Fawning over China has fast become a staple of political discourse during the 21st century, in Australia and elsewhere in the world. In large part it is understandable, given the extraordinary transformation the Chinese economy is going through. The opportunities such development creates occur domestically in China and internationally.
Among the international community few benefit from China's rise as much as we do, in terms of our raw material exports and via regional tourism by China's burgeoning middle class. But China is no democracy. It is an authoritarian state.
Julia Gillard has spent the past week in China, achieving diplomatic and economic outcomes not to be sniffed at - further steps towards a free trade agreement
Yearly meetings between Australian prime ministers and China's president. (I'm sure Tony Abbott will appreciate the forward planning for his diary for next year.) Only Britain, Germany and Russia have enjoyed such access, until now. A currency deal that will save Australian businesses millions of dollars in transaction costs. We will even hold joint military training operations thanks to the Prime Minister's trip.
There is no denying the importance of the growing ties between Australia and China in the context of a global rush to engage with the Middle Kingdom. The Asian Century white paper clearly spells out the opportunities a growing China presents, and no one nation (especially not a middle power like us) can unilaterally stand up to China. I just wonder if democratically elected leaders the world over worry enough about the risks attached to the untamed, uncaged beast an undemocratic China may become.
It is perhaps too late to lament the terms of engagement with China as I do now. The time for conditioning its rise within the international community probably came and went when it was admitted into the World Trade Organisation, without conditions.
But the rush to engage should at least be tempered by the reality that China is not a democracy and shows few, if any, signs of making the transition. We shouldn't praise the fact the Prime Minister on her visit raised concerns over Tibet and the jailing of Australian businessmen without fair trials. These are tokenistic in the extreme, especially given that Gillard refused to elaborate on what she said when asked by journalists.
Fawning over China forgets the disgraceful political culture of censorship, a shaky rule of law and disregard for democratic principles and political rights. These important cornerstones of Western (democratic) capitalism should not be cast aside in a mad scramble to embrace a newly capitalist China. One can't even visit a burgeoning metropolis such as Shanghai and Google the name of the city and a particular landmark without having your search blocked, such is the extent of internet censorship. The difficulty with China being so central to global growth is to know what to do about its lack of democratisation.
I suspect the best we can hope for is that in time the growing middle class will demand political rights as a follow-up to economic opportunities. Promoting democracy in China may now be a wholly domestic consideration (despite the risks citizens face when doing so), especially given the international fawning for economic agreements with China we see from governments.
But democratisation didn't happen in Singapore. A small Asian economic miracle such as Singapore (despite remaining authoritarian) is one thing. A nation with China's military, population and growing international clout is quite another.
Some historians point to China's lack of interest in geographical expansion (beyond localised border disputes) to claim China is unlikely to see global domination as anything more than an economic goal to improve the living standards of citizens within its nation-state boundaries. Let's hope they're right.
Fawning over China and its potential for growth started earlier than this century, when Gough Whitlam made the first visit to China by an Australian prime minister, in 1973. He secured a trade agreement for his troubles. That was the upside of meeting Mao Zedong, a man who, even according to official Chinese estimates, presided over the deaths of 30 million compatriots. (More credible historical references put the figure at closer to 50 million.)
The Liberal Party could hardly condemn Whitlam's visit at the time on narrow partisan grounds given that US Republican president Richard Nixon also made the trip the previous year.
It is hard to think of a bigger snub to the cultural significance of parliamentary democracy in this country than that which occurred in October of 2003 when John Howard invited Chinese president Hu Jintao to address our House of Representatives. There Hu stood, an unelected authoritarian leader speaking to elected representatives of Australia's federal parliament, in the chamber no less, about the ties between our two nations.
If fawning can be defined by example, that was it. Hu's parliamentary address was a low point in Howard's prime ministership, far more so than revisionist history that suggests Howard lied about weapons of mass destruction as the reason for going to war in Iraq. On the 10th anniversary of the start of the conflict this week we saw those claims again aired by protesters at a speech Howard gave in Sydney.
A lie suggests intent to deceive. In fact Howard was deceived by false US intelligence, just like the rest of us. Anti-carbon tax campaigners on the Right would do well to remember this distinction when they call Gillard a liar for her pre-election commitment that there would be no carbon tax under a government she leads. Yes, she went back on her word. No, there isn't evidence that she lied when making the initial pledge.
Stanford professor of history and classics Ian Morris has written an exquisite book on the comparative development of East and West, from the beginnings of human civilisation to today. Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future is a page-turner, despite its 750-page length.
Morris even ventures to predict the likely future given the rise of China we are witnessing today. His conclusion is that there is an inevitability about the East (read China) overtaking the West (read the US, or perhaps Western democracy more broadly). But Morris is more concerned with the risk of what he terms "nightfall": an apocalyptic future courtesy of conflict, climate change and epidemics. His solution to this threat is "singularity": ongoing development, not as two spheres of influence but as an increasingly interconnected global community.
Morris chooses to be a pessimist on the likelihood of singularity trumping nightfall, which is depressing enough in itself. But even if one optimistically asserts that our shared future won't succumb to Morris's gravest fears, a singular world with a new superpower that doesn't embrace democracy should be concerning enough. Morris doesn't engage with that potential outcome, but political leaders in democratic states must.
Without doing so there is a serious risk that our democratic culture will continue to wane, infected by capitalist countries with no intention of giving their citizens a political voice.