Australia refuses to yield to china’s pressure
One of the narratives that emerged from the recent G-20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, was that Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had demonstrated the success of Australia’s unsubmissive approach to China by securing a face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
By refusing to yield to China’s belligerence and economic coercion, Canberra has earned Beijing’s respect or at the very least China’s acknowledgement that its tactics will not work. Rather than a single meeting, sustained high-level engagement between Beijing and Canberra will determine whether this is true.
Instead of making predictions about how the relationship will develop in the future, what is currently of interest is how Australia’s approach to China has been described over the last half-decade, with the often lazy commentariat resorting to terms like “hardline” and “hawkish.” These terms are worth prosecuting because they have implications that are unsettling in terms of how countries like Australia should deal with an authoritarian superpower like China, as well as what Australia’s actual foreign policy objectives are.
When used in foreign policy, the term “hawkish” usually refers to an aggressive or warlike stance.
Despite the fantasies of some groups claiming to be advancing a more “peaceful” Australian foreign policy, it is very unlikely that Australia is seeking to provoke a war in the Indo-Pacific region – or hopes that the US will provoke one as well. As a country economically dependent on northeast Asia, a war over, say, Taiwan would be disastrous to Australia’s direct interests, as well as cause terrible destabilisation in the region with untold consequences (not to mention be horrific for a good friend in Taiwan).
Instead, Australia wishes to preserve regional stability. However, stability is dependent on a collective sense of legitimacy, and not everyone agrees on what that is. Is legitimacy simply based on raw power, as in “might makes right”? Or does it rely on a set of principles, institutions, and rules that allow countries, regardless of size, to freely cooperate with one another? As a middle power, Australia clearly prefers the latter, but as an emerging authoritarian superpower, China prefers the former, despite the fact that its current strength is due to the very cooperative international environment it despises.
In recent years, China has targeted Australia in order to see how far it can push the current international system’s principles and rules. For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the world is neatly divided into those who wield power and those who submit to it. China used economic coercion, arbitrary detention, foreign interference operations, military intimidation, and an extraordinary list of 14 grievances it expected the Australian government to placate to determine whether Australia was a chump.
Australia’s response has simply been a refusal to be intimidated, instead remaining committed to its values and interests, as well as the principles and rules of the international system in which bullying should, ideally, be unacceptable.
Bullying resistance is only “hawkish” if you sympathise with the bullies.
However, Australia’s rhetoric has not always been as restrained as this stoic strategy would imply. The former conservative Coalition government, like the CCP, used fiery rhetoric to appeal to its domestic audience. While this was frequently counterproductive and occasionally played into the hands of the CCP in incredibly stupid ways, the overall goal has been to maintain stability by not rewarding – and thus encouraging – domineering behaviour.
The new Labor Party government has smoothed out some of the rougher edges of the previous government’s stance, but it has remained defiant. China appears to have relented, or at least decided that Australia is now worthy of high-level meetings, sensing that this is now Australia’s behaviour regardless of who is in power. The Australian government has welcomed this, emphasising that it will cooperate with China where possible while disagreeing where necessary.
This strategy is based on a rational assessment of China’s power. If Australia took an entirely values-based stance, it would diplomatically favour Taipei over Beijing.
The new Labor Party government has smoothed out some of the rougher edges of the previous government’s stance, but it has remained defiant. China appears to have relented, or at least decided that Australia is now worthy of high-level meetings, sensing that this is now Australia’s behaviour regardless of who is in power. The Australian government has welcomed this, emphasising that it will cooperate with China where possible while disagreeing where necessary.
This strategy is based on a rational assessment of China’s power. If Australia took an entirely values-based stance, it would diplomatically favour Taipei over Beijing.
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