By Michael Johns Jr.
Tuesday, September 08, 2020
The Trump administration is engaged in an assertive
campaign to stem China’s vast and sometimes secretive efforts to leverage its
global presence for its own ambitious ends. But the U.S. is hardly alone in
this laudable effort. The malicious and increasingly aggressive geopolitical
initiatives of Xi Jinping’s Communist Party have also raised alarm in
Australia, which is now diligently focused on the challenge.
Last week, the Australian government introduced its bold
Foreign Relations Bill, a piece of legislation that would give Canberra the
right to step in and annul agreements, many of them secret, that Australian
universities and government entities make with overseas actors. Its purpose —
to check Beijing’s influence across Australia — is only barely implicit: The
bill would finally disclose the details of those investment agreements and
research partnerships and give the Australian government the power to
potentially cancel China’s controversial development projects associated with
its Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious global infrastructure plan Xi
Jinping first unveiled in 2013.
The responsive rhetoric from Beijing has been ferocious.
Last Tuesday, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece newspaper Global
Times warned
that Australia is on a course to becoming the “poor white trash of Asia.” China
also has taken a number of escalatory diplomatic or economic actions of late:
Last Monday the Australian foreign ministry announced
that an Australian journalist had been detained in Beijing since
mid-August, without charges or explanation; the Chinese telecommunications
giant Huawei announced that it is withdrawing its sponsorship of the Canberra
rugby team; and China announced last Wednesday that it will revisit entirely
its subsidies on the Australian wine industry, which exports a third of its
product to the Chinese mainland. Beijing has signaled that it is willing to
consider even more aggressive measures on Australian markets if necessary.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s case for simple veto power over
China’s influence in Australia grows stronger by the day.
That power could not come quickly enough. The Australian
Foreign Relations Bill follows a series of China-related free-speech
controversies at Australian universities, including an imbroglio at the
University of Queensland this summer in which student
activist Drew Pavlou was attacked repeatedly while demonstrating on campus
in support of Hong Kong. The university charged Pavlou with eleven misconduct
allegations and then suspended him for two years, an unusually harsh punishment
that was later reduced after charges of bias. His assailants, who
attacked him as the Chinese national anthem played in the background, were
never found despite being recorded on video, and China’s consul-general in
Brisbane publicly commended the attack.
Not coincidentally, the University of Queensland has
offered several classes directly
funded by China and also hosts
one of Australia’s many China-funded Confucius Institutes, which have been
criticized globally for their role in advancing propaganda aligned with the
CCP. In the U.S, the Trump administration has vowed to close 75 such Confucius
Institutes and over 500 “Confucius Classrooms” for K-12 students by the end of
the year.
But Australia is facing a network of considerable
influence that stretches beyond its universities. For months, Morrison has been
on a collision course with Beijing as he attempts to untangle his country’s
worrisome ties with the CCP. Tensions have been rising between the countries at
least since 2018, when the Australian government banned Huawei and another
Chinese telecom company, ZTE, from building the country’s future 5G networks —
a sensible decision that the New York Times allowed Huawei to directly
criticize in a “paid post” op-ed.
In April, Morrison joined the U.S. in calling for an
independent inquiry into the origins and spread of the coronavirus and
international response to it. Although the draft resolution Australia
ultimately introduced to the World Health Assembly did not even contain the
word “China,” it still drew howls from Beijing, which imposed an 80 percent
tariff on Australian barley exports, a billion-dollar enterprise, that same
month. With China’s trade restrictions and additional threats made in response
to the Foreign Relations Bill, the message from the Chinese is very clear:
Criticize or challenge us politically and your pocketbook will suffer.
And Australia has undoubtedly suffered. Though only
recently begun, China’s economic pressure campaign, coming on top of the
economic pressures from the global pandemic, is proving costly. Having famously
dazzled the world by surviving the 2008 financial crisis better than virtually
any other nation, Australia is now facing its first recession in nearly three
decades.
Australia is one of the first middle powers closely tied
to China to truly step back, reevaluate, and draw a line in the sand on Chinese
influence. Beijing, in response, is attempting to make an example of them and
send a message to the others: Our influence is not reversible. Shut up or pay
up. This is the coercive logic that defines China’s relationship to Australia
and to the 70 nations currently engaged in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
There are important lessons to be found here for the U.S.
China has played in the democratic sandbox of Australia and New Zealand for
years, learning how academia and public debate can be molded in these open
societies to serve Chinese interests. Beijing has seen how its diplomatic and
political resources can be leveraged to deliver desirable outcomes throughout Western
culture and civil society, even in a micropolitical space such as a university
student body. The tactics learned in Australia, from the Confucius Institutes
to Chinese
government–coordinated student organizations and counterprotest groups, are
being replicated in the U.S. today.
China also has learned how to deploy its considerable
economic resources to deliver long-term gains across the globe, and American
leaders have bought into China’s game. In 2011, even as Vice President Joe
Biden was saying that “a rising China is a positive, positive development . . .
for the world writ large,” the Chinese Communist Party was using loans and
financing schemes to establish debt traps for developing nations across Asia
and Africa that would allow China to take control of critical infrastructure.
In Australia, China learned that creating dependence in even just a few
critical sectors is enough to make trade connections — and therefore their
influence — virtually unbreakable. The provincial government of Victoria, whose
Belt and Road memorandum of understanding served as part of the impetus for the
Australian Foreign Relations Bill, has accused the Morrison government of
“vilifying” China for this move. No doubt Morrison will receive many calls for
relief in response to China’s economic assault on Australian barley farmers and
winemakers.
China is well prepared to navigate such confrontations
and to weather almost any criticism to achieve its ends. Like the U.S.,
Australia once wrongly felt that it could partner with the CCP. Australian
prime minister Kevin Rudd said in a 2008 speech at Peking University that he
wanted his country to be China’s zhengyou — a friend who can dare to
disagree, or to tell uncomfortable truths. But China did not want a zhengyou;
it greatly disliked Canberra’s constant public complaints over its treatment of
Tibet then, as it dislikes them about Hong Kong now. It has demonstrated no
tolerance for truth-seeking, for example, about the extent of its
responsibility for the spread of the coronavirus. Beijing wants compliant
partners who are willing to unquestioningly follow its lead in the
international arena and to remain silent in the face of its global aggressions
and domestic human-rights abuses, including its persecution of the Uyghurs. Such
compliance is what it expects now from Australia.
As the U.S. enters a new chapter of confronting an
aggressive, abusive, and often dishonest China, Australia’s experience should
be instructive. If the U.S. attempts to revise existing arrangements or change
the status quo, Beijing will respond by making those changes exceedingly
uncomfortable and costly. China has proven more than willing to extort its
so-called partners to achieve geopolitical compliance. But this does not mean
that we cannot or should not display the necessary gumption, as Morrison is now
doing. A China that grows in global and economic power will make what seems
difficult today nearly impossible tomorrow.
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