Bob Carr: now is the time for statecraft
Step back from anything that looks confrontational and wait until a more cooperative atmosphere evolves. This is the only advice to offer on the Australia-China front. Yes, this is a more nationalistic and assertive China with ideological rather than pragmatic leadership. Its action on Australian journalists is illiberal, heavy-handed and self-defeating.
It’s a matter of historic record, however, that Australia opted to tilt against China with speeches by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and foreign minister Julie Bishop as far back as 2017. For the first time in our diplomatic relations we were criticising China’s system of government and Turnbull went public calling for an American military build-up in the region (that is, a containment of China). This was a deliberate re-modulation in our bilateral relationship to impress Trump. We can assume China absorbed it.
When in August 2018 Turnbull excluded Huawei from the 5G network he let the world know he had phoned Donald Trump, like a loyal schoolboy. If we had been better diplomats, we would have simply said the matter was about the security and resilience of our national communications network. When in 2020 it came to seeking a Covid inquiry we suddenly had our foreign minister threatening “weapons inspection” style inspectors only days after our prime minister had spoken to the US president. We would have achieved the same goal using diplomacy and including China in it. Beijing couldn’t see this as anything other than a deeply unfriendly act.
Australian ineptitude might achieve the distinction of locking ourselves out of a China delivering 850 million extra people to middle-class status between 2012 and 2030; and of denying ourselves an extra dimension to our international personality, a western nation with viable links to China. Whatever happened to the creative middle power that could mobilise diplomacy to promote our interests without compromising our values?
Yes, even when our partner is prickly, proud, authoritarian. It’s when you want statecraft most.
• Bob Carr is the longest-serving premier of New South Wales and former foreign minister of Australia. He is industry professor of climate and business at the University of Technology Sydney
Elena Collinson: China is a reality that is not going away
Lines of engagement between Australia and China have slowly but surely been redrawn, with 2017 ostensibly seeing the last gasp of “business as usual” relations between the two countries.
To be sure, prime minister Scott Morrison and his senior ministers have continued to refrain from US-style antagonism in their China rhetoric, at pains to emphasise the well-worn, if amorphous, label, “comprehensive strategic partnership” to describe relations. On China’s part, there seemed to be some sort of a shift away from diplomatic posturing predicated on sound and fury towards an attempt at more cooperative rhetoric during a speech by China’s deputy head of mission in Australia last month. He’d said: “We don’t see Australia as a strategic threat. There is no fundamental conflict of interest or historical irritants to be healed.” But substantive actions by both countries have rendered these statements mere window dressing.
China’s increasingly heavy-handed actions – including, most recently, its apparently growing predilection for hostage diplomacy, as well as the sights its security agencies had set on two Australian journalists, forcing them out of the country – have only served to confirm Australian concerns about the character it has assumed under president Xi Jinping. They have also highlighted a pervasive insecurity about itself and its role on the world stage, rendering unpredictable how it will wield its power.
That said, it is imperative at this inflection point that Australia strives to keep lines of communications open and focus on de-escalation of tensions where possible, without sacrificing its own interests and values. China is a reality that is not going away. A sense of balance also needs to be maintained and knee-jerk overreaction avoided. Pursuit of dialogue and compromise ought not to be seen as weakness. It might be instructive, here, to hark back to John F. Kennedy’s advice: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
• Elena Collinson is a senior researcher at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney
Hamish McDonald: did anyone weigh the risks of retaliation?
A midnight knock on the door by Chinese police, as I experienced as correspondent, is a frightening episode of powerlessness. With Xi Jinping now citing the model of Mao Zedong’s “rectification” campaign, when eliminating internal opposition took precedence over fighting the Japanese, and Chinese security using advance surveillance, it’s even more Orwellian.
For the first time since 1973, Australia has no reporters in China, and China is vastly more important for us. Even after last week’s state security visit, I would have been inclined to stay on, if very nervously, as Bill Birtles and Michael Smith were not being accused of national security offences themselves. But given official warnings, the decisions of the ABC and AFR are understandable.
What now? First, unstinting support should be given to Cheng Lei, whose only offence seems to be Facebook postings (outside the Chinese firewall) critical of Beijing’s handling of Covid. China coverage can continue, as long as expulsions and visa-denials leave some other credible third-country journalists there.
Second, in extricating the correspondents our ambassador Graham Fletcher, a career China specialist, has shown our diplomatic expertise. Time to listen to it in Canberra. The foreign affairs portfolio should be brought back to the House of Representatives and filled by a stronger figure who can take over the narrative from a prime minister out of his depth. The Office of National Intelligence needs a new director general who can balance all the different elements of national security, broadly defined to include the economy and knowledge.
Dealing with China is not getting easier, as Xi moves to extend his power and Donald Trump targets China for his re-election. But the government should heed better advice, and avoid silly mistakes like Malcolm Turnbull’s “the Australian people stand up” remark or Scott Morrison’s “weapons inspector powers” demand for a Wuhan inquiry. On Tuesday China’s state news agency Xinhua reported that Asio raided four Chinese journalists here in June and took their phones. Did anyone weigh the risks of retaliation?
• Hamish McDonald is a former foreign editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and regional editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He was SMH-Age correspondent in Beijing 2002-2005
Michael Shoebridge: Australia is not alone
The prospect that the AFR’s Mike Smith and the ABC’s Bill Birtles were going to spend months in China’s notorious black jails, being interrogated and having no access to lawyers, drove them to seek Australian embassy protection and a negotiated exit from China.
We are wrong if we think that these incidents are primarily about the bilateral Australia-China relationship, although reactions from various commentators have largely taken the approach of centring things on “the relationship” and it “hitting rock bottom”. It’s more about the directions that Xi Jinping is taking domestically and internationally – and the collisions this is causing with how other nations and people live and organise.
What do we do from here?
First, we must stop pretending it’s primarily about how our government is “managing the relationship” and how much nuance and sophistication we can bring to sneakily marketing decisions that we must make in our national interests. Instead, our policy and action from here must be to work in partnership with other governments and societies who are also profoundly challenged by the directions China is taking and who face the same risks. That’s a broad set of partners from Tokyo, to Delhi, Washington, Brussels, Taipei, Paris and Berlin as a start. We’ve got to consider whether giving Chinese state media free access to our own societies to spread propaganda makes sense given the closing we see in China to our own voices.
Even more immediately, every business or organisation with Australian employees living and working in China must reassess their need to do so in light of the high and growing risk to their personal safety. Beyond the immediate safety risk, fundamental business strategies about access to the Chinese market must be reassessed, because the assumptions they were based on just a year ago have now fundamentally changed. We have to live with the China we see under Xi Jinping, not the China we wanted as recently as 2014 when Tony Abbott shook hands over a free trade agreement with Xi. The only good news here is Australia is not alone.
• Michael Shoebridge is director of defence, strategy and national security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
