Labor should support the China White Paper

Via Peter Hartcher:

Australia is a country worried about a future under a mighty and demanding China, and afraid that American leadership has already checked out.

…A breakthrough concept in the paper is that Australia should start something it has never done before. Balancing.

Not balancing one priority against another, or balancing the US alliance against the China relationship. But balancing in the meaning of classical European statecraft.

That is a group of nations banding together to offset – or balance against – the power of an overwhelmingly strong state.

The white paper doesn’t actually say that Australia and other regional countries should combine to balance against China’s growing might.

But that’s the clear implication. And there is a second breakthrough concept. It’s that Australia needs to act without waiting for America.

It doesn’t envisage an Indo-Pacific region without America. But it implicitly accepts that region has already lost American leadership.

At core, this is a policy for a country that is anxious about the future under an assertive China. And a country that doesn’t believe its own public rhetoric about the US as some sort of security guarantor.

…So, if Australia needs other countries to join it to “balance against bad behaviour”, who’s in the posse?

The paper says that Australia will put priority on deeper strategic relations with two separate sets of nations. One is the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations.

The other is the “like-minded democracies” of the so-called quadrilateral group, the quad – the US, Japan, India and Australia.

And what do these two groups have in common? They don’t include China.

That is very sensible stuff. Labor should support it. Will they? One wonders:

Labor has given bipartisan backing to the central thrust of the Turnbull government’s Foreign Policy White Paper which urges Beijing to follow global rules and keeping the US engaged in Asia, even though Opposition Leader Bill Shorten maintains fears over China’s rise are overblown.

…Asked whether Australia needed to seek out alliances with “like-minded countries” as the white paper advocates, Mr Shorten said Labor was capable of managing relationships with China and the US and recognised the “legitimate aspiration” for Asia’s middle classes to do better.

“Labor doesn’t share the same fear about the rise of China, we welcome the rise of China and we welcome the strength of the American alliance,” he said.

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said Labor agreed with the white paper’s emphasis on the importance of preserving the international rules-based order.

“China’s rise … has been the key contributor to Australia’s increasing prosperity over recent years. It has also been a good thing for humanity,” she said.

“I think we also should recognise, and should continue to advocate to China, stability in our region is not just in Australia’s interests, not just in Indonesia’s interests, it is in China’s interests because it’s that peace and stability which has been the platform on which China has risen, has enabled China’s economic development.”

Bob Carr seems to have read an entirely different White Paper:

While the Australian government’s foreign policy white paper was at the printers, it was being overtaken by events.

On page 46 it states that territorial disputes in the South China Sea are a “major fault line” of the region. Yet on November 10 the US President gave a speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Summit in Da Nang in which he didn’t mention it. Instead, he chose to tell the 21 assembled nations that he was adhering to America First and changing the trade rules.

Meanwhile, on November 12 Vietnam and China reached a “consensus” to “appropriately manage maritime issues … and jointly strive to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea”.

A US President chooses not to mention the issue when he is in Southeast Asia. The country in the frontline settles on a process.

“Fault line”? Probably not the best way of understanding what’s happening in our region.

…Paul Keating’s recent formulation in Australian Foreign Affairs makes sense. The US will no longer have a hegemonic role in Asia, but it can nurture a mediating or balancing role. That suits Australia because it points to a balance of power that will spring to life should China push too hard — by dredging around Scarborough Shoal, for example.

…The white paper commits Australia to “positive and active engagement with China”. But since the Foreign Minister’s speech on US-Australia co-operation in Los Angeles on January 26, all Australian commentary on China has been negative, exceeding on this score the language about China of any US allies, including that of Shinzo Abe.

What then does the government nominate as the agenda for a positive engagement? The Belt and Road Initiative? It’s China’s conversation with the world. But our reservations about it (some justified) seem to have held us back from doing what the Abbott government did with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: get in early and shape the rules.

Vietnam is tiny socialist, single-party state. What do the democracies of Japan and South Korea think, Bob? Australia’s Chinese engagement is in everything we do economically. Not since the 19th century have we been so dependent upon a single foreign power for our standard of living. To understate this is absurd. The engagement at all levels is gigantic.

We don’t need more China. We need balance to offset the dependence.

Otherwise, over time, Australian democracy will be at risk. China’s own comments eerily echoed China Bob (or the other way around):

…Liu Qing, head of the Asia-Pacific department at the foreign-ministry linked China Institute of International Studies, said this new strategic focus on the Indo-Pacific demonstrated Australia’s “contradictory” approach to China.

“On the one hand, there are positive comments on the Australia-China relationship and the paper talks about its importance,” he said.

“However, it also puts an emphasis on the Indo-Pacific, which displeases China. These partners don’t include China. This implies Australia wants to exclude China.”

“The Gillard government talked more about building a prosperous Asia-Pacific region while this government puts more emphasis on ideology,” he said.

“Australia wants the US to enhance its military presence in the region. This is a cold war mindset.”

The Global Times, a hawkish state-owned newspaper, ran a fairly straight forward report of the white paper’s release on Thursday but gave it a provocative heading: “Kangaroo’s diplomatic white paper: democratic countries come together to contain China.”

Song Guoyou, executive director of Asia-Pacific studies at Fudan University said “China puts more emphasis on the Asia-Pacific while Australia is trying to develop this Indo-Pacific strategy.”

Still, Song said overall the Australian government’s white paper was balanced.

That is pretty modest reaction. Labor should support the White Paper. Bob Carr should quit hit China-biased think tank so he can be taken seriously.