{"id":55940,"date":"2020-05-18T06:00:22","date_gmt":"2020-05-17T20:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=55940"},"modified":"2020-05-18T09:18:38","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T23:18:38","slug":"the-evolution-of-australias-china-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-evolution-of-australias-china-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"The evolution of Australia\u2019s China challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Cascading wake-up moments have shaken Australia\u2019s view of China over the past five years.<\/p>\n

The realisations\u2014a succession of gee-whizz, crikey and oops events\u2014have pushed Canberra to new places.<\/p>\n

The impact doesn\u2019t amount to shock; this is China, after all. But it has caused shifts. And shifts have cumulative effects.<\/p>\n

Shakes shove at policy and politicians. Moods and modes move, overturning the bureaucratic evolution of policy as predictable layering on the existing base.<\/p>\n

Crikey moments have taken the comfort out of China policy. The incremental approach suffers gee-whizz gyrations. We\u2019ve just had four weeks of wobbles.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s call for an international inquiry on the origins and development of the Covid-19 pandemic<\/a> got a blast from Beijing. China\u2019s ambassador to Canberra accused Australia of joining the US in \u2018resorting to suspicion, recrimination or division<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

Beijing hit the economic coercion button<\/a>, targeting Oz beef and barley.<\/p>\n

As part of a \u2018robust program\u2019<\/a> in the South China Sea, HMAS Parramatta<\/em> conducted exercises<\/a> with three US Navy ships. Or, as Euan Graham put it, Australia joined the cavalry<\/a> to push back at \u2018cynically timed Chinese adventurism in the South China Sea, offering reassurance to wavering Southeast Asian countries\u2019.<\/p>\n

To see the five-year curve, consult Malcolm Turnbull. The China chapter of his memoir, A bigger picture<\/em><\/a>, is a wake-up compilation. The former prime minister records his question to China\u2019s Premier Li Keqiang: \u2018Surely China should want to be seen as more of a cuddly panda than a scary dragon?\u2019<\/p>\n

Turnbull relates his shifting answer, starting with the geopolitical impact of China\u2019s island-building land grab<\/a> in the South China Sea. He dishes domestic detail on cyber espionage, Chinese investment and political interference, and banning Chinese 5G technology.<\/p>\n

Dragonish behaviour caused Australia\u2019s China reset<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the crikey of cyber assault:<\/p>\n

[W]hat\u2019s become increasingly apparent over the last decade is the industrial scale, scope and effectiveness of Chinese intelligence gathering and in particular cyberespionage. They do more of it than anyone else, by far, and apply more resources to it than anyone else. They target commercial secrets, especially in technology, even where they have no connection with national security. And, finally, they\u2019re very good at it. A last point, which speaks to the growing confidence of China, is that they\u2019re not embarrassed by being caught.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beijing got heartburn at Canberra\u2019s refusal to join the Belt and Road Initiative. Australia would be happy to work on specific projects, \u2018but we would not sign up to a slogan when we had no control over its content or substance\u2019.<\/p>\n

On the oops of espionage and foreign interference, \u2018Australian governments had simply not been paying attention\u2019, Turnbull writes.<\/p>\n

Our espionage laws were out of date, last revised during the Cold War, and we had no legislation to regulate, let alone prohibit, foreign political donations. With so much foreign, mostly Chinese, money flowing in and around politics, we also lacked any transparency legislation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Turnbull introduced legislation on foreign interference and foreign influence in December 2017, stating the Chinese Communist Party worked covertly to interfere with the Australian parliament, media and universities. China denounced the law; Turnbull pushed back, using a defiant line drawn from Mao Zedong\u2019s 1949 victory statement<\/a>: \u2018The Australian people stand up.\u2019<\/p>\n

Rendering it in Mandarin made the point even sharper, enraging Mandarin speakers from Beijing to Kevin Rudd<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Turnbull recalls the \u2018slightly discordant note\u2019 when US President Barack Obama complained in 2015 about the Port of Darwin being leased to a Chinese company. With the US rotating marines through Darwin, Turnbull concedes, \u2018it wasn\u2019t a good look\u2019. Communications had \u2018gone amiss\u2019 and the US government first heard about the deal from the Wall Street Journal.<\/em> Turnbull reruns his jest line: \u2018I did offer to buy the White House a subscription to the Northern Territory News<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

The jests evaporate when he gets to \u2018a far more serious snafu\u2019 that arose over New South Wales\u2019 effort\u2014nearly a done deal\u2014to sell almost all of its electricity assets to China. \u2018There had clearly been a breakdown in communications within our national security agencies.\u2019<\/p>\n

The wake-up response was to create a centre to check on the national security risks of foreign acquisitions of critical infrastructure. The mood shift is such that during the Covid-19 crisis, the government has cut to $0<\/a> the threshold for checks by the Foreign Investment Review Board<\/a>. No vital assets will be sold cheap during the pandemic. And, you could deduce, there\u2019s no way Darwin\u2019s port would be sold today.<\/p>\n

In the week the Liberal Party toppled Turnbull as PM, Australia became the first nation to ban \u2018high risk\u2019 vendors (read: China\u2019s Huawei and ZTE) from building its 5G network. Unlike 4G and 3G, he notes, 5G can\u2019t be divided into core and non-core elements: \u2018[T]he core is no more\u2014the intelligence it used to contain will be distributed throughout the network.\u2019<\/p>\n

The 5G risk arrived, Turnbull writes, because of \u2018ferocious competition from the Chinese vendors on price and an absence of mind\u2019 in the Five Eyes intelligence club (the US, Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand).<\/p>\n

An adversary with a permanent beachhead in an economy\u2019s most important enabling platform technology would have the ability to make all or parts of the network\u2014or devices and institutions within it\u2014unavailable or unresponsive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After intensive investigation and discussions with other Five Eyes countries, \u2018the unequivocal advice was that the risks couldn\u2019t be mitigated\u2019. Huawei isn\u2019t a smoking gun, Turnbull says, but a loaded gun.<\/p>\n

The wake-up words mount: absence of mind, lack of attention, no control, snafu.<\/p>\n

With two grandchildren of Chinese heritage, Turnbull ends by dismissing \u2018the false premise that any criticism of or concern about China and its ruling Communist Party is \u201canti-Chinese\u201d or racist\u2019.<\/p>\n

Australia has shifted because its major economic partner has form as a bully and reveals its potential as an adversary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cascading wake-up moments have shaken Australia\u2019s view of China over the past five years. The realisations\u2014a succession of gee-whizz, crikey and oops events\u2014have pushed Canberra to new places. The impact doesn\u2019t amount to shock; this …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":55946,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2212,2595,1464],"class_list":["post-55940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia-china-relations","tag-foreign-interference","tag-malcolm-turnbull"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe evolution of Australia\u2019s China challenge | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-evolution-of-australias-china-challenge\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The evolution of Australia\u2019s China challenge | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Cascading wake-up moments have shaken Australia\u2019s view of China over the past five years. 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