China’s wolf warriors devour Australia’s possum pansies

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China’s wolf wanker warrior diplomats may be a pack of arseholes. But at least they’ve got a bit of get up and go.

By comparison, Australia’s possum pansy diplomats are about as fearsome as a trampled flower bed. At The Guardian today:

Australia must work to prevent ties with China slipping into permanent hostility as the relationship becomes more vulnerable to frequent flare-ups, a former senior diplomat has warned.

Without careful management, Australia’s ties with its top trading partner could descend into a “permanently adversarial” state where parts of the economic relationship are regularly at risk, according to Richard Maude, until recently a deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra.

He warned that it was easier to talk about finding new export markets than actually finding them, and Australia would be poorer and less resilient if competitive relations between China and the west deteriorated to a point where it jeopardised cooperation on major global challenges.

“Managing relations with an assertive China requires Australian patience, consistency and steadfastness on policy over the long term,” wrote Maude, the executive director of policy at the Asia Society Australia.

“The task is harder because China increasingly is conducting its diplomacy in a manner it would never accept from others. That diminishes China but is the nature of authoritarian power. Cool determination rather than indignation is the better response.”

The call came as Scott Morrison declared Australia would never “trade away our values” and would deal with other countries “fairly and honestly and openly”.

There’s more of the same from another possum pansy at Domain:

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First and foremost, we need to put down the megaphone and start talking to Beijing as an equal, through normal diplomatic channels. Beijing might even reciprocate by tempering its threats. It might even hold off diversifying supply chains to markets offering lower quality and higher priced agricultural and mining products than Australia has to offer.

Secondly, we should support the Belt and Road Initiative by signing a memorandum of understanding with Beijing that says we will consider BRI projects in Australia on a case-by-case basis, each on its merits. We would not be compelled to do anything that was not in the national interest.

Importantly, it would give face to an initiative that is vital to Xi Jinping’s prestige at home and abroad. Signing up to the BRI would also make it easier for Australian business to take advantage of opportunities that are emerging in BRI markets across Central Asia, including projects intended to mitigate China’s reliance on certain imports from Australia.

Finally, we need to diversify our own export markets. Canberra’s hawks on China are right about this – we do have too many eggs in the China basket. But they are mistaken in the way they are approaching the problem. By continually incensing China on a range of non-trade issues, they risk losing the China market for many of our exporters before we have been able to establish alternative markets.

Baloney. Commodities are fungible go to highest bidder. The end.

As for shutting down the debate and quietly objecting to CCP encroachments, this is the very approach that got us to where we are today: half-colonised, overly-dependent and corrupted to the point of being unrecognisable. That is why the CCP insists upon it. It serves their interests.

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What we need instead is sunshine and lots of it. Intense and burning light that exposes and rips through the relationship like a searing migraine. We need to permanently shift the normatives around CCP influence-peddling from yesteryear’s delusion that we could make a buck no strings attached, to today’s cold reality that doing so is treason.

Without that, what you end up with is this, also at Domain:

In response, [UQ Chancellor] Mr Varghese — a former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and a former director-general of the Australia’s peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments — said that because Chinese students accounted for about 20 per cent of UQ’s revenue and China was a major research partner, “it would be surprising if the management of this relationship was not one of the vice-chancellor’s KPIs”.

“There is nothing subversive about this,” he said on Thursday.

Mr Varghese said that, while Professor Hoj had been criticised for his links to China it was “worth noting that he has been a significant contributor to the design of the (federal) government’s framework on how to manage areas of research with foreign partners that may have national security implications”.

…“Our political systems and values are very different. But boycotting China is not a sensible option. What we need is clear-eyed engagement with China which serves our interests and is faithful to our values,” Mr Varghese said.

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How does UQ stand up in this assessment? It has gutted pedagogical standards more than anywhere else while crush-loading the campus with Chinese kids. It protects Chinese thugs while persecuting Australian pro-democracy protestors. It is in bed with the CCP consulate to a staggering degree. Its management is signed on to CCP United Front operations.

In short, it has sold Australia out under the banner of quiet diplomacy.

The lesson is, do not look to Australia’s possum pansy diplomatic corp to provide advice or support in the project of restoring sovereignty and democracy. DFAT is a sausage factory of backstabbing Sinophiles that are cookie cut to follow post-modern values of cultural engagement over hard-nosed modern assessments of strategic necessity.

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They are useless as a policy organ in a post-globalisation world so use them for what they are good for – serving the tea – and leave it at that.

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.