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Via Chris Uhlmann comes a rare voice of sanity:

What is it that terrifies the people of Hong Kong about the Chinese Communist Party that eludes so many pliant Australian academics, business leaders and ex-politicians?

In the same breath, some local cognoscenti lament the Australian government’s weakness in barely mentioning the troubles in the Chinese territory before returning to their rote gripe that Canberra’s national security establishment is too hawkish.

Australia’s intelligence agencies are better described as cautious about the balance of risks and opportunities that come with China’s rise because, unlike their critics, they are not wilfully blind…On the streets of Hong Kong a people’s visceral fear is on parade. They fear they are to be subsumed by what looks increasingly like a nasty totalitarian regime.

…Expect no parades of courage here. Australia’s problem with China isn’t that it is too assertive, it is that we are weak.

Much more at the piece. Too right. As UBS discovered, kissing the CPC’s butt encourages it to sit on you harder.

Australian groveling is all the more bizarre when we note that it has been on the wrong end of CPC influence operations much more than elsewhere. There is a good reason for that. We have power. Via ANZUS and iron ore, which directly supports CPC economic legitimacy. We cannot be pushed around.

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Unless we let ourselves be.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.