Domainfax does a good job today on China in the Pacific. Do-nothing Malcolm is upset:
The Turnbull government has warned China against building military bases near Australia following a furore over a possible defence outpost on the nearby island nation of Vanuatu.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia would view with “great concern” any foreign military bases in the Pacific islands, drawing a line in the sand amid calls for stronger action to curb rising Chinese influence in the strategically critical region.
…Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said the revelations were a “game-changer” in the debate over the Pacific and showed Australia had to take a leadership role to prevent the militarisation of the region.
…New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said any military arrangement was a matter for the two sovereign nations but added she would “privately and publicly” push her government’s position against military build-up in the region.
I wish I believed Do-nothing Malcolm but he always says the right thing then does nothing. From on the ground:
The sheer ubiquity of Chinese effort in the Pacific island nation, just 2000 kilometres from Australia, is striking. As Fairfax Media reported on Monday, Beijing is eyeing the establishment of a permanent military presence in the country.
Locals worry that their government is letting too much happen too quickly, threatening to leave their small nation with unmanageable debt to Beijing and too little economic opportunity for its own people.
“It is going to change everything,” said Jackie Willie, who was selling water and fruit juice at one of the capital Port Vila’s main markets on Tuesday morning.
It was a common view at the market among people who are at the bottom of the socio-economic pile.
Mr Willie, 44, said he believed there was an overly close relationship between the government of Prime Minister Charlot Salwai and Beijing.
“We know it is going on but we don’t have the power to do anything about it,” Mr Willie said. “The Chinese have got more money, they talk to them [the government] and they get what they want.”
Peter Martin chimes in on Chinese “assistance”:
It comes in the form of loans, not much cheaper than, and sometimes more expensive than loans that could have been obtained from organisations set up for the purpose such as World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But their advantage is that they are approved quickly and are often for purposes more attractive to elites than to the countries themselves.
China was insistent on lending for a 1000-seat convention centre in Vanuatu rather than the hospital that some of the local authorities would have preferred.
It’s also often smaller things; bursaries for children of the elites to be educated in China, contracts for their families.
And there’s usually a port or an airfield involved.
Corruption is not new to Pacific Islands. And Australians have themselves been unwelcome colonists in the past. But the sheer scale of this is unprecedented and it does not end well for the unwary.
Peter Hartcher describes the fate of the colonised Uighur people:
You can understand her frustration. More and more of Rebiya Kadeer’s family have been rounded up into Chinese Communist Party re-education camps. She was once one of the richest women in China, a successful retail entrepreneur, a member of China’s National People’s Congress, Beijing’s model member of its Uighur minority. Today she lives in exile in America accused of sedition for championing Uighur rights. Thirty-seven of her clan members, including 11 children under the age of 10, are locked up. How many of her family are free? “None,” the slight, 71-year old grandmother answers matter-of-factly.
She’s at liberty because, as the face of the world’s Uighur ethnic minority, the US has granted her residency as protection from Chinese government repression.
Most Uighurs live in China’s remote north-west province of Xinjiang. They are an ethnically Turkic people who call their land East Turkestan and practice Islam. She’s been called the Muslim Dalai Lama.
More and more of the Uighur people are being penned up in the camps, and the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t even bother with a legal pretext any more, Kadeer says.
The New York Times recently ran a horrible profile of the Uighurs fate:
Imagine that this is your daily life: While on your way to work or on an errand, every 100 meters you pass a police blockhouse. Video cameras on street corners and lamp posts recognize your face and track your movements. At multiple checkpoints, police officers scan your ID card, your irises and the contents of your phone. At the supermarket or the bank, you are scanned again, your bags are X-rayed and an officer runs a wand over your body — at least if you are from the wrong ethnic group. Members of the main group are usually waved through.
You have had to complete a survey about your ethnicity, your religious practices and your “cultural level”; about whether you have a passport, relatives or acquaintances abroad, and whether you know anyone who has ever been arrested or is a member of what the state calls a “special population.”
This personal information, along with your biometric data, resides in a database tied to your ID number. The system crunches all of this into a composite score that ranks you as “safe,” “normal” or “unsafe.”Based on those categories, you may or may not be allowed to visit a museum, pass through certain neighborhoods, go to the mall, check into a hotel, rent an apartment, apply for a job or buy a train ticket. Or you may be detained to undergo re-education, like many thousands of other people.
A science-fiction dystopia? No. This is life in northwestern China today if you are Uighur.
The Uighur live within today’s Chinese borders so they represent a different level of threat to the Chinese Communist Party. But the difference between internal and external Chinese repression is only a matter of priority. China is not some benevolent, peace-loving nation. It is a bald-faced autocracy that imprisons or corrupts anyone deemed hazardous to the national interests crafted by the autocrat.
It is true to say that other nations share these habits of interference in subordinate nations, not least the US. But the one key difference is the intended outcome. US imperialism is at its heart a push towards liberal capitalism to its own benefit, for all of its flaws. Even mistaken conflicts such as that that has transpired in Iraq are rightly placed within this context. The US is a liberal empire.
Chinese imperialism is at its heart a push to install policy obedience to Beijing, by force or corruption. It is an illiberal empire.
So, you choose for your kids. Do you value for them the freedoms that can be used to fight for better freedoms. Or, do you prefer for them the freedom to answer to Beijing.
If, as I do, you choose the former, then the following is our best way forward:
- value competitiveness and productivity to ensure as broad a mix as possible of exports and trade partners is sustained;
- use fiscal policy and sovereign wealth funds to lean heavily against Dutch Disease;
- cutting immigration to historic averages to ensure a balanced geographic mix in people-to-people connections, policy integrity and lower household debt;
- police foreign buying of realty to ensure foreign powers do not gain leverage over household wealth;
- use monetary tools and tax reform to prevent excessive offshore borrowing that funds unproductive debt and is vulnerable to sudden reversal;
- use industry policy to promote manufacturing and energy independence;
- install codes of conduct at universities protecting free speech;
- re-engage the US wherever possible in regional diplomacy, and
- create anti-corruption watchdogs in all parliaments.
Do-nothing Malcolm has done none of it.
