But the crisis of Australia’s sovereignty is far bigger than the week’s events.

Morrison’s response was clumsy and ill-advised. It was “not textbook”, as Danny Russel, a former Asia-Pacific adviser to Joe Biden and Barack Obama, put it to me. The Chinese spokesman who tweeted the mocked-up picture of a digger holding a knife to the throat of a child, Zhao Lijian, is the leading practitioner of China’s hypernationalist “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Russel describes him as “a troll in wolf’s clothing”.
But the crisis of Australia’s sovereignty is far bigger than the week’s events, and far more important than a rhetorical exchange. Beijing won the week’s battle; it has not won the war. We keep hearing from some commentators, some business people and even some Labor politicians that the relationship needs a “reset”, or that Morrison needs to send positive signals to Beijing, or that Morrison needs to “pick up the phone”.
Apart from the fact that the phone lines from the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai to Australia have been disconnected as part of the psychological pressure campaign, this is all trivia. Russel, the White House adviser who brought the then vice-president Biden to Australia on his 2016 visit, says that it’s not only a “very serious” situation but that it’s a global test case. “If China can pick countries off one at a time, it’s not only winning, it’s effectively ‘strangling the chicken to frighten the monkey'”, he said, drawing on an old Chinese aphorism. “There’s a growing degree of the demonstration effect in what they’re doing China feels that its moment has come and it would rather be feared than loved.”
And what a demonstration. Xi is targeting the income of 13 Australian industries with total Chinese exports of $54 billion annually in pre-pandemic trade. That’s roughly one-third of Australia’s exports to China. Beijing has commonly used trade as a weapon of political coercion for many years, but it usually targets a much narrower slice of a victim’s trade French aircraft, Norwegian salmon, South Korean “K pop”, Japanese rare earths. Its coercion of Australia is the biggest in the breadth of industries under threat and the proportion of national trade at risk. Or, as Russel puts it: “You may have set a new land speed record in China’s coercive and punitive trade pressure.”
The erudite Australian sinologist Geremie Barme agrees that Xi has marked Australia out as a special example: “Xi would have said, ‘f–k the Australians let’s make an example of them, let’s squeeze them till we hear their pips squeak.” One pointer was the ranting by the editor of the Party-owned Global Times, the provocateur Hu Xijin, who said that “everybody had better pay attention” to what China was doing to Australia because China had had enough of foreign countries’ disrespect. “Australia has to start learning respect for China. It may take a while. Ten years, 20 years, that’s okay, we are patient.”
Of course, as Barme points out, “respect” in the Party’s terms “never means mutuality of respect or reciprocity of respect it means ‘do as we say and capitulate’.” Beijing fails to understand Australia, says Barme, just as it has often misread Western nations. Because it fails to see that the more pressure it piles on to Australia, the more impossible it makes it for Australia to “just give in”.
Barme, the founder of the ANU’s Centre on China in the World, who now publishes his work on chinaheritage.net, concludes that: “I think Australia is in a profound crisis. The first thing the government had better do is make sure they and the Labor party are on the same page.”
Till now, one of Australia’s greatest strengths in confronting Xi’s campaign of intimidation and infiltration has been the bipartisanship in Canberra. This week we saw the entirety of the Australian Parliament unite to condemn Beijing’s crass insult. This is the second thing that Xi achieved this week unifying Australian politics in defiance of China’s thuggery.
This is not inevitable. Indeed, over time political unity is more likely to fracture than to adhere. Even this week we saw Labor’s leader flirting with fracture. Anthony Albanese, while condemning Beijing, tried some political point-scoring by criticising Morrison’s government for its overall handling of the China relationship. This is exactly the wrong issue for Albanese to politicise. It will only encourage Xi to press harder in pursuit of a full-blown Australian partisan argument. Xi would be thrilled to be able to divide and conquer.
But the main onus is on the Morrison government. Why? The clue is in the word “government”. Labor’s Penny Wong, one of Canberra’s true grown-ups, repeatedly has approached the Foreign Affairs Minister, Marise Payne, to propose a more structured bipartisanship on China. Payne has refused the offer every time. This is political vanity and partisan neurosis. Payne needs to think about the country; she should accept the offer and work with Wong. Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, also has proposed a joint approach on China. No takers in the government. Morrison and his ministers need to realise that this is a historical confrontation with a nuclear-armed great power. The Coalition has been lucky to have Labor’s support to date. It needs to be grown up in the national interest.
Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit:
Russel is not a formal spokesperson for the incoming Biden administration, but he worked closely with Biden for years and he’s intimate with all his key national security appointees to date. His counsel to Australia? Giving in would be the worst possible course for Australia to take: “If your response to Chinese coercion is capitulation, then you are guaranteed to experience more of it.”Which is easy for an American to say. What help is Australia’s great and powerful friend going to give? Russel makes three points. First, he points out that the man the President-elect has named as his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, made a statement of support this week: “The Australian people have made great sacrifices to protect freedom and democracy around the world,” tweeted Sullivan. “As we have for a century, America will stand shoulder to shoulder with our ally Australia and rally fellow democracies to advance our shared security, prosperity, and values.”
Russel describes this as “American leadership” versus Donald Trump’s “America first”. He agrees that a firm Australian defence of its sovereignty is in the interests of the US: “This isn’t altruism and this isn’t a spectator sport. If the Leninist-Pavlovian conditioning that Beijing is pursuing proves effective, then the West will be surrounded by governments that tip-toe around China … That’s not a good geopolitical environment for us. There is value in herd defence.
“I would be saying to Biden ‘the more conspicuously the US engages on this and visibly consults not only Australia but other free-market economies, the more concerned and therefore more cautious Beijing will become’.”
Specifically what might a Biden administration do to assist? Russel points to China’s blockade on supply of rare earths to Japan as a precedent. The US and European Union joined Japan in its WTO action against China. I’d add that even more useful is the action Australia and the US and Japan have taken since to jointly develop Australian rare earth miners to enter the market and break China’s near-monopoly on global supply of these essential minerals.
And if like-minded countries can work to increase supply, they should be able to work together on demand. One idea is that, in cases such as Australia’s today, other countries could help manage Australia’s pain by arranging to buy more of the exports embargoed by China. A kind of buyers’ club.Indeed, Peter Dutton suggested such an idea to Morrison months ago: That the Quad countries, the US, Japan, India and Australia, could coordinate to defeat the power of China’s coercive tactics. The idea has not been developed yet.
Russel agrees that such an arrangement might be achievable; he calls it a “victims’ fund yes, the sky’s the limit with creative options.”
These are the third and fourth things that Xi’s hamfisted attacks on Australia have achieved this week. He has exposed himself yet further to the world as a domineering thug, and he has brought the rest of the world to start thinking about new ways to manage his wanton hostility. Already the Quad countries have joined in a new military manifestation of their alarm at Xi’s conduct, by jointly exercising for the first time in the Malabar naval manoeuvres hosted by India. This regrouping of world powers will only accelerate. Biden is planning to host a “summit of democracies” next year, for instance.
Xi won the week’s battle for discourse control. The larger and longer struggle is afoot. The chicken is still alive. And looking to the monkey for a hand.Peter Hartcher is political editor.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.