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Debates about Taiwan policy often end in a moral impasse.

Those focused on preserving peace in our time often point to the devastating human costs of defending Taiwan if that ultimately means high-intensity warfare between China and Taiwan, backed by the United States and its allies in the Western Pacific.

Meanwhile, those focused on defending liberal democracy often emphasise that it would be an abandonment of core values to not protect the rights and freedoms of 24 million Taiwanese from a clear and present danger.

Although the world may eventually face the invidious choice of large-scale war or monumental moral compromise over Taiwan, it is far too soon to resign ourselves to such a grim decision.

Instead, liberal democracies can still protect Taiwan with a policy of calibrated deterrence. And Australia has a role to play in incrementally ratcheting up deterrence measures to keep pace with China’s intensifying economic, military and political pressure on Taiwan.

Although the task of deterring Beijing is becoming harder as China’s power grows, the policy options have not been exhausted.

There’s much that even medium powers like Australia can do to expand their ties with Taiwan and thereby sow further doubt in the minds of Beijing’s policy planners about the international implications of attempting to seize Taiwan.

As others have argued, Australia and other liberal democracies should continue to make the case for Taiwan’s representation in international bodies as well as its inclusion in free trade agreements.

But beyond these diplomatic and economic policy options, there are at least three concrete steps that Australia could take to increase the deterrent effect in the defence and national security spheres.

First, Canberra could establish a de facto defence attaché office in Taipei, which as part of the Australian Office would represent Australian interests in the absence of formal diplomatic relations.

As well as deepening unofficial ties with the Taiwanese Armed Forces and government, this de facto defence attaché office could potentially also serve as a conduit for intelligence-sharing between Taiwan and Australia. As the risk of conflict in the Taiwan Strait increases, this intelligence exchange function could prove immensely useful for Australia’s situational awareness.

This de facto office would meet a Taiwanese desire for such connections, while equally reflecting the extent to which the security situation in Taiwan affects Australia’s core defence and security interests. To avoid overly antagonising Beijing, it could be staffed by non-uniformed Australian Defence Force personnel and Department of Defence civilians.

Second, Australia could explore the feasibility of incorporating Taiwanese Armed Forces personnel in multilateral non-traditional maritime security training and exercises in the Pacific islands region or Southeast Asia.

As well as providing training and representational opportunities for Taiwanese forces, such activities would provide a low-profile way of building unofficial ties between the Taiwanese Armed Forces, the ADF and other regional militaries.

Although China would view such activities with suspicion, the focus on relatively uncontentious activities and the precedent of Singapore’s low-key military relationship with Taiwan would likely moderate blowback from Beijing.

Third and finally, Australian politicians at the federal and state levels could establish a Taiwan–Australia parliamentary exchange.

Such an exchange wouldn’t need to be endorsed by the federal government and could be pursued independently by likeminded senators and members of parliament.

It could facilitate productive and candid exchanges on shared national security concerns for both Taiwan and Australia, including managing the impact of China’s politically motivated trade restrictions and responding to Beijing’s political interference.

As well as assisting Taipei and Canberra develop concrete policy responses to Beijing’s statecraft, such an exchange program would allow Australian legislators to gain an intimate understanding of the threat China poses to Taiwan’s freedoms.

Although China would disapprove, such an initiative would be consistent with the policies adopted by other liberal democracies such as France, which recently rejected Beijing’s efforts to dissuade French legislators from official contact with Taiwanese authorities.

Of course, these policy initiatives alone won’t be enough to deter China from, in extremis, invading. But they are precisely the kind of calibrated ratcheting up of international engagement with Taiwan that will challenge Beijing’s efforts to isolate Taipei.

It would be imprudent to not ask how these initiatives would impact Australia’s ties with China.

The simple answer is negatively. China would most likely cast these moves as destabilising meddling in its internal affairs and issue firm public and private diplomatic rebukes.

Yet the relatively discreet nature of these initiatives and the precedents from other countries suggest that they will probably not cause a further dramatic downturn in the already strained Australia–China relationship.

And even if these initiatives breed additional ill-will in Beijing, they are still likely the right course of action for Canberra.

For designing Taiwan policy for Australia is not just a question of strategy; it is also a question of ethics. Our decisions on Taiwan may define for this age the values that we represent and our willingness to uphold them.

Southeast Asia is a region of crucial strategic importance to China. The Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea are choke points for much of its international trade. The mainland states of Southeast Asia have been closely connected with China for centuries. And Southeast Asia is one area on its periphery where China is not encircled by another great power.

With the rise of China as an economic and political power in recent decades, Southeast Asia has become a critical economic partner for China, as well as a target for China’s political influence, as well documented by Sebastian Strangio in his recent book, In the dragon’s shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese century.

Strangio began his career as a reporter at the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia, and has since traveled and reported extensively across the 10 nations of ASEAN.

With some flair, he weaves stories of the rich history of the region, with a discussion of recent trends and defining issues. Recurrent themes through his country profiles are mutually beneficial economic cooperation, Chinese attempts at regional domination, pushback by regional countries and the waning influence of the US.

Nowhere in the world is China’s rise more visible than in Southeast Asia, according to Strangio, due to the reality of proximity. For centuries, they were bound together by trade, tribute, movements of people, and cultural and technological diffusion. And with China’s economic renaissance, China and Southeast Asia are now tied ever more tightly together, thanks to a ‘collapse of the distance’ between the two. A network of highways, rail lines and special economic zones is breaking natural barriers with mainland Southeast Asia. And there’s a similar collapsing of distance at sea as China has built-up a world class navy.

Southeast Asia is also home to sea lanes which are critical for China’s booming trade, especially imports of crude oil. This is the basic strategic driver of China’s occupation of the South China Sea, writes Strangio, rather than claims of historic rights and traditional fishing grounds.

For Southeast Asia, China’s proximity has always been a mixed blessing. The lure of prosperity coexists with fear and trepidation about what a powerful China will mean for the region’s future, especially in light of the deterioration in US–China relations. In some countries, it has reawakened memories of China’s support for communist insurgencies during the Cold War and the vexed question of its relationship with the region’s ethnic Chinese communities, according to Strangio. And China has mirrored its construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea by damming the upper Mekong River, giving Chinese dam engineers the power of life and death over large swathes of the downstream Mekong nations.

China is not popular in Southeast Asia, and is its own worst enemy with its imperious attitude, writes Strangio. The general Chinese message to the region is that it can flourish within a Chinese orbit or languish outside. In short, China believes that Southeast Asian states should defer to its wishes. While all great powers tend to behave that way (‘great state autism’), in China’s case it may be worse as it also reflects the nature of its one-party, authoritarian system that leaves very little space for civil society. One disturbing trend has been Chinese outreach to the ethnic Chinese populations in Southeast Asia to enlist their support, which risks reawakening old fears about dual loyalties on the part of ethnic Chinese, notably in countries like Indonesia.

Nevertheless, a prosperous and stable China is in the best interests of Southeast Asia, which has good reason to maintain healthy relations with its big neighbour. China has become a vital economic partner to every nation in the region, and has been more helpful than the US for dealing with Covid-19. Despite the risks and challenges of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is very attractive to the region’s poorer countries for kickstarting their economies. The reality of geographic proximity makes China something that Southeast Asia can’t ignore or wish away.

Thus, despite their immense goodwill towards the US, Southeast Asians are reluctant to sign up to any American-led alliance or coalition of states aimed at containing China’s power. Indeed, many Southeast Asians are concerned that the US often sees its relationship with the region mainly through the prism of its great-power competition with China. The depiction of the US–China competition as an all-or-nothing struggle between democracy and dictatorship has failed to gain much traction in Southeast Asia, argues Strangio.

In this informative and readable book, Strangio concludes that the emergence of a more powerful and belligerent China poses the most serious foreign policy challenge that the Southeast Asian region has faced in a generation. One issue that could have been developed further is the future of ‘ASEAN centrality’—the notion that regional security and economic cooperation revolve around ASEAN.

In reality, ASEAN now seems less effective and cohesive than ever. It is being fractured by China’s adoption of Cambodia as a client state. Mainland ASEAN states are becoming more economically integrated with China than with other ASEAN states, and are thus drifting away. ASEAN’s perennial weak point, its inability to solve problems in its own backyard, has been highlighted once again by the political crisis in Myanmar. And ASEAN’s biggest member Indonesia is clearly more preoccupied with national interests and demonstrates very little regional leadership.

This month in Beijing, the so-called two sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference convened to formalise a range of policy goals for China’s economic development, environmental management, law, foreign affairs and more. This year, there’s been the promulgation of the 14th five-year plan (2021–2025) and the continuing dismantling of Hong Kong’s governance system.

The two sessions are a highly formalised performance that express the machinery of power in the People’s Republic of China. They are only the public moment of an extremely dense and complex policy formulation process that happens behind closed doors in the months and even years before delegates meet.

Taiwan is always mentioned in key speeches at these meetings. Premier Li Keqiang offered two paragraphs in his work report to the NPC in which he reasserted Beijing’s commitment to its ‘one China’ principle and the 1992 Consensus. He also warned against separatist activity while promoting engagement: ‘We will promote exchanges, cooperation and integrated development across the Taiwan Strait. Together, we can shape a bright future of rejuvenation for our great nation.’

Similar references to Taiwan were made in the CPPCC work report by chair Wang Yang and, with more specifics, in a section of the five-year plan devoted to Taiwan.

The references were mostly standard for PRC statements on Taiwan over recent years: the 1992 Consensus, the ‘one China’ principle, condemnation of ‘separatists’ and warnings about the use of force, as well as promotion of investments links and people-to-people exchanges.

In 2021, these statements come in the context of a significant rise in Beijing’s pressure on Taiwan since the re-election in a landslide of President Tsai Ing-wen. Most worrying has been military overflights in the Taiwan Strait that have tested Taiwanese military reactions and sought to normalise the presence of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force.

That the two sessions offered established positions on Taiwan says that Beijing hasn’t made fundamental changes to its Taiwan policy but for now is still working within the existing framework. By way of comparison, the NPC has in the past signalled sharp changes in Taiwan policy. In 1979, it issued the Message to compatriots in Taiwan formally ending the ‘liberate Taiwan’ policy set in 1954 in response to the end of the Korean War and the signing of the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, and which formally drew a line under the anti-Japanese Second United Front between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang from 1936 that collapsed in the early 1940s.

That there are no comparable changes this year places the recent military activity as a tactical move within the existing framework rather than as part of a fundamental strategic shift or CCP ideological reassessment.

This doesn’t offset the likelihood of a crisis, however. Within the core positions, there were pointers on the ideological structure of PRC Taiwan policy that suggested vectors of escalation.

It was notable that Li didn’t include a reference to ‘one country, two systems’ as Beijing’s formula for Taiwan’s future, especially since the 2019 speech President Xi Jinping gave for the 40th anniversary of the Message to compatriots in Taiwan made much of ‘one country, two systems’. Clearly, events in Hong Kong and Beijing’s response to them, including at this year’s NPC, call into question the meaning and use of the term, but Li did still apply it to Hong Kong, so it might be premature to say that it has been formally abandoned.

PLA spokesman Wu Qian made a statement about Taiwan that noted the activities of a ‘tiny number of separatists’ and warned Taipei not to try to ‘borrow strength from foreign forces’. These phrases are not unprecedented, but they could be used as a pretext for military action against Taiwan if Beijing were to claim that such activities had become an existential threat to ‘reunification’ and therefore to the task of the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’.

There were other potentially interesting comments during the two sessions. The Global Times, while not always a reliable source, reported that CPPCC members had floated the need for new legislation promoting unification. At the same time, Transport Minister Li Xiaopeng released a plan for 2035 that included an undersea rail link between Taiwan and Fujian province, an implausible proposal first suggested in the mid-1990s that highlights the challenge in separating out substantive policy changes from political theatre in the PRC system.

What the two sessions have not signalled is any tone of compromise within the existing framework. Beijing remains unwilling to reach out to Taiwan’s elected government under Tsai and has not matched claims of ‘exchanges, cooperation and integrated development’ with reduced military activity in the Taiwan Strait.

The ideological and policy framework put in place in 1979 has failed to realise Beijing’s goals for more than 40 years, and this has created structural tension in the PRC’s Taiwan policy architecture. The lack of compromise is symptomatic of a system with limited mechanisms for thoroughgoing policy reassessments and an ideological belief that policy failure is a reflection only of a lack of commitment, not of a policy being in any way wrong.

US and other naval forces have undertaken transits through the Taiwan Strait and members of US President Joe Biden’s administration have made comments in support of the status quo. In the absence of any signs of softening from Beijing or an abrupt change in PRC Taiwan policy and ideology, maintaining these calibrated international actions to ensure they figure in Beijing’s Taiwan policy calculus remain the best guarantor of regional security.

The year of the ox has begun darkly for the people of Hong Kong. On 16 February, nine pro-democracy activists, including 82-year-old Martin Lee, the revered long-time leader of the city’s Democratic Party, went on trial facing charges of illegal assembly.

A week later, the Hong Kong government announced that it would enact a law allowing only ‘patriots’ to serve on district councils, the lowest level of the city’s administrative apparatus, with responsibilities ranging from sanitation to traffic. This will likely result in the expulsion of democratically elected council members and the disqualification of future candidates deemed disloyal to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Then, on 28 February, in the most sweeping crackdown yet since China imposed a draconian national security law on the former British colony in July, Hong Kong authorities charged 47 leaders of the city’s pro-democracy movement with ‘conspiracy to commit subversion’ under the law. Because the law rigs the trial process to ensure conviction, these activists face the prospect of years in prison.

Several considerations may have prompted Chinese President Xi Jinping to escalate the repression in Hong Kong. For starters, indications that the national security law has succeeded in instilling the rule of fear in the once-defiant city may be encouraging Xi to take advantage of the despotic momentum and try to decapitate Hong Kong’s pro-democracy forces.

Moreover, the West’s measured response to China’s imposition of the national security law—until now limited to diplomatic denunciations and sanctions against a small number of senior Chinese and Hong Kong officials—has not really hurt the government in Beijing. Chinese leaders also appear to have drawn a line in dealing with new US President Joe Biden: China’s sovereign prerogatives in Hong Kong and the western province of Xinjiang are non-negotiable. China will do as it pleases in those places, despite Biden’s warning of ‘repercussions’ for human-rights abuses.

But Xi may have underestimated the costs of his actions in Hong Kong. This latest spate of prosecutions of pro-democracy activists, coupled with a lack of goodwill gestures from China to improve ties with the United States, will most likely harden Biden’s stance.

For the time being, the Biden administration wants to avoid a head-on collision with China, because it must first attend to domestic priorities such as tackling the Covid-19 pandemic and fostering economic recovery. As Biden’s advisers weigh the best approach to China, the CCP’s intensifying crackdown in Hong Kong will undermine advocates of a more nuanced and less confrontational US approach while vindicating those convinced that only a hardline position can modify Chinese behaviour.

When the 47 pro-democracy activists are convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, the Biden administration will have no choice but to make China pay. The narrow window for stabilising US–China ties, which should serve Chinese interests, will likely close, and bilateral relations could resume their dangerous downward spiral.

At that point, Chinese repression in Hong Kong will make it much easier for Biden to recruit wavering Western democracies as allies. Currently, many European countries are hesitant about becoming full-fledged partners in a new US-led anti-China coalition. Aside from their extensive commercial interests in China, they worry that an unrestrained US–China geopolitical rivalry could plunge the world into a new cold war, disrupt and fragment the global economy, and doom any hope of combating climate change.

But European leaders ultimately must respond to voters, many of whom care deeply about human rights and are demanding tougher policies towards China. It will not be long before Germany and France, in particular, find it untenable to maintain a policy that relies on strategic neutrality in the unfolding US–China duel to preserve their economic interests in China. When European democracies finally join the Biden administration’s nascent anti-China coalition, the credit should go not to America, but to Xi.

Such a coalition could impose painful costs on China for its actions in Hong Kong. True, in the short term, the US and its allies cannot easily undermine Chinese efforts to build Hong Kong into a financial centre capable of rivalling New York and London; after all, financial sanctions, such as a ban on investing in companies listed there, would cause chaos in global markets. But they still have a wide array of other options to squeeze China.

Decoupling China from global technology supply chains currently seems inconceivable, but it could become a reality if the coalition agrees to a new arrangement similar to the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, which choked off Western technology transfers to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Western democracies could also deny Chinese leaders the international prestige they seek by curtailing high-level exchanges and vigorously contesting Chinese influence in multilateral organisations. And sheltering victims of China’s crackdown in Hong Kong would be both a humanitarian gesture and a forceful rebuke of Chinese policy.

Chinese leaders are most likely already aware of these consequences as they weigh their options in Hong Kong. They have settled on an ultra-hardline course in the belief that its costs are bearable; arguably, their gambit has paid off so far. But, by throwing down the gauntlet to a new US administration and its allies, China may be overplaying its hand.

This week, an editorial in the Chinese state-run newspaper the Global Times alleged that the almost 80-year-old Five Eyes alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States is an ‘axis of white supremacy’. Such blatantly ridiculous statements beggar belief and most certainly do not warrant a response. More interestingly, though, the editorial is symptomatic of four critical flaws in the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic thinking about China’s future.

The first is a fundamental confusion over hegemony. When discussing the Five Eyes, the Global Times argues, ‘We cannot allow their selfishness to masquerade as the common morality of the world, and they cannot set the agenda of mankind.’

That kind of thinking conflates dominance and leadership. While it is, of course, possible to be dominant, real power comes from leadership.

Domestically, the CCP prefers to exercise its power to assert constrictive control over its population. Exercising this kind of absolute control or power in international relations is neither possible nor desirable.

The global powerhouses in international relations are reliant not on coercion, threats or control but on leadership and influence. Attempts to challenge the rules-based order with soft power or coercive and divisive threats will not result in CCP hegemony and are not a zero-sum game. When it operates within the rules-based order, the CCP’s penchant for division and dominance does little for maintaining peace, security and economic prosperity.

Second, international relations is not an activity that lends itself to binary choices or generalisations. There’s a strange irony to the Global Times’ invoking of concepts of ‘Anglo-Saxon civilization’. Like the CCP’s broader strategic thinking, this perspective has more in common with dated biblical questions like, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’—an attitude largely abandoned in Western culture, let alone international relations. Let’s not forget that US President George W. Bush tried a similar turn of phrase in 2001, and it fell flat.

Engagement in the rules-based order is not concerned with a series of simplistic black-and-white questions or a matrix consisting of shades of grey; it is a rich and complex endeavour more akin to a Jackson Pollock painting than a Mark Rothko. As argued by Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The true enemy of man [humanity] is generalisation.’

Third, thinly veiled threats and coercive actions, economic or otherwise, are having less and less success. China’s constriction of rare-earth supplies to Japan, and later the US, has led them to initiate all-new strategies to secure their supply chains. More than a year of the CCP’s economic sanctions against Australia has hardened Canberra’s resolve and tarnished Beijing’s global reputation.

Finally, and most importantly, divisive wedge strategies and identity politics, whether at the national, bilateral or regional level, do not create power.

While the CCP’s identity politics may have some traction domestically, it falls flat internationally. Stoking the fires of identity politics is by its very nature harmful. Narrative gestures that seek to link the governments of the Five Eyes countries with the increased ‘transnational threat’ of white-supremacist movements and pit their ‘tiny’ populations against the rest of the world along this fictional battleline are a homogenising tool that is counterproductive to the international diversity the CCP claims to champion.

In 2018, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’s memorandum of understanding with the CCP to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative surprised Canberra. Australia’s federation makes foreign affairs a matter for the Commonwealth government. The BRI agreement is an egregiously manipulative CCP endeavour likely designed to force a divisive wedge between the Commonwealth and the states. But the federation is strong enough to survive this.

Perhaps fear of Chinese economic retribution was behind recent ministerial suggestion from New Zealand that Australia should ‘show respect’ to China. Little wonder that this latest Global Times editorial tries to drive a wedge between the Five Eyes members. Australia and New Zealand have strong cultural and historical roots. And small New Zealand has expended blood and treasure for its allies.

The CCP is anxious about effective multilateralism, as its advantages come from dealing bilaterally. It’s much easier to exert control when you’re the much bigger party in a two-way relationship.

The Chinese state uses a divisive approach to multilateralism. Even the most casual observer can see this strategy playing out in the way the it engages with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its member states.

For decades, the economic development of ASEAN members was hindered by persistent shortages in high-quality infrastructure. The issue wasn’t a lack of desire but a lack of access to equity and investment.

Chinese direct investment was already flowing into the region before President Xi Jinping announced the BRI in 2013. Nonetheless, the introduction of the program was a watershed moment in ASEAN infrastructure development. It has also made most ASEAN members increasingly economically reliant on China.

This investment, especially in Laos and Cambodia, has influenced not only these countries but also ASEAN’s collective responses. Intense reactions to the CCP’s actions in the South China Sea seem unlikely to be forthcoming.

There is, however, an awakening across the region to the dependency that Chinese investment brings. This realisation is driving all new connections within and with the region. Symbolic projects like the Australia–Vietnam friendship bridge in Dong Thap Province and the Vietnam–Japan friendship bridge in Hanoi show that there are alternatives.

The Global Times’ comical analysis is reminiscent of the 1950’s propaganda produced by the Soviet Union. The editorial also illustrates that one of the essential strategies for responding to the CCP’s attacks on multilateralism is a continued commitment to a rules-based order and the myriad possibilities it holds.