’s definition of its vital national interests is growing along with its power – and it is busily trying to build an expansive sphere of influence in East Asia, which is certain to alarm Australians across the political spectrum, not to mention people across the Indo-Pacific region.

From Beijing’s standpoint, it makes good strategic sense to challenge American pre-eminence in East Asia. It’s how rising great powers behave: they invariably try to dominate their region of the world, as the US did in the 19th century.

The tragedy, as leading American realists John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt argue, is that as Beijing asserts itself in East Asia and other regions, Washington will go to great lengths to contain Chinese expansion. And it probably won’t matter who is in the White House. It follows that, if China continues to grow, the security competition in East Asia will become more intense.

What is likely to make this rivalry even worse is that Beijing is not good at winning friends and influencing people. It appears to have no sense of the importance of “soft power”, as the “wolf warrior” diplomacy of China’s ambassadors makes clear. This heavy-handed behaviour is seen by many as a threat to the sovereignty of countries in the region, including Australia. Hence our present crisis with Beijing.

It is not surprising that many Australian friends of China desperately want to repair relations with Beijing. After all, China accounts for about 40 per cent of our export wealth and the continued deterioration in relations between the two countries is likely to hurt our post-virus economic recovery.

The return of harmonious relations is not on the cards because security always trumps prosperity in international politics. A Lowy Institute poll shows that 77 per cent of Australians think we “should do more to resist China’s military actions in our region, even as it affects our economic relations”.

None of this is to deny that there will still be substantial trade between China and all its security rivals, including Australia. However, there are likely to be limits on that economic intercourse, especially regarding sophisticated technology. After all, whenever there is a conflict between economic and security imperatives, the latter will prevail.

Because we lived for so long in a unipolar world that was dominated by our closest ally and because East Asia was so peaceful during that period, we came to think it was forever. It was hard to imagine great-power rivalry ever returning to this region. But that world has gone away, mainly because of the rise of China, which we helped fuel.

The Sino-American rivalry is likely to be the defining feature of international relations in the century ahead and it’s mainly going to take place in our neighbourhood. This is not a welcome development by any means, but it is our future.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.