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Here is the article, "Up yours, General Secretary Xi!", appearing in the Spring 2021 edition of the Salisbury Review magazine:
An unanticipated consequence of Covid-19 has been China’s trade war against Australia. Canberra earned Beijing’s ire when Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne, subsequently backed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, called for an international inquiry into the genesis of the novel coronavirus. That was back in April 2020. President Xi Jinping has responded by incrementally placing restrictions on key Australian exports to his country. Almost forty percent of our total exports, including coal, wine, beef, barely, wheat, wool, cotton, copper, timber and lobster, is threatened by Beijing’s belligerence. Xi and his wolf warriors have gone for the jugular in order to ‘teach Australia a lesson’. However, the Morrison government has not run up the white flag and, at least to this point in time, Australia still refuses to bend the knee to General Secretary Xi.
The PRC, despite being the regional behemoth, is not invincible. In 1979, for instance, Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping sent his army across the border to ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’. Beijing’s wrath had been provoked, as far as we know, by Hanoi’s decision in 1978 to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime in neighbouring Cambodia. The genocidal Khmer Rouge were, as it happened, sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the imperialist-Leninists in Beijing did not take kindly to the impertinence of ‘upstart’ Vietnam, previously a tributary state of the Qing Great-State. Nevertheless, on this occasion the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) routed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) resulting in some 25,000 dead Chinese soldiers. Deng summarily claimed victory and ordered his surviving troops to withdraw. Some lesson.
But Xi’s PRC is a different proposition from Deng’s China. The PRC we are faced with today has been a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for two decades and its economy is not just a regional powerhouse but a global one. Besides, over the past three decades, Australia’s political class has convinced itself that we could ride on the coattails of Beijing’s economic transformation and all would be well. Take the comprehensive 2015 China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. The deal allows for China’s companies to invest in Australia, but our businesses were not granted reciprocal rights. No matter. Few in Australia appeared worried because our export industries were benefitting so much from their access to China’s market. Australia had been the ‘lucky country’ in the 1950s when its prosperity rode on the sheep’s back and post-war Japan bought all our iron ore and coal. Now China was making a lucky country all over again.
The souring of Beijing-Canberra relations is the result of a great misunderstanding between the two countries. Though grateful to be selling our primary resources at premium prices, few Australians believed that ‘selling stuff to China’ – Prime Minister Morrison’s way of saying it – necessitated a downgrading of our national security. Beijing, we now know through the release of its Fourteen Grievances in November last year, sees things differently. It turns out that Australia’s call for an international inquiry into the origins of Covid-19 was just the final incitement. The Fourteen Grievances go back to the 2012 decision (by a Labor government) to exclude China’s telecommunication companies from our then-embryonic National Broadband Network to a more recent parliamentary enquiry into the CCP’s meddling into our domestic politics. President Xi, additionally, had seen Australia’s criticism of him interning a million Uighurs in Xinjiang and the suppression of the democracy movement in Hong Kong as hostile acts.
Australians have almost grown immune to the PRC’s Cold War-era invective. The lead writers for the English-language Global Times, for example, have been threatening Australia with ‘lasting punishments’ ever since April last year. It is as if we are back in 1950 and the so-called People’s Volunteer Army is about to swarm over the Yalu River. What is gradually dawning on many Australians, however, is that Xi Jinping has already carried out most of the threats promised by his wolf warriors. Meanwhile, the Australian economy is surging, partly because our island nation has not been affected by Covid-19 in the same way as Europe, the UK and North America (see ‘Aussie Flights to Nowhere’, Salisbury Review, Autumn 2020). Another reason, paradoxically, is the astonishing rise in the price of iron ore, the one Australian resource for which Beijing has no alternative (so far).
Perhaps the most important reason Canberra has not apologised to Beijing is because Xi’s trade war against us has fostered a profound patriotic spirit in Australia. The strength of it is unprecedented. We are not exactly talking ‘Blitz spirit’ but it is resonant enough to put some spine in our government. Large mining and agricultural interests, in concert with the establishment media and the Labor Party, might have been expected to launch a concerted campaign against Morrison’s administration – Mao called this a ‘tongue war’ – and yet the proponents of appeasement are careful how they chose their words. There is little attempt on their part to conceal or excuse the hostility and spitefulness of Beijing’s trade war against Australia. Our China apologists are no doubt aware of the ‘Streisand Effect’, the social phenomena that can occur with an attempt to hide the truth, in this case, Beijing’s withering contempt for Australia’s independent voice on the world stage.
Early indications are that General Secretary Xi’s attempt to ‘teach Australia a lesson’ might be backfiring. Although his trade war against Australia has made us realise how dependent we have become on the PRC, it has not cowered us. Quite the contrary. In August 2020, Beijing suddenly announced an 80 percent excise on barley. Things looked bleak for many Australian famers given that over the past decade China became a mainstay for our top-quality barley. Yet new markets were soon enough found in places as far apart as India and Mexico. Because of poor harvests in Russia and the Black Sea region, new possibilities for our wheat unexpectedly opened up in the Middle East and North Africa. None of this is to suggest Australia is not faced with enormous economic challenges going forward, and yet there have been lighter moments, including news footage of ordinary Aussies buying lobsters off the back of fishing boats in Fremantle in the weeks before Christmas. Over the years, lobster had become unaffordable for most Australians due to high demand from China. Not any longer.
We tend to think of Mao and his successors as aficionados of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, brilliant strategists who are always outsmarting their foes. Xi Jinping’s declaration of war on Australia’s economy, and by extension Prime Minister Morrison and our political independence, was meant not only to teach Australia a lesson but the entire world. Xi identified Australia’s vulnerability, our dependence on ‘selling stuff to China’, and attacked it without mercy, flouting all the rules of the WTO and the China-Free Trade Agreement. In doing so, he has exposed the PRC – in the eyes of the vast majority of Australians – as a rogue state bent on global conquest. His failure to break us, moreover, has only made us more defiant. Morrison, in November 2020, signed an ‘in principle’ Australia-Japan military pact. Australia, in the same month, also participated in the Malabar Naval Games off the Bay of Bengal for the first time since 2007, having passed up on the opportunity in 2008 out of deference to Beijing’s feelings.
In August last year, President Xi put a 200 percent duty on imported Australian wine, much of it at the quality end of the market. China’s estimated 55 million committed drinkers have developed a taste for Australian wine in the region of £1/2 billion a year. Some of them, apparently, are prepared to pay three times the old price to enjoy their Clare Valley Sauvignon Blanc or Coonawarra Shiraz, but there has to be a limit to their brand loyalty. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Australians duly noted that the UK officially left the EU on December 30, 2020 and that Prime Minister Johnson is looking to sign a UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement before this year is out. Given the fate of China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, it could not have come at a more propitious moment.
