We are all at odds over China because we don’t have a plan

The events of the past few years have demonstrated that our strategy for dealing with the rise of China is out of date. It requires a serious and systematic rethink.

We cannot go back to the halcyon days of Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and John Howard. We can’t go on improvising in an ad hoc manner. Nor can we move forward safely on the lines urged by those, such as Hugh White, who assert that China’s dominance is inevitable and the end of US hegemony in East Asia at hand.

Rather, we need to reframe our strategic planning and diplomacy in Indo-Pacific terms. Xi Jinping has demonstrated that misgivings about his regime and his overweening strategic ambitions are warranted. He has shown that China under his aegis is not our friend. A trusting relationship with Xi’s China is next to impossible.

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He requires acquiescence and submission.

That’s the context for Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo’s remarks about the drums of war. We don’t want and won’t accept subordination to Beijing. None of our substantial Asian neighbours, from Delhi to Tokyo, wants subordination either. We handled relations with China well during the past 40 to 50 years, including disagreements over various things. We have profited handsomely from its long boom. We are still so profiting. Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox urges that we bear this in mind and tread carefully.

But Xi’s China is at a profound watershed – economically, politically and geopolitically. We need a strategy for hedging against possible turbulence. The elements of such a strategy are to hand, but it needs far better articulation. It hasn’t yet been thought through, much less institutionalised as was our strategy for the China boom under Hawke, Paul Keating and Howard.

Independent MP Craig Kelly says appeasing China "is not going to work". "We need to stand up as Anzac partners – Australia and New Zealand – tell them that we are going to stand up for own values – and we are going to criticise China where it’s necessary," Mr Kelly told Sky News. "We just cannot be singly relying on China for our exports and source of export income".

China under Xi is menacing but also brittle, not rising relentlessly. The immense expenditure Beijing is putting into surveillance, repression, censorship, indoctrination, trolling and propaganda shows how insecure it is. China’s attempts to corrupt or coerce many foreign governments betray a lack of ease or self-assurance, rather than a mastery of the game. It seeks to bully because it lacks the capacity to lead.

Our strategy must play on these things. Audrye Wong, of the Harvard Grand Strategy, Security and Statecraft program, points out in her essay “How not to win allies and influence geopolitics” (Foreign Affairs journal, May/June) that wherever transparency and accountable government rule, China’s attempts to suborn or corrupt foreign states are floundering.

We’ve begun to show that in this country. Beijing needs to learn that leadership must be earned, not brusquely asserted. Its assertiveness is alienating many, not buttressing the case for a Chinese led new order. That’s why there’s the Indo-Pacific Quadrilateral Dialogue between the US, Japan, India and Australia.

In a long front-page piece for the Saturday Paper a few weeks ago, White reiterated his familiar mantra that China will soon be the largest economy in the world; that, therefore, its will can’t be thwarted and a new Chinese-dominated order is inevitable. He concedes this would be much less to our liking than the US-led order.

What he doesn’t allow is that most other countries in Asia feel the same about this. Some favour a rebalancing. Almost none favour Chinese hegemony. White concluded that coping with the looming Chinese hegemony would require “hard work, deep thought and subtle execution”. Unfortun­ately, he has never spelled out the nature of that work, the “deep thought” required or how “subtle execution” would handle a domineering China. Those inclined to his strategic outlook fail to allow that it is only in co-ordination with our Asian neighbours (especially the heavyweights among them), backed by the still formidable power of the US, that we could possibly conduct a “subtle” relationship with China. There is, after all, nothing subtle about the way Xi does business – at home or abroad.

It needs to be made clear to Xi and his party colleagues that his approach to international affairs is counter-productive. It should be indicated diplomatically, but clearly and firmly, that should China resort to the use of force against its neighbours, including Taiwan, that would set off a chain reaction of alarm. That would itself be costly to China’s own enduring interests – regardless of whether it prevailed in the immediate instance. This is what the Quad is all about – not ill-will towards China but growing concern about its assertiveness and military build-up.

Should the time come when the rest of Asia, from India to Japan, feel at ease with China’s wealth and power, the US military presence in the Indo-Pacific might become redundant. For as long as China hectors and bullies the rest of us, this is unlikely and undesirable. The clearest index of Beijing’s failure in this regard has been its escalating threats to use force against Taiwan, a de facto self-governing and prosperous state four times the size of Singapore.

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Certainly, deep thought and subtle execution are demanded in rethinking and readjusting our strategic and foreign policies.

Where White and those like him are in serious error is in their apparent belief that we could successfully do this in bilateral relations with China after the US had withdrawn its military presence and security guarantees from East Asia and the Indo-Pacific. We need those things precisely to induce Beijing to see a slow and equitable rebalancing as preferable to any attempt to force a radical revision of global order.

The problem is not China’s wealth. It’s an assertive dictatorship in Beijing. Xi’s actions and ambitions have rendered long-cherished assumptions about China invalid. Talk about the “drums of war” is symptomatic of growing alarm.

However, our foreign and strategic policy responses had been rather reactive well before Covid precipitated confrontation. Disarray concerning the Darwin port, Huawei and the Victorian Belt and Road Initiative agreement betrayed underlying lack of strategic cohesion. This is not serving us well. The federal government needs to reframe the strategic narrative from first principles.

This isn’t a matter of a white paper or green paper. In 1990, the Hawke government released Ross Garnaut’s epochal report Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy. Thirty years on, we need an authoritative report of comparable scope on Australia, commerce, diplomacy and security in the future of the Indo-Pacific.

Rory Medcalf, director of the National Security College at the Australian National University, in his book Contest for the Indo-Pacific: Why China Won’t Map the Future (2020), set the stage. What is needed now is a report on Australia and the Indo-Pacific future based on probing questions of Medcalf’s reasonings – to inform public debate and the deliberations of the national security committee of cabinet.

Paul Monk was head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation in 1994-95. He has lectured on modern Chinese politics and he is the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018), among other books.

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