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.
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I get where you are going. China is a bald faced autocracy, and anybody expecting it to engage with the rest of the world out of some sense of altruism is simply not thinking things through.
But ultimately the problem at the moment isn’t ‘them’ it is ‘us’
The other side of the dynamic, the side seen by a load of people in the Pacific, but plenty in Australia, the US, UK and even Europe, is that what we see as democracy and the freedoms and individual rights which balance around that have – for more than a generation – essentially sold the middle and working classes and their aspirations down the drain while providing better outcomes for a very small section of society. The mantras and ideological billboards of the apogee of neo-Liberalism, the Free Trade agreements, the global banks, the debt and the embedding of return on investment as being the only way to drive society, has been exposed as a fraud. Sure it has lifted people out of poverty, but to what extent is it only so they can be cash cows to be milked?
Our model, the model, we are proposing for peoples in developing nations is seen as a failure by us – see the election of Trump, the Brexit vote, the loathing of our own politicians – and reflective of a widespread sense that our politics cannot be corrected by participating in it, and is failing us every day. How the hell are we supposed to proselytize about what sort of decisions somewhere else in the world should make? Should we tell them to look at our energy market as a guide to how good we are? Or our labour rights or private debt load? Do we try and explain how it is that an education system which was once well respected has been trashed to provide a buck – with a lot of the bucks coming from the developing world? Is Uber expensive housing for the punterariat something we should be highlighting as a selling point? And that corruption we are forever complaining about, and which much of the world sees as fairly normal – should we bang on some more while putting in the short steps on addressing corruption in banks, or tax avoidance or Facebook and Cambridge Analytica? Sure their corruption is a disgrace, but is our industry self regulation any less so? Much of the world still is quite tribal, superstitious and corrupt – but that has some advantages: most would look at an aged care regime running long of stashing the aged in institutions so their assets can be stripped by sundry related parties as being a tad distasteful.
Arguably more than half the world has a tradition of being ruled by strongmen, despots, dictators or royals of some sort or another, where patronage is expected and bestowed and favors done at every level effectively make a system. The Chinese will plug straight into that, and understand, and be understood fine. They arent selling a political setup which upsets local applecarts and undermines local elites, and tells them to produce a dividend for global capital. Right at the moment they are selling a political structure which they can portray as ‘it works’ (sure I get that there are weak points) and will plausibly provide a superior outcome to that being exhorted to (many Pacific Islands for starters). Australia has had a Gulag in one Pacific Island until recently, and its other one in Manaus is close enough for the Pacific to get a real sighter on Australia’s commitment to peoples rights. China’s treatment of the Uighurs and the Tibetans is profoundly ugly – but much of the world will assume that this isn’t a risk for them as they pose no real threat to internal China, and they don’t have assets which China wants to exploit
Before we restart selling American style capitalism and ‘democracy’ to others, it may be worth doing a refresher on whether we still want it for ourselves……..I do, but I want an upgrade on outcomes, and I am not sure our system has it in it to provide them for people like me. The ones we’ve had over a generation now have tended to coq things up and customer service – in the form of our politicians, media, and institutions – keep putting me though a load of phone banks and then telling me the problem is at my end.
As great powers clash you will have two choices. One empowers you to fight for better the other does not.
In his 2016 documentary titled “HyperNormalisation”, Adam Curtis very aptly describes the need to polarise complexities into “good” and “evil” in order to justify the actions of the Westworld.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
No empire is good and neither has any “altruism”. There is no dichotomy, *every* empire is equally evil.
Moral relativism is chicken soup for the soul.
There is no dichotomy, *every* empire is equally evil.
That’s a mighty long bow.
But which is which?
From the end of WW2 to the reagan/thatcher economic reset gains were shared as a bulwark against communism.
Since then the freeing of capital has given us a gilded age mk2 and the rise of trumpism but importantly perhaps a Bernie next.
So i choose usa against colonisation by payday lending china.
Good point Gunna. The creeping corruption we see in our own business and political economy is not a good advert for our ways. Let’s just start by cleaning that up. If we had a political party that was hell-bent on cleaning up the rorts across the spectrum then I reckon they’d be on a winner. Problem is our current crop are entrenched rorters themselves.
The rorters will always outbid the honest people for places of power as they are simply willing to do more to obtain them as they are more value to someone sticking their snought in the trough than someone trying to make the country better.
There’s always that one bloke who won’t just toe the line, thinks everyone else is nuts and ain’t too afraid to say it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAIKh7AnTIk
I hope he’s ok.
Hey Gunna, love your commitment and your ideas, we really need to get together and sort out how we can do some sort of internet radio chat on China’s emergence, specifically as seen from the Aussie perspective.
I’ve got a feeling that you have just the right balance and attitude to temper my excesses, I think the chemistry could be just right, to create broad level audience appeal. I know you talked about this a couple of years ago but I wasn’t ready…I’m ready now.
+1 would listen
Good stuff Gunna in my book.
Lest we devolve to binary Clinton vs. Trump choices and then externalize all the failures one might be more introspective before casting aspersions.
We cut foreign aid to nothing and than get surprised when someone else wins hearts and minds
“The Turnbull government has warned China”
What a joke, as if Turnbull “warned China” now America on the other hand can “warn China” and China pays attention…Australia doesn’t warn anyone because we are very low in the peaking order of the world stage. The problem is we think we are higher, when in fact we are a pathetic little nation full of ourselves.
Yes we’re greatly concerned about that takeover occurring 2000km offshore…….whilst we sell them anything not nailed down (and nailed down to be truthful).
We should just get nukes and tell China that we would consider a base in a Vanuatu as a threat to our national security. It would dramatically increase the costs for them of following through.
We are Australia, not the 52nd State of the USA. They would laugh at us.
That’s the whole point of nukes
Yeah nah, still no impact. What are we going to do? Nuke the pacific? Send nukes across SE asia and hit Beijing? This is North korea in reverse ideology.
China says stories of them building a base in Vanuatu is fake news . So expect a fully working airbase with bombers capeable of reaching Straya to be operational in 3 years. Besides …both Vanuatu and Straya are both within the new 27 (or is it 36) dash line ?
Anyway, good opportunity for Strayan property as we can sell more of our children’s homes to the new inhabitants of Vanuatu . They will be closer and it will be good for the economy ……and jobs n growth ..isn’t that right Malcolm ?
According to this, Ch!nk$ bought Aus RE at premium inflated prices only to bomb it to oblivion, perhaps to claim that they were destructinf their own properties???
Our good deterrent against Chinese bombs is their undoubted ownership of realties. Not having nukes on our turf is the top rational reason not to see Aus as a nuclear threat hence not to nuke Aus
True ….no need to bomb the universities, apartments and other useful real estate if you already own it …….just knock out the US supply points and you can then bottle the whole place up nicely
…but I’m sure our generals are experts and well on top of these matters …..the next big dust up when it comes won’t be a rerun of the 1940s for Straya that’s for sure .
That To Do list is quite full and won’t be achieved by any Parliament. Prayer and those online Mandarin lessons look more realistic, plus an acceptance of even greater negative liberty, as Isaiah Berlin framed it.
This year, China started a new program where people have a ‘social point score’. If you have unpaid fines, you will lose social points, and if you lose enough you can’t even buy a train ticket!!
CCTV at every corner is both a gross invasion of privacy and a valuable tool at solving crime. When a driver runs over someone in Chins, their first instinct is to flee the scene. Without CCTV no one will ever be held responsible for many accidents. (Their surveillance system is called Skynet..) We actually have something similar in Australia right now, just not widely publicised.
Right now, China is lookimg after its own interest, while the US is busy with destroying itself. The inability to deliver infrastructure projects on time and under budget will eventually doom a nation, and the neo-liberal model of privatising profit right now us more corrupt than what crooked Chinese officials can get away with. We merely stopped calling it corruption, when it is nothing but.
Russian troll!!!
Sandwich bot!!!
/sarc
Is it better to know your living in a dictatorship, or to think your living free in a ‘democracy’. The Western Model lost its people a long time ago, when we eat our young, old, and sick on a daily basis, what chance do we have.
Malcolm: Keep out of our backyard, comrade!
Xi: Got it. No more students to go to Great Southern Mine. Commence the media campaign.
Malcolm: Whoah, whoah, whoah … don’t take me out of context!
Australia is a Chinese colony in waiting. Just give it time. Too late for the poor saps who didn’t see it coming years ago.
If change is inevitable, then why delay change?
Embrace the change instead, become a vector of change rather than an opposing force that can only weaken with time. The one approach is like a growth strategy whereas the other is an undeniable death spiral.
I kinda know which way I’ll vote even if the majority of my countrymen choose to associate honor with a slow decay.