The starting point to be clear on is that, as former senior Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan has observed, Australia’s foreign policy challenge of having to manage a large economic relationship with China alongside a deep strategic and security relationship with the US isn’t unusual. Many countries, including Japan, India, Thailand, and the Philippines to name just a few, similarly must balance such interests.

The next point to recognise is that Canberra isn’t alone in having serious differences with Beijing. Indeed, the divisions between China and Tokyo, New Delhi, and many other capitals are even more acute. Yet despite this, it is Australia that is an outlier in having no senior-level political dialogue with China, in addition to the array of trade punishments it is being hit with. This raises obvious questions about whether in the face of China’s undoubted capacity for hypocrisy and bad behaviour, Australia got its strategy for handling the relationship right.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was at the helm when the relationship with China began its downward spiral, wrote recently that the “Chinese strategy was to isolate Australia from its allies.“ He further assessed that “at the same time as Australia was being disciplined, Beijing sought to get closer to Japan and the United States.” This implies that the severing of political dialogue and trade strikes that now mark Australia as an outlier were not of its own making. Turnbull’s remarks instead argue Chinese strategists had settled on isolating Australia and that was that. This aligns with Prime Minister Morrison’s more recent claim that “Australia has done nothing to injure [the] partnership [with China], nothing at all.”

However, this version of events comes up short. First, it ignores occasions when arresting the decline, and potentially even turning the corner to a positive relationship trajectory, was within reach prior to the dramatic negative step-change in 2020.

On August 7 2018, just two weeks before he was deposed as prime minister, Turnbull delivered what Phillip Coorey, the Australian Financial Review’s Chief Political Correspondent, described as a China “reset speech.” Coorey noted it was “carefully written and planned to address an invited audience, which included China’s ambassador and consul-general to Sydney.” In responding to Turnbull’s intervention, which had praised China’s economic reforms and the benefits of bilateral ties, the Chinese foreign ministry said it had “noted and commended these positive remarks.”

On August 23 2018, the Australian government banned Chinese tech company Huawei from participating in the country’s 5G rollout. At the time, Scott Morrison took responsibility for the decision, then in the position of treasurer and acting minister for home affairs. When he subsequently emerged as prime minister, Beijing still extended an invitation to his new minister for foreign affairs, Marise Payne, to visit China in early November 2018 for the 5^th Australia-China Foreign and Strategic Dialogue. Payne’s predecessor Julie Bishop went the last two and a half years of her tenure without setting foot there. As well, a year later, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang met Morrison for an annual leaders’ meeting on the sidelines on the East Asia Summit in Bangkok. Such moves are hard to square with a settled strategy of isolating Australia.

Second, the idea that Australia’s outlier status was inevitable ignores a series of national diplomatic choices over a period of years that were guaranteed to make China less willing to cooperate with Australia, while providing no offsetting national interest benefit. These included Bishop’s needlessly provocative Fullerton Lecture in Singapore in March 2017, in which after singling China out as a “non-democracy,” she then contended that “democracy and democratic institutions are essential for nations if they are to reach their economic potential.”

Then there was Turnbull’s inflammatory remarks made while introducing new foreign interference legislation in December that year. Delivered in Mandarin, Turnbull asserted that the Australian people had “stood up,” just as Mao Zedong said the Chinese people had done at the formation of the People’s Republic in 1949 following a century of foreign occupation and humiliation. As well, rather than pressing the point that the laws were intended to be country-agnostic, Turnbull chose to justify their passage by citing “disturbing reports about Chinese influence.”

Australia’s diplomatic positioning hasn’t only involved loose rhetoric. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reported that in recent years, Australian diplomats have “crisscrossed Europe connecting China critics in smaller nations with counterparts elsewhere,” adding that these efforts had “buttressed similar ones by Washington.”

Third, even if other countries such as Japan were the subject of Beijing’s overtures, they also proactively took steps to maintain a balanced relationship with China. Tokyo’s approach to China, by contrast to Australia’s, has been anchored in careful, consistent, and clear diplomacy. Former Australian ambassador to Tokyo John McCarthy assessed that, “The Japanese are… careful about the tone and context of public statements about China, and the company in which these are made.” This can be illustrated in the fact Japan has sought to find areas where partnerships with China could be forged, even while retaining misgivings. On China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Tokyo University professor Asei Ito says that Japan moved from “non-participation” prior to 2016 to “conditional engagement” afterwards. Ito further assessed Japan demonstrated a willingness to work with China on projects in third countries. On a state visit to China in October 2018, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and President Xi Jinping announced 50 joint infrastructure initiatives in partnership with China.

On the other hand, Australia appears to have moved from “conditional engagement,” signing a memorandum of understanding with China on cooperating in third countries in 2017, to “non-participation.”  This can be reflected in the prime minister’s declaration in June last year that the BRI was a programme “Australian foreign policy doesn’t recognise,” with it not being in “Australia’s national interests.” This turn has extended as far as threatening to tear up a non-binding agreement on BRI cooperation signed by the Victorian government.

That ties between Tokyo and Beijing are now experiencing strain does not change the facts of Australia’s China policy since 2016. Abbreviated accounts of how Australia-China relations came to be in such a parlous state won’t fool China. And in the long run, they won’t serve Australia’s interests either.

The article was originally published on Australian Outlook on 24 March 2021.

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Just rocks, crops and undergraduate commerce degrees?

Last year the total value of Australia’s goods and services exports to China reached $169.1 billion, a record high. This was 6.6 times that to the United States.

The latest trade data show China’s share of Australia’s total goods exports for the month of June jumping to an extraordinary 46.1 per cent.

Yet some commentators have played down the benefits of this trade relationship. In 2017, Simon Jackman, the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Studies Centre, wrote:  ‘Our trade with China is valuable on the balance sheet, but shouldn’t be equated with the nation-building legacy of decades of “here-to-stay” direct investment, with the United States providing the lion’s share. Nor should our exports to China — tilted heavily towards resources, agricultural products, undergraduate commerce degrees and inbound tourism — be equated with US-sourced investments in technology-rich sectors that continue to grow Australia’s stock of human capital and technological capacity’.

Leave aside that economics textbooks do not contain such a neat distinction between the benefits flowing from trade versus investment — both can boost income and productivity growth.

And while rocks, crops and undergraduate commerce degrees might loom large in the case of China, as Jeff Wilson from the PerthUSAsia Centre notes, Australia’s exports generally are “deep but narrow”. Australia’s export bundle to China is, in fact, more diverse than to other significant customers like India and Japan.

Another problem with such descriptions of the Australia-China economic relationship is that they are outdated.

A new report by researchers at the Australia-China Relations Institute shows that in 2019, a greater proportion of Australian scientific research publications involved a partner affiliated with a Chinese institution (16.2 per cent) than an American one (15.5 per cent).

In terms of Australian publications with the highest impact — those in the top one per cent of most-cited publications globally — collaborations with the US remain number one. But China is now in second place, on par with the UK. In the most recent year for which data is available, collaborations with China for these publications grew by 12.8 per cent while those with the US declined by 5.9 per cent.

The Australia-China science partnership questioned too 

Yet just as with trade in goods and services, the worth of scientific research collaboration with China has been called into question.

Australian universities and institutions like the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have been accused of engaging in activity that ‘supports China’s goals, not ours’, ‘surrendering’ the nation’s research capabilities, allowing Beijing to ‘steal’ intellectual property and facilitating ‘valuable information’ being passed on to Chinese intelligence agencies.

There’s no argument that appropriate due diligence needs to be undertaken to assess the appropriateness of specific research partners, Chinese or otherwise, as well as the national security and ethical implications of individual research projects.

But a bigger danger is missing the forest for the trees.

Criticism of collaboration with China is almost exclusively directed at the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

What is often not made plain however is that the scale of China’s knowledge creation in STEM disciplines vastly exceeds Australia’s. In fact, in 2019 Australia only managed to produce more peer-reviewed publications than China in five of 28 fields of inquiry — Arts and Humanities, Health Professions, Nursing, Psychology and Undefined.

Consider Materials Science, a field that was cited in a 2017 opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald and given the headline: ‘Australian universities are helping China’s military surpass the United States’.

Last year China produced 37.0 per cent of global publications in Materials Science. Australia produced 2.1 per cent. And of that relatively modest Australian share, 39.4 per cent involved China-affiliated researchers.

Banning or significantly restricting collaboration with China in Material Science would be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Another fact: the evidence that Australian universities have been negligent in their China collaborations is slim.

The research activities they undertake are subject to Defence Trade Controls (DTCs) to protect against inappropriate leakages of technology. DTCs are overseen by the Department of Defence.

In October 2018, Greg Moriarty, Secretary of Defence, told a Senate Estimates committee that Defence had not identified a single instance of non-compliance involving universities or research organisations.

Certainly, allegations and insinuations have continued to flow but such repetition does not make them a reality. And several allegations have subsequently been proven demonstrably false.

The idea that the Australian government is asleep at the wheel with respect to managing the regulatory framework also struggles to stand up to scrutiny.

It was only in February last year that DTC’s were subject to an independent review by Dr Vivienne Thom, a former Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, to ensure they remained fit for purpose. This did not support the “broad approach” calls found in some of the more hawkish submissions. Of the legislative gaps that were identified, the government accepted the review’s recommendations and has set about closing them in consultation with research institutions.

Further underlining a willingness to take risk management seriously, in 2019 universities worked collaboratively with the Australian government, including the security agencies, to devise best practice guidelines to counter foreign interference in the sector.

Not easily derailed

That the Australia-China economic relationship has continued to prosper despite the deterioration in political ties, and amidst plenty of rancorous commentary that is not always well supported by facts, is testament to the fundamental complementarities between the two countries, as well as the people-to-people ties that make seizing the opportunities possible.

The post From rocks to science: the irrepressible Australia-China economic relationship appeared first on The China Story.

“Disinformation” is the new buzzword in Australia’s discussion of China. It refers to the intentional spreading of false information to manipulate an audience. And the spotlight is being shone on Beijing as the chief culprit.

In a June 16 speech at the National Security College of the Australian National University, Australia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, called out China (and Russia) as having “carried out targeted disinformation campaigns seeking to undermine democratic debate and exacerbate social polarisation, and improve their own image in the COVID-19 context”.

Minister Payne referenced the findings of a European Commission report issued the previous week, as well as Twitter removing 32,000 accounts attributed to state-linked information operations, remarking it was “troubling that some countries are using the pandemic to undermine liberal democracy to promote their own more authoritarian models.”

So concerned is the Australian government by disinformation from China that a new unit will soon be established in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to combat it.

Some of the urgency is curious because to the extent that Beijing has sought to “improve its own image” — one of the aims of China’s disinformation campaign according to Minister Payne — there is little evidence to suggest it has been successful.

According to the 2020 Lowy Poll, the proportion of Australians who “trust [China] to act responsibly in the world” has crashed from 52 per cent to 23 per cent over the past two years. And on COVID-19 specifically, 69 per cent of Australians think that China handled the outbreak badly. This compared with just seven per cent who said the same of Australia.

In terms of elite opinion, an analysis piece on June 12 in the South China Morning Post observed that “[Australian] voices urging understanding of China’s position have all but evaporated from a national conversation that has long been informed by both hawkish and dovish sentiment”.

Nonetheless, that still leaves attempts by Beijing to “undermine democratic debate and exacerbate social polarisation”, the two other aims according to Minister Payne.

The Chinese Communist Party has form here. In 2017 it was reported that a visiting Chinese official had told Labor party leaders it would be a shame if the Chinese government had to tell the Chinese community in Australia that Labor did not support the bilateral relationship because of its opposition to an extradition treaty between the two countries.

The heartening news here is that social divisions vulnerable to exploitation are also within the capacity of the Australian government to manage. For example, as Adam Ni and Yun Jiang from the China Policy Centre observed in a recent submission to a parliamentary inquiry into Foreign Interference Through Social Media, rather than conceiving Chinese-Australian communities as a vector of Beijing’s disinformation campaigns, they are frequently the target. Accordingly, the appropriate Australian response is to “protect their rights as any other Australians, and treat them as a national asset and not a liability”.

Minister Payne’s speech was also notable for the selectivity of the disinformation examples that were included. A paragraph along the lines of the one below probably wasn’t even considered for the first draft:

“Now let me clear: disinformation doesn’t just come from autocracies. In recent months we have seen senior figures in the United States government spread conspiracy theories about how COVID-19 supposedly escaped from a Chinese laboratory. Australian intelligence agencies have confirmed they are unable to find any evidence supporting such claims. Even more alarming is that a US State Department document showcasing such theories was dressed up as “Five Eyes intelligence” and laundered through an Australian media organisation last month. Pro-Chinese government bots on Twitter are one thing. But when the front page of a major Sydney newspaper carries unfounded accusations that have the potential to incite attacks against Asian Australians, our determination to push back is even greater”.

Disinformation can also come from within the legislative branch of the Australian government.

In April, the National Party Member for Dawson in Queensland, George Christensen set up a website that urges readers to “speak up on China’s economic infiltration of our nation”. To egg them on, Christensen makes a number of claims, including that “Communist China is Australia’s largest foreign investor. They use their investments in Australia to guarantee a supply to China, also off-shoring both profits and tax.  Government-owned businesses also do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party in Australia.”

There is not a single data source that comes close to substantiating this. Last month the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released new data for 2019 that showed China was Australia’s ninth largest foreign investment source, accounting for just two per cent of the total. The share of the US was 26 per cent. If Christensen doubts the quality of the ABS data, the US embassy in Canberra, as well as nearly every visiting senior American political leader, do not. These sources have long  trumpeted the fact that because the US owns more Australian assets by a large margin than any other country, Washington, not Beijing, is “Australia’s most important economic partner”.

Yet Minister Payne’s speech also said nothing about her Coalition colleague’s blatant disinformation. Meanwhile, Christensen regularly pushes such falsehoods on Australian TV screens, radio airwaves and social media feeds. Never mind the backlash that could result from allowing these claims to go unchallenged, such as abuse directed at Asian Australians doing something as mundane as attending an auction to put in a bid for a family home.

There’s nothing wrong with plainly calling out disinformation from Beijing. But disinformation needs to be recognised and resisted when it comes from allies and at home as well.

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