Via Peter Hartcher today:
For the first time, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force on Friday landed heavy bombers on an island in the South China Sea. Three weeks ago it installed anti-ship and anti-aircraft cruise missiles on some of the islands.
…”There’s no conceivable defensive rationale for putting these things on these islands,” says Lowy’s Graham. “It speaks very powerfully to power projection. They are literally putting markers down.”
…And what does this mean for Australia? Most political and media discussion of China in recent weeks has been devoted to discerning whether Australia has a problem in its relations with China. Peak hysteria was a newspaper column demanding that Malcolm Turnbull sack Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop because China relations were “now in the freezer”. The author, Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador to Beijing, is now on the board of a Chinese state-controlled coal company and runs his own China-based consultancy.
…Why might the Chinese be cross? Because the government criticised the Chinese Communist Party’s covert foreign influence operations in Australia. Two points here. First, if the Chinese regime were seriously trying to punish Australia, we wouldn’t have to guess. They’d impose real economic pain, as they did in boycotting South Korean music and movies, as they did in cutting off a key Philippines export, bananas.
Second, if the party were “punishing” Australia for standing up for itself, is it really the right reaction to self-flagellate? Is Australia that craven? White puts it this way: “The Chinese have only cleared their throat, and they’ve got us running around like chooks with our heads cut off.”
Would China sack its foreign affairs minister for defending its national interests?
Thank god for some backbone on the issue. If Raby-style kowtowing is adopted as national policy we’ll end up somewhere like I discussed yesterday. There are two working models for living involuntarily under Chinese power. The New York Times recently ran a profile of the first, the Uighurs of Western China:
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.
This plays out differently in our second model, that of Hong Kong, via Reuters:
As China tightens its grip on Hong Kong, pro-democracy parties have been hit by the sidelining of key leaders and have been losing ground to a well-organized pro-Beijing camp.
Those troubles hit home last month, when the democrats suffered an electoral setback in a key legislative by-election, winning only two of three seats they were expected to take easily.
Critically, many supporters stayed home – and some switched sides to protest what they said were the confrontational tactics of pro-democracy groups.
“The opposition always argues for the sake of argument,” said one democracy supporter who gave her name as Feng. In frustration, she cast her ballot for a pro-Beijing candidate in the March 11 elections.
“Confronting Beijing directly is not a good strategy,” the 44-year-old government contractor said. “You have to go about it in softer ways.” She said she did not want her full name published because she works for the government.
That sort of shift by voters like Feng is worrying leaders of pro-democracy parties in Hong Kong who fear an eroding public mandate, which they see as their sole weapon to counter Beijing’s influence in the city.
“We have to make sure that our own people here in Hong Kong do not give up on us,” said Alvin Yeung, a barrister and head of the pro-democracy Civic Party.
Over the past decade, resentment has deepened toward China’s perceived growing encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy.
In 2014, protests by pro-democrats calling for a greater say in how Hong Kong’s leader was chosen engulfed large areas of the city for months. The collapse of those protests led to growing calls among young activists for independence.
The Chinese government has responded with an increasingly tougher line.
In 2016, it intervened in a Hong Kong court decision that removed pro-independence lawmakers from office for taking their oaths improperly – the action that led to the March by-elections. It has also deemed a Hong Kong train station to be under mainland authority.
On Tuesday, dozens of pro-Beijing groups took out advertisements in Hong Kong newspapers calling for the dismissal of a University of Hong Kong academic, Benny Tai, after he allegedly made comments advocating independence for China.
The growing reach of China’s security apparatus is also worrying many in Hong Kong after instances like the 2015 disappearance of several Hong Kong booksellers who later showed up in Chinese custody, as well as the mysterious disappearance of a mainland Chinese tycoon from a luxury hotel in 2017.
Hong Kong authorities, meanwhile, have proposed jail terms of up to three years for those mocking China’s national anthem, and there have been calls from pro-Beijing politicians for national security laws outlawing subversive acts against China.
The authorities have also started jailing protest leaders like Joshua Wong, a 21-year-old student.
So, neither option looks altogether appealing. Still, if we went the way of HK and steered ourselves directly under Xi Jinping’s skirts I expect that we’d see the following:
- Chinese soft power would dominate Canberra. There’s be no official takeover because there is no need. China bribes and trade coercion would be enough to control the parties. Elections would continue but Beijing would determine the outcome in advance to ensure no resuscitation of Anglophone allegiances.
- Slowly but surely the media would be corralled as a Chinese Communist Party propaganda unit. At first by takeovers and joint ventures. Eventually a new licencing regime would be introduced to limit views. The ABC would play a major role promoting the CCP. New media would be shut down. Some agitators for freedom may even quietly disappear for re-education. A show trial or two may be needed to make the point.
- ANZUS would die and US marines shifted out of Darwin. Pine Gap would be converted to a Chinese operation and Australia withdraw from the “five eyes” intelligence network. Chinese military bases would open in WA (to police the commodities trade) and in NSW (as a kind of permanent gun to Canberra’s head) to rapturous local applause. Or, perhaps, Chinese aircraft carriers would simply frequent both coast lines.
- There might be a national service obligation in the Australian Liberation Army to brainwash youth and inculcate obedience. All armed services will be retooled for integration with Chinese tech. It’s that or they would effectively be disbanded.
- Mass immigration of ethnic Chinese would be dramatically expanded to Sinofy the identity over time. Chinese joint ventures would mushroom across the economy. Universities especially would become promotional units of Chinese hegemony.
- There’d be no obvious presence of Chinese policing but advanced surveillance techniques would be deployed across all cities to ensure trouble-makers were spotted early for re-education by Vichy-styled Australian officials. There’s probably no need for gulags Downunder. That may upset the locals. But if a few get restive you never know. There’s always a bit of forced work in the Pilbara mines as an option.
- Above all else, the Chinese Communist Party would infiltrate and dominate and divide everything until there were two classes of people. Those in it and those not.
We’d remain rich and fat as Chinese dollars flowed Downunder, eventually becoming a kind of distant marsupial theme park for Chinese seeking a little more freedom than that available on the mainland. Perhaps an outlying haven for gay Chinese who want to escape conversion therapy. A kind of socially liberal ‘Hong Kong on the beach’.
On the whole life would not too bad so long as long as you kowtow to the Beijing line, are happy for the Chinese Embassy to approve or disapprove your overseas travel, and don’t mind as your culture and history are air-brushed into oblivion.
Perhaps Geoff Raby is positioning himself for the regional governorship.
