Crikey welcomes its new Chinese overlord

Wanning Sun is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She also serves as the deputy director of the UTS Australia-China Relations Institute. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2020-23). She is best known in the field of China studies for her ethnography of rural-to-urban migration and social inequality in contemporary China. She writes about Chinese diaspora, diasporic Chinese media, and Australia-China relations.

As a card-carrying member of the infamous UTS Australia-China Relations Institute, the disgraced lovechild of Bob Carr and Xiangmo Huang (the billionaire tossed from the nation on ASIO advice of foreign interference), one would have thought that Wanning Sun’s bio should include greater detail about who funds her research.

After the fall of Xiangmo Huang, UTS ill-advisedly stepped in to pay for its disgraced Chinese…err…unit.

But this is hardly independent funding, is it? Like most unis, UTS made a killing out of foreign kiddies in 2024. Across the sector, nearly a quarter of the international students are Chinese.

The remaining funding for ACRI comes from businesses, two of which are owned by state-owned Chinese enterprises: China Construction Bank and John Holland.

The other sponsors obviously do business with China.

Now, for a media professor, you would think that Wanning Sun would understand it is appropriate to disclose these funding links whenever she publishes.

Let alone the editors at Crikey.

So, let’s take a look at what ACRI’s China-funding-linked Wanning Sun thinks we should do about the emergence of anarcho-imperialism.

A number of developments outside Australia last week could be signs of the geopolitical tectonic plates slowly shifting. Not that you’ll read about them in Australia’s mainstream media — these developments would be considered either too peripheral to Australia’s national interest, or too incompatible with the existing narrative framework of reporting the world.

…First, Canada. Last Thursday, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney visited China and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang. He wanted to leverage Canada’s national strengths to cooperate with China on trade, energy, agriculture, seafood and other areas. Describing the Canada–China relationship as “distant and uncertain for nearly a decade”, Carney declared, “We’re changing that”:

…On the same day as Carney’s arrival in Beijing, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz performed an equally eyebrow-raising rhetorical manoeuvre by telling a New Year’s reception in Halle, in the former East Germany, that: 

Meanwhile in France, angry about the White House’s threat to impose extra tariffs on European countries if they oppose the US’s takeover of Greenland, President Emmanuel Macron urged the European Union to consider activating its Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI). Dubbed Europe’s “trade bazooka”, the ACI was originally designed as a “nuclear option” to “deal with bullying by a hostile external country”, and, as the BBC’s Europe correspondent Nick Beake said, “at the time they were thinking of China”.

…All these musings invite a question: does the Australian government have a Plan B, in case the US alliance emerges as no longer reliable? If it does, it clearly hasn’t shared this with the Australian public yet.

So, because Canada is giving the US the bird, Australia should, too, especially AUKUS, Wanning Sun appears to be arguing.

Is this analogy appropriate? Has Canada given the US the military bird?

The two nations comprise North America, so no. They share:

1. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command), which controls all air and maritime approaches to the continent, including missile early warning systems.
2. NATO & Multinational Integration. Canadian forces are highly interoperable with the US, particularly in joint deployments, communications systems, and logistics.
3. USNORTHCOM for Arctic sovereignty and maritime patrols.
4. Shared Defense Infrastructure Radar and satellite networks (Pinetree Line, DEW Line historically, and modern replacements). Air bases and staging facilities.

In short, Canada and the US have two of the most integrated militaries in the world. This puts the lie to Wanning Sun’s thin-sliced analysis.

But Australia does have a fatal strategic weakness. Canada, like Australia, is a Five Eyes country, and by sharing a border with the US, it naturally has some long-standing, pre-existing strategic cooperation arrangements with the US, such as the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). But Canada is not weighed down by AUKUS. In comparison, Australia’s strategic enmeshments with the US — including AUKUS, the long-term US military infrastructure in northern Australia, and Pine Gap — have resulted in a deeper operational commitment, and perhaps make our relationship with the US more intractable and less open to flexible and agile decision-making in our international relations.

Canada can act independently with other countries, and this will not affect its strategic relationship with the US in the slightest. Canada and the US comprise the continent of North America. It is ludicrous to paint it as less US-military integrated than Australia.

The Canadian pivot to China is economic, not strategic, and kind of petulant at that. A much more useful contribution was made by Mark Carney at Davos, who said the world needed a concert of middle powers to resist superpower bullying. That’s one potential Plan B for Australia.

How about Europe? Is it problematic for Europe to be considering its options regarding Russia? Europe’s defenceless utopia is done for, not because of the American madman, but because it misread the political development of China and Russia. It is no bad thing that it takes Russia more seriously.

ACI was made for China, and that has not gone away. China is eating the European economy alive with its cheap EVs. The Chinese economic model is dying with its population, and export domination is its chosen way out. This is an existential threat to European standards of living

Is there any argument here to suggest Australia should immediately seek to pivot to Beijing? Do either of these analogies apply to Australia? No.

Australia is already more deeply integrated with China economically than either Canada or Europe is with Russia. If we are seeking hedges in today’s anarcho-imperialist world, it should be against this dependence, not for it.

That is why we are building out our maritime power-projection capability (you can argue over how it should be done).

The truth of it is, Australia’s major danger from China is being bullied into thinking we will be invaded, not that we will actually be. Gunship diplomacy is not an invasion.

And this is where Wanning Sun really comes a cropper. What is a postmodern journalism professor doing advising on military hardware?

Is Wanning Sun an expert on strategic thought? No.

Is Wanning Sun independent? No.

Should Wanning Sun be headlining any Australian publication, let alone on such topics? Not without a serious health warning about funding.

Crikey!