The five core principles for dealing with China under Xi: Sydney Morning Herald

Next month marks 50 years since the Whitlam government established diplomatic relations with Beijing – a momentous decision rooted in Gough’s visit to China as opposition leader the previous year.

Whitlam had been roundly attacked by Billy McMahon’s government, which claimed the Communists “played him like a trout”. McMahon was later humiliated by revelations that Henry Kissinger secretly visited China that same year, ahead of Nixon’s path-breaking visit that launched the next chapter of Chinese engagement with the world.

The Australia-China relationship has ebbed and flowed over five decades, but it has grown gradually closer. China became our biggest trading partner by the 2000s as trade flows shot through the roof and Chinese students flocked to our universities.

The darkest days came in 1989 amid Australian and global outrage at the massacre of students at Tiananmen Square. I recall being in the square in the weeks leading up to June 4 – an ugly chapter that Chinese textbooks still brush over as a “foreign-inspired, counter-revolutionary incident”.

China has also changed internally. Hu Jintao’s term saw increasingly assertive behaviour in the South China Sea – actions that were expressly identified in Australia’s 2009 Defence White Paper and influenced the decision then to double our submarine fleet and increase the surface fleet by a third.

However, Xi Jinping has ushered in the most dramatic changes: Chinese domestic politics have skewed to the Leninist left, putting all power back in the hands of the party; economic policy has tilted to the Marxist left, deepening state control over the private sector; and Chinese nationalism has been taken to the right in support of more assertive foreign and security policies. These are all significant departures from the recent past, and they have led the world to recalibrate their own approaches to China’s rise.

In Washington, after 40 years of “strategic engagement” with Beijing, national security adviser H.R. McMaster in 2017 embraced a new framework of “strategic competition” with China. The US stopped assuming China would become a fully participating member of the international rules-based order. It concluded that as China became more powerful it would start fundamentally rewriting the rules. The US judged China was beginning to construct an alternative international system – and one anchored in Chinese, not American, geopolitical power.

Australia – both as a treaty ally of Washington and a local observer to China’s changing regional strategic behaviour – has also adjusted its response. Unfortunately, the former government conflated a stronger policy and operational response to China, with Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton simply using the public political megaphone at every opportunity. They believed they could enhance Australia’s strategic posture while throwing red meat to conservative voters through rolling rhetorical fusillades. Their cardinal error was to equate higher political volume with effective public policy. The result was a complete collapse in the bilateral relationship.

Amid this collapse came China’s unilateral trade sanctions in retaliation against Morrison’s unilateral call for an international commission to investigate the origins of COVID-19. There was nothing wrong with the content of Morrison’s call. I had previously done the same in an open letter in The New York Times co-signed by dozens of other former political leaders. But he failed to take the time to co-ordinate a united front with European and Asian friends and allies. Instead, Morrison charged over the parapet, apparently hoping to claim glory for himself. And Australian industry took the bullet.

This is the relationship inherited by the Labor government six months ago. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong have sensibly taken the political temperature down several notches by refraining from regular ill-considered outbursts. The rhetorical heat has similarly dropped on China’s side. Ministerial contact – frozen for almost three years – resumed immediately. And when our PM sat down with Xi this week in Bali, it marked the end of an unprecedented six-year freeze at that most senior level. Is everything fixed? Of course not. Even with patient and effective diplomacy, there will still be disagreements. As I urged Morrison at the time, there are five core principles that should guide any Australian government dealing with China under Xi: unapologetic commitment to universal human rights, anchored in international law; unapologetic support for the US alliance, though not as an automatic compliance with every element of American policy; third, maximise economic engagement to our mutual advantage, such as the resumption of normal tourism and student flows; fourth, maximum collaboration with China through global institutions on climate change, global economic stability, nuclear non-proliferation and future pandemic management; and finally, when we do need to part company with China, do so in partnership with friends and allies. It’s safer to hunt in packs.

We cannot simply wish away the real differences of strategy, policy and values. But neither should we ignore our mutual interests. If we hope to celebrate this 50th anniversary of the bilateral relationship, one positive step forward on China’s side would be to lift the sanctions imposed on the Morrison government. This would finally draw a line under the recent past. As well as clearing a path to jointly address our common challenges and opportunities for the future.

There will be many of both.

Source: Kevin Rudd: The five core principles for dealing with China under Xi (brisbanetimes.com.au)