As we enter 2021, the Taiwan Strait is stormy. The U.S. military, the most important force in directly restraining the Chinese Communist Party from committing crimes against Taiwan, is sending strong signals. For example, Philip Davidson, the outgoing U.S. military’s first Indo-Pacific commander, believes that the Chinese Communist Party could invade Taiwan within the next six years, while his successor, John Aquilino, has said that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is imminent and could happen within the next three years. The prestigious British magazine The Economist also recently published a cover article referring to Taiwan as “the most dangerous place on earth”.
On May 6, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a Melbourne radio station that the Australian government’s policy on Taiwan would remain firm. If the Chinese Communist Party violates Taiwan by force, Australia will fulfill its commitment to support the United States and its allies. Earlier, on April 25, Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton told the media that the possibility of a military conflict between China and the Communist Party over Taiwan should not be underestimated; Australian Home Affairs Secretary General Mike Pezzullo also said that the “drums of war” (drums of war) had been sounded Australia and its liberty-minded allies must be prepared to fight for freedom.
However, in the Indo-Pacific region, Australia is arguably the country with the “least conflict of interest” with China compared to the US, Japan and India, so why is it on such high alert? In this regard, this article tries to explain two points.
First, the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to change the current international order and poses an “overall threat” to Australia.
The Chinese Communist Party is defined as a “revisionist” regime by the Trump administration. Since Biden’s inauguration, the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to challenge the U.S.-led international order since the end of World War II have become more blatant. Here are two examples. The first example is that on March 18, during the opening remarks of a high-level meeting between the U.S. and China, the Communist Party’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi broke the rules of the meeting and went on a 16-minute rant, blatantly saying that the U.S. was “not qualified to say in front of China that you talk to China from a position of strength” and did not recognize what the U.S. called universal values and a rules-based international order. As a second example, on May 7, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in a UN Security Council Foreign Minister-level video conference he initiated and chaired entitled “Safeguarding Multilateralism and the UN-Centered International System,” said that international rules must be written by all parties, and not “the monopoly and privilege of a few countries. “The United States is the world’s most important country. U.S. Secretary of State John Blinken was tit-for-tat, emphasizing that the basis of international multilateral cooperation is the common adherence of all countries to a rules-based international order, and criticizing, without naming names, the Chinese Communist Party’s blatant disregard for international rules on issues such as human rights, trade and territorial borders.
Previously, in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, the CCP once challenged the international order since the end of World War II by proposing the establishment of a “new international political and economic order,” but at that time, its power was weak and it finally ended. Now, under the banner of “defender, builder and contributor to the international order”, the Chinese Communist Party has been transforming the current international order little by little, posing a real threat to the world. This threat is widely perceived. For example, on February 17, Estonia’s annual report “International Security and Estonia 2021,” released from far away in Europe, devotes nine pages at the end to “the increasing pressure from the Chinese (communist) countries. Frank Jüris, an Estonian foreign policy expert, said, “Estonia’s greatest fear is that the world order that gave Estonia back its independence 30 years ago and the prosperity and development we have been involved in for the past 30 years is being dismantled.” “Our world order is being dismantled,” he said.
Since this perception is shared by the small country of Estonia, it is even more strongly felt by Australia as a “middle power. Australia has long positioned itself as a “strong advocate of liberal institutions, universal values and human rights” and a staunch ally of the U.S. In its first foreign policy white paper in 14 years, published in November 2017, Australia warned of the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party, saying that Beijing was ignoring the “rules-based order” of international relations since the end of World War II. “rules-based order” and expressed concern that the CCP’s military expansion in the South China Sea threatened to lead to conflict in Asia.
Australia’s attitude toward the CCP was soon reflected in defense policy adjustments. on July 1, 2020, the Australian government released the 2020 Defense Strategic Update and the 2020 Force Structure Plan, announcing that it would spend A$270 billion over the next 10 years to strengthen defense capabilities (about 1.3 trillion yuan, a 40 percent increase over the 2016 budget plan), and considers the Indo-Pacific region from the northeast Indian Ocean to the western Pacific Ocean as an area of direct strategic interest for Australia, focusing on improving maritime interdiction capabilities, maritime control capabilities and maritime force projection capabilities. Prime Minister Morrison said at a press conference that the possibility of a hot war on Australian soil in the post-epidemic era is the greatest since the 1940s. It is widely believed that the main purpose of the new Australian defense strategy is to “defend against the Chinese Communist Party.
It should be noted here that Australia’s high level of vigilance against the CCP is due in large part to a consciousness of its values, as analyzed in my previous article “Australia’s Awakening to Hit the CCP Hard”. In late April, Prime Minister Morrison told a Christian conference on the Gold Coast that when he was elected Prime Minister of Australia, his pastor gave him the advice to “do what God has put in your heart with what God has put in your hands …….” . At a time of endless conflict between China and Australia, Morrison gave a speech of “God’s call”, and I agree with the analysis that Morrison was calling on his constituents to follow God’s will to fight evil with him. From the faith dimension, the confrontation between China and Australia basically has no room for maneuvering, because although the manifestation is a conflict of values and systems, the connotation behind it is a conflict of faith.
Second, the CCP’s global ambitions and military expansion directly squeeze Australia’s strategic space.
In terms of the global strategic landscape, Australia is located in the South Pacific in the “Asia-Pacific era”, while in the “Indo-Pacific era”, Australia is the hub linking the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. For the CCP, Australia’s strategic position, coupled with its close alliance with the United States, is seen as a necessary target, while its dependence on the Chinese economy makes it a soft target.
However, it is clear that the Chinese Communist Party has seriously underestimated Australia’s determination and tenacity to resist. It is not clear whether the CCP’s economic sanctions will hit Australia’s economy hard (see my article “CCP’s Economic Coercion Tactics Against Australia Kicked the Steel Plate”), but the economic card has some effect, but when it comes to choosing between security and economy, I am afraid the economic card will not be as effective as before. This is a major miscalculation of the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward Australia.
The topic is more specific to Taiwan. In the first island chain to contain the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan is an important relay point from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia, and to Oceania. If Taiwan is occupied by the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party’s submarines will be able to move out of the first and second island chains unimpeded, and Australia’s anti-submarine operations will be very difficult.
At the same time, the expansion of the Chinese Communist Party in the South Pacific also poses a major threat to Australia: Papua New Guinea in the north of Australia, which is Australia’s northern barrier (determining Australia’s access to Taiwan and Northeast Asia) and with which Australia has deep historical ties, but in recent years China has invested heavily in Papua New Guinea; and the Solomon Islands in the northeast of Australia (determining Australia’s access to the Northeast and to Hawaii), which was originally a major island. connectivity to Hawaii), which was originally a state of Taiwan but was taken away by the Chinese Communist Party in 2019. To the east of Australia are the Pacific Islands (with the Pacific Islands Forum, a regional organization), where the Chinese Communist Party is expanding its influence and even seeking to establish military bases by lending infrastructure investment funds to Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and other countries, among others. During World War II, the Pacific Islands served as a central military base and a strategic stronghold for Western countries seeking to stabilize their maritime routes.
Another important point is that, according to the analysis of Cheng Xiaonong, a scholar in the United States, the Chinese Communist Party has “planted islands” in the South China Sea to implement strategic deterrence against the United States, turning the South China Sea into a “deep-sea fortress” for the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic nuclear submarines; from the “deep-sea fortress “However, this channel is located in the sea where the U.S. Navy’s anti-submarine forces are focused on prevention, so it is not easy to pass through. The Chinese Communist Party has had to develop other shipping lanes to the “deep sea bastion” (due east out of the Philippine Islands, south out of the Java Sea), all of which are related to Australia. The Chinese Communist Party has taken the initiative to worsen its economic relations with Australia by imposing widespread bans on the import of Australian goods, ultimately not for economic gain, but as a means of causing economic damage to Australia, in an attempt to overwhelm Australia and force it to relax its defense.
It is thus clear that the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic intentions towards Australia are very obvious and the strategic squeeze is quite strong. Australia cannot help but fight back. On the one hand, it counters the CCP’s economic coercion, and on the other hand, it strengthens U.S.-Australian military cooperation and adjusts its defense strategy. Australia’s revised National Defense Strategy 2020 sets out a clear strategic approach to security: accelerated military build-up, clearer objectives, inclusion of the northern Indonesian archipelago waters in the defense area, expanded defensive coverage, and a defense focus on the “imminent region” (immediate region) rather than just the The focus of defense is on the “immediate region” rather than the “immediate neighborhood”. Previously Australia’s defence area covered the waters of northern islands and lakes such as Papua New Guinea, but now it has expanded north to include the Indonesian archipelago. All six of Australia’s major air bases are to the north, and U.S. Marines are stationed near the port of Darwin, the most important port on the north coast, with the number of Marines having been raised to 2,500 since 2014 to date. This expeditionary force is the same size as the U.S. military’s deployment in Okinawa. This shows Australia’s growing importance, with Japan guarding the northern hemisphere and Australia defending the southern hemisphere.
Conclusion
Australia’s stark statement of concern about the situation in the Taiwan Strait releases separate messages to the U.S. and China, expressing a firm alliance with the U.S. while drawing a red line against the Chinese Communist Party, telling it that pressure on Australia will not achieve its objectives. Australia envisages a worst-case scenario with the aim of raising the cost of war in the Taiwan Strait for the CCP as a disincentive for war to break out in the Taiwan Strait.
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