Speak Truth to China's Power

CHINA today is Janus-faced. In the contradiction of the two faces of China sits the present Australian crisis in our relations with the Middle Kingdom. China today is a contradiction in statehood.

Internationally it has never been more powerful or self-confident. Its leadership feels vindicated by the global financial crisis and conducts itself with increasing swagger, if not arrogance. It is one of the chief locomotives of Asian growth, and Asian growth is one of the chief locomotives of world growth.

But at home China's leadership is febrile and neurotic. Every sign of dissent brings an overreaction. A riot in Urumqi forces President Hu Jintao to flee the G8 summit. Any criticism of China's government is construed as an attack on the Chinese people. Massive over-reactions in Xinjiang and Tibet threaten to radicalise those populations. Relentless Cold War-style denunciations of the Dalai Lama and Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer as terrorists turn them into global superstars.

In 2007 Susan Shirk, a senior State Department official under Bill Clinton, published a seminal book, Fragile Superpower: How China's Brittle Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise. Shirk sketched how the Chinese leadership had fostered an all-consuming nationalism that at times bordered on racism, but that the Chinese leadership could not wholly control, and that they feared could eventually unseat them.

This contradiction is giving China problems with many nations. Beijing put fierce pressure on Japan not to admit Kadeer. The Japanese defied Beijing. South Africa, on the other hand, acquiesced in shunning the Dalai Lama. Last year China cancelled a summit with the European Union because France's President Nicolas Sarkozy met the Dalai Lama. All this bears out the analysis of Bruce Jacobs, a China expert at Monash University, who tells Inquirer: "The reason we're having trouble with China at the moment relates to China. It has very little to do with us."

Nonetheless, this was a remarkable week in the Australia-China relationship. It saw the Foreign Minister, the extremely unflappable and measured Stephen Smith, boast of having stood up to China. It saw Kevin Rudd working to project an aura of calm. It saw a liquefied natural gas deal signed with China, worth potentially $50 billion, which proves both that the Chinese are utterly unsentimental in their resources trade and that political disputes need not affect the commercial relationship.

And it saw the opposition, in the person of deputy Liberal leader and foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop, so spectacularly abandon principle and common sense in foreign policy that it has probably for the moment definitively forfeited the right to be taken seriously as an alternative government.

First, recall the range and disconnected nature of the problems. In his first visit to Beijing as Prime Minister, Rudd criticised, very politely, China's human rights performance, especially in Tibet. The defence white paper criticised a lack of transparency in China's substantial military build-up and foreshadowed an expansion of Australia's maritime military power.

The Foreign Investment Review Board took a long time considering the bid by Chinese government-owned Chinalco for a $25bn stake in Rio. During that time the deal collapsed for commercial reasons.

But Beijing's biggest gripe was that it felt it was paying too much for iron ore. China's position here is a little perverse. It wants to pay lower prices than South Korea or Japan.

Then Beijing arrested Rio's No.2 man in China, the ethnic Chinese Australian citizen, Stern Hu. This provoked criticism in Australia. The single biggest incident, however, was Canberra's decision to grant Kadeer a visa.

There is no plausible case against the actions of the Rudd government in any of these incidents.

Do critics argue that the Australian government should set iron ore prices, that Canberra should have overridden the FIRB to ensure instant approval for the Chinalco bid, that Australian government and society should not react publicly to the jailing of Hu, that no prime minister should ever raise human rights publicly or that Canberra should have denied Kadeer a visa?

Smith dealt with the Kadeer issue in a powerful series of parliamentary interventions. He told parliament: "The Chinese at a range of levels, including Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, made very strong representations to Australia about the proposed visit of Rebiya Kadeer ... that we should prevent her visit. I considered those representations and came to the conclusion there was no basis for denying her entry to Australia."

Another day he said: "We understand, respect and recognise freedom of speech. We value the capacity of someone to come to our country and say things even if we do not agree with them."

But perhaps his most revealing remark was: "I vaguely remember the Leader of the Opposition saying to the government some time ago that we should stand up to the Chinese. We did on the Rebiya Kadeer issue."

The opposition's response, through Bishop, was pathetic. It was internally contradictory, unprincipled, amoral beyond even the exigencies of parliamentary hypocrisy and profoundly stupid. Bishop was a dud shadow treasurer and is now a dud foreign affairs spokeswoman. But her response on China betokens a much broader crisis for the opposition. The Liberal Party is now not so much a political movement as a collection of unemployed former ministers in search of a public service to do their thinking for them.

Bishop's press release of August 19, surely one of the dumbest press releases issued by a foreign affairs spokesperson, lambasted Rudd in these terms: "The Prime Minister in particular needlessly offended China from the outset with his decision to lecture China about human rights in a speech during his first visit, rather than use the Australia-China human rights dialogue established by the Howard government in 1997. That was compounded by his decision to make veiled threats to China through the media about the detention of Stern Hu ... Most recently, the Rudd government failed to work constructively with China regarding the visit to Australia of Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer."

In this statement the Liberal Party formally abandons all the values of liberalism. No one with the slightest regard for human liberty could in good conscience vote Liberal while that statement holds.

Does Bishop really believe that no Australian leader may raise human rights publicly with China? It would be a barbaric international system if the only nation strong enough to raise human rights publicly is the US. Bishop's formula would put Australia at odds with our close friends, Japan, and all European practice. Increasingly Asian nations, such as ASEAN under the leadership of Indonesia, criticise egregious human rights abuses in other Asian nations, such as Burma.

Only the Liberal Party of Australia has completely abandoned human rights. The task in diplomacy is to maintain human rights as a serious concern while proceeding to do other business as well. The existence of an officials' human rights dialogue does not absolve political leaders from the task of having some basic human and political values.

Similarly, is Bishop really suggesting that an Australian Prime Minister should not remind China that the world is watching its treatment of Hu? Bishop's construction on the Kadeer visa is deliberately couched in a weasel word formulation to avoid saying she would have denied Kadeer a visa. But that is the only possible interpretation of her words.

When John Howard got into trouble with Beijing for receiving the Dalai Lama, Labor's then leader, Kim Beazley, criticised the way Howard had managed the China relationship but explicitly backed the decision to see the Dalai Lama. That the Liberals cannot make even such elementary moral distinctions suggests they will be a long time in opposition.

The calmest voice of all was Rudd's. He said: "The China-Australia relationship is always full of challenges ... and it will be thus for a long time to come ... I'd also say that China has significant interests in Australia."

The Australia-China diplomatic relationship is in crisis but the Rudd government is not in crisis. Instead it has protected core Australian interests, not compromised core Australian values, continually projected a desire for a positive relationship with China, overseen huge trade deals and weathered a crisis manufactured in Beijing.

It has done somewhat better, so far, than Howard did. But then, domestically at least, it has much weaker opposition.