The problem of dealing with a belligerent communist China is the geopolitical challenge of the age. Its favourable resolution will open the door to global amity. The alternative is enduring global instability, confrontation, and the risk of a major war in the Pacific, fought with nuclear weapons standing ready on a hair trigger.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was studied closely in Beijing, China came to view the United States as a powerful adversary which would one day seek to impede its rise. It adopted a policy to ‘hide its strength and bide its time’. Priority was afforded to economic development, and the generation of a vast industrial and technological base—something that no dictatorship had ever managed to create. At the same time, China studied US military prowess in order to better understand how the US had managed to potently network its platforms and systems on a global scale.
After the global financial crisis of 2008, China began to act more boldly in the wake of what it perceived to be the onset of US decline, building leverage in its external relations, accelerating its military build-up, and stepping up its long march through international institutions. It then embarked on ‘national rejuvenation’, in the face of perceived US weakness. Paranoid and insecure, but at the same time overly confident, China’s belligerence increased. One of the most astute analyses of this journey, by Rush Doshi, says it all in its title: The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, 2021.
Australia’s China policy consistently misjudged this long trend. Policy only began to harden in 2016. Then, across a range of fronts—including foreign interference, espionage and cyber—Australia ‘stood up’ to the challenge of China (see Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir, A Bigger Picture, 2020, chapter 34). We should, however, have started to adjust policy from around 2009. The key judgements that underpinned the 2009 Defence White Paper went beyond military affairs. In framing the looming China challenge correctly, it set out a strategic template that should have flowed across other national security and economic policy areas.
However, instead of seeing China as it was, official thinking preferred to see an ‘imagined China’—that is, China as the ‘responsible stakeholder’ that was emerging in the 1990s and early 2000s after the shock of the heinous massacre of 4 June 1989. In this imagining, with the end of the Cold War, it was thought that a liberal order could be extended across Eurasia, bringing China into a global system of interconnected trade, investment and technology development, as well as into co-operative international institutions, which would somehow civilise its despotic tendencies. China’s rulers, however, saw the trap that was being set for them—the end of the communist regime, as economic liberalisation would lead inexorably to calls for political reform.
Policy swung after 2009 to the trope of the China-centred ‘Asian Century’, which returned from the 1990s, obsolete and ill-suited to the early 2010s. Re-reading today the Asian Century White Paper of 2012 is a telling exercise. It, and the Australia-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of 2014, seem a distant memory. Policy did not adjust quickly enough to the reality that the ‘imagined China’ was no more, or rather had never been. As a result, President Xi Jinping was given the benefit of the doubt after 2012. Due to this misreading of China, and timidity which was a function of our economic exposures, we lost valuable time we could have better used to enhance our resilience, diversify our trade, and build up our hard military power.
China showed its true colours through its campaign of trade coercion against Australia that began around 2018. This was political warfare, where trade was used as a weapon to attack our sovereignty. Chinese political warfare seeks to attack political and social fault lines (for instance in a federation), creating fractures and undermining national resolve, setting the conditions for eventual subjugation to Chinese interests.
Initially, however, this onslaught was treated as a cyclical, as distinct from a structural, problem. The Government adopted a stance of ‘strategic patience’, with each issue being treated separately, on their individual merits. There was a reluctance to frame the issue in terms of Chinese political warfare. The release by the Chinese Embassy in Canberra of the ’14 points’ in November 2020 was the key inflection point. Thereafter, Australia treated the trade coercion for what it was, and then Prime Minister Scott Morrison took the issue out of its bilateral framing. The high point was the discussion that he led at the G7 meeting in June 2021 on Chinese coercion and political warfare. He circulated the ’14 points’ to his fellow leaders. Great interest was shown in the Australian experience of being coerced and resisting.
There is now a risk of a new ‘imagined China’ emerging and embedding itself in official thinking. Instead of continuing to work to rally likeminded nations against Chinese coercion, as we did in 2021, the alternative approach of quiet engagement—assuming that if only we moderate our language, then somehow Chinese belligerence will dissipate, and relations will be ‘stabilised’—might yet entrench a dangerously benign view of the China challenge in official thinking. This approach implies that the challenge is not structural, but rather cyclical, and that we can, through adroit diplomacy, enlarge the space for ‘cooperating where we can’, while minimising the space for ‘disagreeing where we must’.
In this new variation on the earlier ‘imagined China’, Chinese belligerence is excused on the basis that ‘all great powers behave so’. This rationalisation is simply wrong and ahistorical: Bismarck’s Germany was, for instance, a far more restrained and cautious great power than was Imperial Germany after 1890. The world paid the price in 1914. Great powers make choices about how to behave—and should be held to account for their choices.
Worse than being wrong, excusing Chinese belligerence as being an intrinsic function of great power behaviour will lead to poor strategy. The space for Australian willingness to ‘disagree where we must’ will reduce, as our anticipation of China’s belligerent response—normalised and excused—will increasingly lead to self-censorship and reticence. This will see Australia abandon the hard-won gains of its resistance over recent years. China wants our silence—over human rights, Taiwan, territorial aggression, unsafe military activities and more besides. We should not give it so readily.
