Australia’s real China Problem
Professor Robert Ayson is currently Senior Fellow in the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. Professor Ayson is the newly appointed Chair in Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at VUW. He assumes the role in January 2010. He authored the third report in the Asia:NZ Outlook series in April 2006. The report can be accessed here. In this article he discusses Australia's increasing fraught relationship with China.
Even a casual observer of Australia’s media commentary over the last few months would find it easy to conclude that New Zealand’s trans-Tasman neighbour has a China problem.
After years of celebrating China as a massive opportunity, born out of the relentless expansion of Australian mineral sales to the Middle Kingdom, complications have set in. The most celebrated of these has been the detention since July of Stern Hu, a senior China-based negotiator on Australian iron ore sales for resources giant Rio Tinto, who has since been charged with bribery and obtaining commercial secrets.
This is not the only case. China has also encouraged a recent campaign of pressure against a Melbourne Film Festival which screened a documentary about Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. China’s diplomatic representatives sought unsuccessfully to persuade the Australian government to deny a visa to Kadeer for her visit to Australia at which she spoke at the Festival and the National Press Club.
Some Australian pundits have been looking for answers. Did Stern Hu’s arrest have anything to do with Rio’s decision to rebuff a major investment proposal by Chinalco, a leading state owned enterprise? Is Beijing upset with Canberra because of the unflattering strategic depiction of China in the Australian government’s recent Defence White Paper and in the suggestion in wider commentary that China is being treated as the main rationale for Australia’s defence modernisation? Has Kevin Rudd’s fluency in Mandarin, which the Prime Minister used on a celebrated early visit to China raise questions about Beijing’s human rights policies, been more of a liability than an asset? Or is Australia simply on the receiving end of what some conservative commentators regard as the real China: not the modern, open and cosmopolitan China that Beijing would like us to believe in, but the suspicious, authoritarian and nationalist China that is only starting to throw its newly found weight around?
Australia does have a China problem, but it says as much about Australia’s approach to China’s rise as it does about anything that Beijing is doing or saying. And this problem exists at two main levels. First, the sense of an increasing closeness in Australia-China relations, fuelled by the burgeoning Chinese demand for Australian resources, has been accompanied by an assumption amongst some Australians that they understand China more than they really do. This understanding is often expressed in simplistic terms. But the modern Middle Kingdom is not a benign factory which prizes prosperity above all things, but nor is it a dark, brooding polity which is out to coerce the rest of us. It is a complex mixture of forces, factors and faces, sometimes more cooperative and more open, other times more competitive and closed. So just as Australians were missing that complexity if they thought the Australia-Chinese relationship was all gain and no pain, they would also be wrong to conclude that the sky had started falling in.
Second, Australians need to be aware that swimming alongside the big fish in the wider Asia-Pacific region is a game of peril as well as opportunity. Like the Howard government before it, the Rudd team has not only emphasised the importance of Australia’s relations with the great powers, including China and the United States. The Rudd philosophy also continues the tradition of envisaging Australia as having a stake in the Asian distribution of power. In other words, Australians see their country as a bit of a player, in a way that is quite different to perceptions New Zealanders have of their own (smaller) country’s place in things. To the extent that these perceptions of Australia’s regional substance translate into reality, this provides Canberra with certain privileges. From time to time it means that the great powers will want to court Australia. But this position also exposes Australia to significant hazards. Being strong enough to matter but not strong enough to take on the big guys independently can make Australia an easy target for pressure. So sometimes it may be better to be anonymous.
Australia’s real China problem is therefore a symptom of a deeper challenge. It is a question about what role Australia really is prepared to play in the big Asian pool, and whether Australians are prepared for the knocks as well as the handshakes which will come from that. It may sound like odd advice but what Australians need right now, especially in the media comment on relations with China, is something we might assume has never been in short supply in the big dry continent: a certain amount of hard-headedness, resilience and resolve. On China, Australians need to take a deep breath, pause for a beer, and ready themselves for a long and often testing relationship, but one which is not without its rewards.
- By Robert Ayson
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Dr Robert Ayson authored Outlook 03 in our flagship series of publications
