Via the ABC:
Wang Xining is not a fire-breathing ideologue.
In fact, China’s Deputy Head of Mission has a reputation in Canberra as a bit of a charmer — smooth, cerebral and cultured.
But when the senior diplomat took to the podium at the National Press Club yesterday, he had a message to deliver, and he did so faithfully.
It’s not me. It’s you.
Wang started by alluding to the looming pachyderm in the room; the increasingly poisonous and hostile ties between Australia and China.
The Deputy Head of Mission put it in marital terms. A diplomatic relationship “takes concerted determination and joint effort to make it thrive”, Wang observed.
“A married couple knows this!” he declared, raising slightly strained chuckles in the room.
But, he observed sorrowfully, “while a rift between husband and wife hurts one family, a rift between two countries hurts millions.”
It’s not clear which country is the husband and which is the wife in this formulation, but Wang made one thing crystal clear: China was the wronged spouse, and Australia the guilty party.
The main wellspring of this bitterness? The Federal Government’s push for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
‘Et tu, Brute?’
Wang laid out Australia’s sins in some detail.
“First, the Australian Government never consulted the Chinese Government in whatever way before the [inquiry] proposal came out,” he said.
Second, Australia’s push for an inquiry must have been at the behest of the United States.
Wang didn’t provide any evidence to back up this accusation, but offered a watertight nexus of circular logic.
“The proposal came at a time when the US was trying to [blame China] so the proposal would help Washington to put more pressure on China,” he said.
And all this when Wuhan — and much of China — were taking their first tentative steps out of lockdown.
Wang said he struggled to convey “the intensity of emotion of our people, how much indignation, anger and frustration they expressed” at Australia’s “shocking” proposal.
This was the moment he quoted — rather dramatically — Julius Caesar’s famous last lines of betrayal penned by Shakespeare: “Et tu, Brute?”
It made great vision for the television news bulletins that evening.
But sadly, there’s no evidence that Julius Caesar ever actually said these words.
And while Wang Xining’s monologue was both fluid and articulate, it’s unlikely to provoke a bout of self-introspection in ministerial offices and national security agencies across Canberra.
Scant supply of ‘mutual respect’
The main reason for this is that the Morrison Government is more focussed on what the Chinese Government does than what it says.
Officials and ministers alike appreciate that Australia’s pre-pandemic happy state of affluence was buoyed by China’s nearly inexhaustible appetite for our goods and minerals.
But they’re also grappling with relentless and pernicious cyber-attacks emanating from China, the Chinese Government’s persistent meddling in Australia’s Chinese diaspora, and a series of thinly-veiled trade punishments meted out from Beijing.
Which might explain why one Morrison Government source, when asked about Wang’s demand for “mutual respect”, replied with a one-word message to this reporter — “SNORT.”
The quality of “mutual respect” has also been in scant supply for Australian officials and politicians trying to piece the relationship back together again.
Even the polished Deputy Head of Mission squirmed just a little when asked a series of questions about Beijing’s determined effort to ignore Australian efforts at rapprochement.
The Morrison Government has had no high-level contact with China since Trade Minister Simon Birmingham travelled to Shanghai in November 2019.
A dizzying array of ministers have complained they are simply unable to get their counterparts in Beijing to pick up the phone and return their calls.
This is more than a mere cold shoulder. Beijing has placed the entire Australian Government firmly inside a diplomatic deep freezer and turned the temperature dial down to somewhere between “sub-Arctic” and “Dante’s Ninth Circle of Frozen Hell”.
Wang gave vague excuses for this, saying it was “not possible to organise face-to-face exchanges between leaders of countries and even senior ministers” during the pandemic.
But that explanation withers under cursory scrutiny, particularly given that China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi is right now embarking on a week-long tour of five European countries; Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France and Germany.
In reality, Beijing is determined to punish Canberra because Australia has defied it. The message is aimed not just at Canberra, but also at other countries who are weighing how they should handle a rising and increasingly authoritarian China.
This doesn’t mean Australia’s conduct has been faultless or blameless. But there is a reason that the bipartisan consensus on China is largely holding, despite the enormous strain on bilateral ties.
Australian officials and politicians seem determined not to blink.
It’s not us. It’s you.
This soft power relationship is all but over. Every Australian export outside of iron ore is now at risk of reprisal and so is iron ore longer term. Via The Australian:
Scott Morrison will legislate to tear up Victoria’s multi-million-dollar Belt and Road Initiative agreement with Beijing, creating laws that will also ban a raft of other deals with foreign governments found to be against the national interest.
In an unprecedented move against Chinese interference and the protection of state secrets, the use of external powers under the Constitution to direct state, territory and local governments on national security issues will effectively kill dozens of agreements with foreign governments and institutions.
The Foreign Relations Bill, which will be introduced to parliament next week, also extends to universities and captures any questionable agreements between Australian public institutions and foreign governments.
In a major flexing of its constitutional powers, the Morrison government will cast its net over all foreign relations agreements struck by lower tiers of government, amid fears that national security has been compromised by often secret deals between state governments and foreign powers.
We have made our choice.
