research / ACRI Opinion

By Bob Carr

Note: This article originally appeared in The Australian, September 10 2016. 

No sweeter duty for a premier. A convention centre packed with families, their youngsters being praised as the highest achievers in the end-of-school exams. Looking back, one thing stands out about the annual awards: the steady rise, in my years, in the number of students with Chinese names.

There are 481,800 Australians born in China, plus their sons and daughters. China is now our biggest source of migrants. I doubt if any group has moved faster to integrate, get naturalised, produce sons and daughters comfortable in their Australian identities.

Some of the commentary unleashed in the past week has been a defamation of this successful Chinese diaspora. Here’s one indicator. John Lee, writing in the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter blog, says a quarter of the postgraduate researchers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in Australia are Chinese nationals: a quarter.

At the heart of innovation — and some want to stereotype their families as Maoists disloyal to their adopted country? Australia needs their brightness, their enterprise.

The now-cancelled Mao Ze­dong commemorations were promoted by a telephone-box minor­ity desperate for attention. Sadly, comments suggested they were a statement by many Chinese-Australians. Rowan Callick, the China correspondent forThe Australian, began by asking, “What’s happening within Australia’s Chinese community?” Paul Dibb wrote, “There are a considerable number of Chinese residents and students here who feel nostalgic about the People’s Republic and its ruling party.” Considerable number? No, virtually none.

The concerts were just flickering above the level of being an urban myth, like crocodiles in the sewers. They were not going to be attended by Chinese diplomats, who were embarrassed. The idea died. Meanwhile, a migrant community got saddled with the canard of “allegiance to a foreign power”, to use Dibb’s words.

There was a similar absence of what lawyers might call an “evidentiary base” in an Australian Financial Review article on Sept­ember 3. It claimed Chinese spies were focused on iron ore negotiations. One problem: the iron price has been determined in the spot market since 2010. There hasn’t been anything to negotiate for six years. No negotiations, no spying. The same article breathlessly revealed that, according to an unnamed ASIO source, Chinese tourists are an espionage risk, “sucking up intelligence to be digested in Beijing”. Presumably they secretly log B-52 overflights as they view the waves at Bondi. Or hide copies of Gregory’s street directories in their luggage under the infant milk formula.

If Chinese tourists are a threat to security it’s one that has escaped the attention of the Japanese, who hosted 3.78 million Chinese tourists last year, nearly four times our number. If the AFR claim is not just ludicrous scaremongering, the problem lends itself to a simple answer: just cut off tourist visas. That absolves us of the embarrassment of having an extra $7.7 billion in our national accounts by this carefully concealed espionage army armed with Canon cameras, their prying eyes concealed behind Armani sunglasses.

Similar boldness seems to be demanded by the analysis of Peter Hartcher in The Sydney Morning Herald; having earlier compared China to Islamic State, he indulged a conceit that branded anyone who had ever said a positive thing about the Australia-China relationship “a rat, a fly, a mosquito or a sparrow”. He swept up Alexander Downer and James Packer in this McCarthyist indictment.

If China can be understood only as an evil empire comparable to Islamic State, then logic and morality compel one course: undo Gough Whitlam’s work, close the embassy in Beijing and reopen it in Taipei. For good measure, abrogate the free trade agreement.

The fact is it is a huge wrench for some Australians to see China except through US eyes. Some Cold Warriors find it very hard. Consider how our foreign policy would look if they had prevailed in the past three years.

Australia would now be running naval patrols up close to claimed Chinese territory. Brave, lonely Australia, the only US ally to snap to attention at hints from two US admirals. We also would be with Japan the only holdout against the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, sponsored by China. Canada decided to apply last week. The AIIB has just begun issuing loans syndicated by the World Bank.

We would have allowed a junior US official to get away with announcing in Washington that Australia was hosting B-1 bombers. (Then PM Tony Abbott firmly overruled him). We would have snapped up Japanese submarines off the shelf with a handshake deal.

And one suspects the Cold Warriors would have insisted we forgo the FTA (economic integration with China!) and — perhaps their real agenda — should be tripping happily towards an ANZUS-style treaty with Japan.

Their recent rage at China is partly fury that the Abbott and Turnbull governments have not signed up for this ideological agenda. Allowing the Landbridge lease was the final straw. This is the essence. Has Australia the wit to nurture a policy based on our interests as well as values, or can we see China only ideologically and through the Washington lens? Australian Cold Warriors have spent too much time in US think tanks but too little reading Henry Kissinger’s On China or walking the streets of those Chinese cities that increasingly resemble Singapore 20 years ago. No, 10 years back.

None of us knows the character China will assume domestically — it could be a transition like Singapore’s (or Taiwan’s, or South Korea’s) or, to its own cost, it could stay frozen in authoritarian mode.

Wise to keep options open, as for the most part Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull have done, and to deploy what Paul Keating, in a recent conversation with Kerry O’Brien, called “the elasticity of diplomacy” — that is, to bridge gaps of political values and stay open to possibility.

“Our interests aren’t always the same as a great power’s,” former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Dennis Richardson said when I was foreign minister, talking about this very question. Of course, we could overlook this wisdom and just do what we imagine is acceptable to Washington — on patrols, on the AIIB, on subs. But in truth the US would not be surprised if, like all its allies, we pursued a pragmatic approach to China. “Just be the most desired girl on the block,” assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell told me in 2013 about Australia’s smartest position.

Or, to use Keating’s words, we could bet all our cards on US primacy continuing forever. That only leaves us hostage to the day Air Force One lands in Beijing and a US president, guided by Kissinger realism, alights to forge a new partnership, leaving us — as Richard Nixon left William McMahon in 1972 — in a backwater, bobbing isolated and exposed and silly.