Over the past few years, Australia has become one of the main targets of the Chinese Communist Party authorities as their war-wolf diplomacy has spread throughout the world.
On April 27, Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a tabloid owned by the Communist Party’s central organ, the People’s Daily, issued his latest threat to Australia via Sina Weibo, a Communist Party-controlled social media outlet, stating that “if there is a war off the coast of China, and they dare to send soldiers to fight against the Communist Party, those Australian soldiers will be annihilated. If Australian bases serve in a military conflict, those bases will also be mercilessly destroyed.”
Hu did not elaborate on what exactly is meant by “if there is a war in China’s coastal waters and they dare to send military personnel to fight against China,” but Australia has repeatedly stated previously that “Australia is committed to a secure, open, prosperous and resilient Indo-Pacific region. We consistently work with our regional partners to address common security challenges.” Australia has also joined the United States, Japan, France and the United Kingdom in sending warships to the South China Sea to participate in freedom of navigation operations to declare its commitment to keeping the waters there open.
In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China’s historically based sovereignty claims were inconsistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Chinese Communist Party is a signatory to the convention.
In addition to military threats against Australia, Australia has been repeatedly targeted by Beijing through trade over the past few years. To date, Beijing has hit Australia economically by tightening travel to Australia for Chinese tourists and restricting or blocking exports of Australian beef, wine, barley and coal to China.
Australia’s most important trading partner is China. At the same time, Australia is also an ally of the United States, holding the same or similar positions as the United States on Hong Kong, Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Xinjiang Uighur issue, and whether Western allies should allow China’s Huawei to participate in the construction of their 5G networks, which has led to repeated ups and downs in Australia-China relations.
The Communist Party’s official media continues to propagate to the Chinese public that Beijing is bullying Australia, giving the public the impression that Australia is beyond China’s reach. How does the Australian community and the Australian media feel about what observers call Beijing’s war-wolf and trade weaponization diplomacy? How does it feel?
The difficulties of managing Australia-China relations
Voice of America spoke with Tony Walker, a leading Australian commentator, vice-chancellor’s fellow at La Trobe University and adjunct professor in the university’s School of Communication. Walker has twice reported as a China-based journalist during his career as a media professional. After leaving China, he has continued to focus on China and Australia-China relations, and continues to publish his analysis and commentary on China and Australia-China relations in the media today.
Walker, a veteran Australian media personality (Courtesy of Walker)
In the interview, he expressed his personal views on Australia-China relations and the role played by the Chinese Communist Party in today’s world. He was outspoken in his criticism of Beijing’s war-wolf diplomacy toward Australia and other countries’ diplomacy, and of the Australian Prime Minister for making mistakes in managing Australia-China relations. But he also said that no one could pretend that managing the difficult Australia-China relationship was easy.
Walker also admitted he had been naive about the Chinese Communist Party in the past. I thought the CCP would gradually take on the role of responsible stakeholder globally in a way that was not so out of place,” he said. But that’s clearly not how it’s going to end. Now we have to acknowledge that we’re dealing with a different kind of Chinese Communist Party. The question that we now face, the question that Australia and the United States and other allies face, is how to deal with dealing with this phenomenon.
“Is it going to be dealt with in the form of confronting the Chinese Communist Party? Is it going to be dealt with by staying in contact with the Chinese Communist Party? What is the most appropriate way to deal with it? I would say the best way to deal with it is to stay engaged with the Chinese, as (President Joe) Biden’s special envoy on climate change, John Kerry, has done on climate and other issues, and hopefully China will be brought back to a position that is more reasonable to the rest of the world.”
The following is a transcript of Walker’s interview with Voice of America. The interview represents his personal views only.
Reporter Q: You were previously based in Communist China covering news for Fairfax Media Australia and the Financial Times. When was that?
Walker: I first came to China in 1979, just after Deng Xiaoping’s third comeback, and I stayed in China until 1983, when China was continuing to open up to the outside world. At that time, the Chinese Communist Party was abandoning the Mao-era practices, the so-called reforms.
I came back to China after a full decade of absence, in 1993. That is, after the Tiananmen Square incident (in 1989, when the Chinese Communist authorities deployed the military to suppress peaceful demonstrators of students and citizens demanding democracy and anti-corruption), and after Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour to restart the reform process. This allowed me to clearly observe the beginning of China’s reform and its important subsequent stages.
Q: How would you compare the China of then and the China of today? Or do you think it was a good time in the past?
A: That’s a good question. Of course it wasn’t easy to do things in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The communication technology was still very basic and we were all fumbling around in the dark. And China had just emerged from the Cultural Revolution, and Chinese people were nervous about talking to foreigners. It was a difficult time to establish contact with ordinary Chinese people.
And of course, the foreign media at that time was not at the stage or level that it is today. I am referring here to the amount of foreign media as well as the technical content. When I first went to China as a journalist, the United States and China had just established diplomatic relations and a large number of American media were just beginning to arrive in China.
What I knew about China today was limited, and I hadn’t worked in China for some years. But my observation is that it’s harder for journalists to work in China at this late stage. The reason is simple, because the Chinese are more focused on maintaining control over their reporting and activities. But as China opens up, all sorts of issues become more visible to the outside world. It is harder for the Communist authorities to control the reporting of these issues. What I’m referring to here is of course the human rights violations that have occurred in Xinjiang.
Q: Australia is now repeatedly the target of Chinese anger. Chinese propaganda gives the impression to the Chinese that this is the case, that Australia is easily crushed or subdued, at least as far as trade is concerned. Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, the official Chinese Communist Party tabloid promoting nationalism, at one point said that Australia was a piece of chewing gum on the bottom of China’s shoe. What do you make of this Chinese propaganda?
A: I must say that this is clearly a propaganda campaign by the Chinese Communist authorities. If they thought Australia would give in to that kind of pressure, I think they were very wrong and misunderstood the character of Australia.
But the Chinese Communist authorities did cause economic pain to Australia and that is a concern. And frankly, I think the Australian government has made some mistakes in dealing with the Chinese government that have given Beijing an excuse to launch attacks on Australia. Of course no one is pretending that this is not the case.
This approach by Beijing also sends a signal to the countries in the region, as well as to the United States, in another form, which is, don’t upset China. What’s clear to me is that Australia is being used for this purpose. This is what the Chinese call killing the chicken to show the monkey. It’s a traditional tactic of Chinese diplomacy, and Australia is the target.
A civilian worker sits under a Chinese government propaganda sign erected outside a Beijing train station. (January 21, 2019)
Q: Propaganda is not new to the Chinese government or any government for that matter, but what do you think are the most striking features of the new propaganda in China today, compared to the old propaganda?
A: What is clear is that the successes and failures are now much more significant. Now you can no longer simply say that China is a rising power, China is a rising power. It has more influence in the world today than it ever has before. China’s interests are broader than ever before, and therefore the issues covered by China’s propaganda are broader.
What I can see very clearly is that some of the old habits in Beijing are hard to remove, the sense that they have that the central body can control the flow of information. But it’s much harder to do that kind of thing now than it used to be, because the technology is much more advanced now. China’s interests are now more global.
Q: There are many Chinese inside and outside China who wonder how long Australia will be able to withstand Chinese economic pressure and refuse to cave in. As an Australian, what would you say to Chinese who think this way?
A: We are a resilient country, we have a very diverse market and our country has a fairly robust economy. We have different trading partners, and of course China is our biggest and most important partner. I think we can withstand that pressure. We can withstand this pressure fairly indefinitely. Of course that pressure will cause, or is causing difficulties in certain sectors of the economy such as agriculture.
The hope here is that as the relationship between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party improves, Australia’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party will be less confrontational, if not more so, and the Australia-China relationship will move to a plateau. You can call me an optimist, and you can call me unrealistic. But I think there is at least that hope.
I would add that there were reports not long ago from Shanghai or Seoul that John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy for climate change in the Biden administration, said that after three days of talks, he and the Chinese Communist Party had reached a consensus on climate issues. I think that bodes well for a more constructive relationship between Washington and Beijing, and that could be good for Australia.
Q: In a recent article in The Conversation, you wrote that Beijing’s trade war against Australia smacks of overkill, which may have become a staple of China’s state-run media, but in reality it’s not an approach that serves the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. Can you explain in a little bit more detail what you mean by that?
A: Yes, I think that’s the case, for all the reasons I mentioned. Beijing is moving forward with actions against Australia for reasons other than economic. If we look at the complementarity of the Australian and Chinese economies, Australia is very important to the Chinese Communist Party. I would say, of course, that the Chinese Communist Party is more important to us.
But we supply the Chinese Communist Party with things that China needs like iron ore, coal. Coal shipments from Australia to the Chinese Communist Party have been almost completely stopped. It would be more expensive for the Chinese Communist Party to get that from somewhere else. That means that the Chinese Communist Party is also paying some kind of price for this retaliatory action against Australia.
I would say that this action by the Chinese Communist Party is overkill. In my view, in the long run, I think this approach is illogical. I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of Australia, but from a regional perspective, we are an important country. Australia is a very large country and strategically located in a very important way. We are the twelfth and thirteenth largest economy in the world and we are an important country in the region. I don’t see where the logic is for the Chinese Communist Party to maintain this poor relationship with Australia indefinitely.
Q: Prime Minister Morrison said that Australia “would like to have a positive relationship with the Chinese Communist Party that is consistent with Australia acting in accordance with its values and its national character. In your opinion, what does Morrison mean by these words?
A: What Prime Minister Morrison is trying to do, of course, is to try to bring Australia and the Chinese Communist Party back to a more normal relationship. I must say that Prime Minister Morrison is responsible for some of the deterioration in the Australia-China relationship, and he has made mistakes in that regard. No one can pretend that dealing with this difficult relationship is easy. I think what Prime Minister Morrison is trying to do is to send a signal to Beijing that this is about restoring stability to our relationship in accordance with our values, and I’m not sure that’s enough.
Q: You said earlier that Prime Minister Morrison has made some mistakes in the way he has handled the management of the Australia-China relationship. What were those mistakes?
A: I think there are some accumulated problems in Australia’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. The Australian side made several mistakes. Morrison wasn’t prime minister at the time. But I think it was a mistake for Australia to lobby its allies to exclude Huawei when building a 5G network, and we don’t need a broader, global lobby in our Five Eyes alliance with the U.S., U.K., Canada and New Zealand.
We can talk to the Chinese Communist Party or make a bid to avoid unnecessarily angering them. We could have awarded the contract to Ericsson and not to Huawei. But instead we lobbied against the economic interests of China, which is our major trading partner, and that just doesn’t make sense to me. Mawson was not the prime minister at the time, but the finance minister in the Turnbull government.
The most recent example of this was Morrison’s leadership a year ago in calling for an investigation into the origins of the outbreak that occurred in Wuhan. That seemed to me to be a mistake and unnecessarily provocative because the World Health Organization was going to conduct an investigation and Australia did not need to unnecessarily anger China.
My point here is not to say that we should accept the Chinese Communist Party’s claims on these issues against our will. I think we should assert our values and interests, but I don’t think there’s any point in unnecessarily angering the Chinese Communist Party. I think that’s what’s actually happening.
Q: Not long ago Chinese Ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye launched a charm offensive in Australia, defending the CCP’s treatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Ambassador Cheng Jingye said that no country should have any illusions that the CCP would swallow the bitter pill of interfering in China’s internal affairs, and that “we will not provoke, but if someone provokes us, we will return the favor with a tooth.”
Such words are considered to be typical of the war-wolf diplomacy that the CCP is now pursuing globally. As an experienced observer of CCP issues, how successful do you think war-wolf diplomacy has been, or how unsuccessful it has been?
A: I think it may work within China or with some of its neighbors, but I have to tell you that it’s completely counterproductive in Australia and it’s counterproductive internationally. It has led Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States and other countries to take a hard line against the Chinese Communist Party. Because the CCP is seen as trying to block information and bully other countries or journalists into not paying attention to issues that are going on inside China that might be of more widespread concern.
That’s the kind of approach that I think the CCP is taking is a counterproductive approach. The result is that this approach by the Chinese Communist Party has now prompted countries like Australia and the United States to join together to counter this diplomatic pressure that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to push broadly to stop journalists from reporting on human rights violations that are taking place in the Chinese Communist Party.
Q: Alongside the war-wolf diplomacy, the CCP has also been criticized for engaging in a sort of hostage diplomacy, as you point out in an opinion piece, “Hostage diplomacy is a relatively recent name for an old practice that seems to have a place in the CCP’s diplomatic arsenal.” Beijing is increasingly detaining foreigners, as if to express its displeasure with a particular country or to use as leverage.
At least two Australian citizens, one Cheng Lei and one Yang Hengjun, have recently been detained and charged with vague national security-related charges. What do Australians think of this development? How do you feel?
A: Frankly, I think this hostage diplomacy tactic is highly repugnant and will not be tolerated. It is a crude use of the weapon of diplomacy and we should absolutely and resolutely oppose it.
In the case of Australia, it’s hard to argue now that Canberra’s poor relationship with Beijing is exactly what Beijing wants. But in the case of Canada, the detention of two Canadians by Beijing authorities on unspecified national security grounds is clearly a bargaining chip against Canada’s detention of a Chinese citizen, the daughter of Huawei’s creator, as a bargaining chip. And with the case of whether she can be extradited to the United States pending in Canadian courts, this is clearly an example of hostage diplomacy, which is absolutely intolerable to accept.
In the case of Australia, the situation is not so clear cut. You could argue that the detention of these two Australian citizens of Chinese origin by the Chinese Communist authorities is hostage diplomacy. Or it could be that the Chinese Communist Party is there to send a strong message to Australia that the Chinese Communist Party is not happy with us.
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