It is not panda hugging to better understand China's history and avoid our own unforced errors.
As the Australia-China relationship sinks to new lows, advice on whether and how to improve it is not in short supply. Having been an economic and trade adviser to Bob Hawke when the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre occurred, and trade minister when Julia Gillard secured a strategic partnership with China in 2013, I have witnessed at close quarters the highs and lows of Australia-China relations. What can be viewed as impossibly complicated is, in many situations, remarkably simple if a basic process is followed: think Chinese, act Australian.
Western foreign policy has faltered and erred when its architects have failed even to try to understand how non-Western societies and their leaders think. Australia was drawn into the Vietnam War by the Domino Theory of communism emanating from China and descending into Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. Yet anyone who had studied the history of China and Vietnam would have known that China had dominated Vietnam many times going as far back as 111BC.
Nor, as communist countries, had China and the Soviet Union been good mates, Deng Xiaoping telling Bob Hawke that a catalyst for his decision to open up China’s economy to the world was the perceived threat of its northern neighbour.
China’s leadership laments the Century of Humiliation, from 1839 to 1949, when it was subjugated to Western powers, Russia and Japan. What looks to the West like Chinese military expansionism through its behaviour in the South China Sea is clearly that, but it can also be explained in part by China’s determination to never again be humiliated.
Setting out these few facts will earn me a reputation among the Hard Right of Australian politicians as a “panda hugger”– which is unfortunate, since I did hug a baby Panda as it sat on my lap in Chengdu chewing on sugar cane I fed it (see incriminating photo).
Understanding the way the Chinese leadership thinks does not oblige the Australian Government to agree with it. But nor should it entail attributing to China’s leaders the worst of motives and intentions.
A constant in the Australia-China relationship has been our concern with human rights in China. Before the treatment of the Uighurs, Australia consistently expressed its concerns with China’s treatment of Tibet. And Bob Hawke could not have been more expressive in his condemnation of the Tiananmen Square massacre, granting permanent residence to all Chinese students studying in Australia at the time.
Prime Minister Gillard raised human rights issues in our meeting with recently elected President Xi Jinping in 2013. The meeting did not end abruptly or with acrimony.
Is it, then, so momentous, that a middle-ranking Chinese official, in a disgraceful way, raised the issue of atrocities by some Australian soldiers in Afghanistan? If an official in an Australian Government Department had condemned China for an incident of human rights abuse, neither President Xi Jinping nor Premier Li Keqiang would have responded.
But Australia’s Prime Minister did. In the era of old technology, the sage advice was that, if writing a letter in anger, put it on the top of the fridge overnight and have a final look before deciding whether to send it. Perhaps Prime Minister Morrison could have waited a few hours before deciding to give a middle-ranking Chinese official global notoriety.
And maybe Mr Morrison might reflect on the wisdom of hitching his wagon to President Donald Trump in echoing Trump’s demand that China must relinquish its developing economy status at the World Trade Organization (WTO). My analysis of the advantage China has chosen to extract from that status reveals the answer is close to zero. By repeating Trump’s vacuous allegation, Mr Morrison proudly displayed his deputy sheriff’s badge, for all pain and no gain to Australia.
Australia rightly objects to China’s tariffs on Australian barley and wine, applied on the pretext that these products are being dumped onto the Chinese market. But no lesser authority than the Productivity Commission https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/trade-assistance/2018-19/trade-assistance-review-2018-19.pdf has criticised Australia’s anti-dumping actions against China on steel and aluminium, suggesting they would fail if China brought them to the WTO. Nor do Australia’s anti-dumping actions against China appear to be consistent with the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement lauded by the Australian Government.
So, here’s a constructive suggestion. If both countries are truly confident of the legitimacy of their anti-dumping actions against each other, let’s, in a spirit of cooperation, take them to the WTO’s dispute-settling processes for adjudication. And let’s agree in advance to abide by the dispute-settling panel’s verdict without appealing it to the Appellate Body, which is no longer functioning courtesy of the Trump Administration’s veto over new appointments to replace judges whose terms have expired.
In so doing, Australia and China would be reaffirming their support for the multilateral rules-based trading system that the Trump Administration had torn apart.
As to Australia’s broader national interest, we must never compromise our values, our security or our integrity. And we should say so loudly.
But nor should we engage in gratuitous insults, looking for announceables on national television or tipping out anti-Chinese stories to conservative media outlets so they can parade ethnic-Chinese academics in mugshots. Behaviour that is in the short-term political interests of the government of the day is not necessarily in the national interest.
Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics. He is Director of the Australian APEC Study Centre at RMIT University, a Distinguished Fellow at the ANU and an Adjunct Professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.