Of all of the failures of the failing Albanese government, this will be the most costly in the long run.
As Albo jets off to Bejing to celebrate a half-century of Labor grovelling, Xi Jinping is elsewhere:
On Thursday, when the other leaders sat down at the East Asia Summit in Jakarta, Xi was inspecting rice paddies in Heilongjiang province in north-eastern China, the country’s chief source of grain.
…American sinologist Bill Bishop commented in his Sinocism newsletter last week: “There is debate in some circles about whether or not the country is preparing for war, likely with the US. I think it is increasingly obvious that Xi is hardening the country in every way possible to prepare for that extreme case contingency, even if it is not his preferred outcome.”
So this is the reason Xi is pushing food security. An agricultural economics professor at Germany’s University of Göttingen, Xiaohua Yu, spelt it out for the Financial Times: “China is preparing for the worst-case scenario in which it couldn’t buy any food from abroad.”
Which is a problem. Because China is a major importer of food. “Although China’s grain self-sufficiency ratio has always remained above 97 per cent, its imports of oilseeds, soybeans, sugar, meat and dairy products have been growing,” explains Liu Chin-tsai of Taiwan’s Fo Guang University in a piece in ThinkChina.
Australian analyst Ross Babbage of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington explains why: “The US and its allies are in a strong position to dominate the rimlands of the Eurasian landmass and, in any serious war, interdict most shipping and many aviation movements to and from China,” he writes in his new book, The Next Major War: Can the US and its Allies Win Against China?
Yep. What’s more, the threat of this interdiction is precisely the best hope of preventing any kinetic conflict.
This brings us back to the hapless Albo. While China is readying for war, Albo is readying a rousing kumbaya chorus. He’s off to try to lift Australian trade interdependence with China even more.
He has already undone much of the hard work exporters did to diversify their trade.
And has done nothing to reduce Chinese imports.
While the US also prepares for war by shifting its supply chains radically away from China:
Does this strike you as hard-nosed realpolitik on your behalf by Albo? Or is it just the usual tactical Canberra calculus to buy off a few interests in place of national interest strategic thinking?
AUKUS is no hedge to any of this. It only ensures that we will blockade our own ports when the time comes.
Nobody wants war but some are sensible enough to prepare for it.
