Australia’s defence thinkers are ever worried about self-reliance and order.

The Rs reign: rules and self-reliance and region.

Those themes run through the 40 years from the first Defence White Paper in 1976 to the just-released seventh Defence White Paper.

On the order front, the 1976 White Paper described the demise of colonialism as producing ‘a new world order’ while the Communist victories in Indo-China made for an uncertain regional future. The White Paper said the US wanted ‘a peaceful and stable world order’ while the USSR sought ‘disruptive political change’.

The 2016 White Paper worries repeatedly that the old order is cracking. The US is still seen as central to a stable world order. One guess about the identity of the big player guilty of seeking disruptive change.

Welcome to another effort to seek strategic topography from the typography—tracking the use of words/concepts through the seven Defence White Papers in 1976, 1987, 1994, 2000, 2009, 2013 and 2016.

Previous columns counted the number of times countries were mentioned and the use of geographic constructs (from Asia–Pacific to Indo–Pacific). Now to follow themes and memes over the 40 years.

One of the great Canberra mandarins, Arthur Tange, was proud of getting Oz ‘self reliance’ into the 1976 paper. But self reliance/self reliant appeared in the text only six times (once as a heading). That was enough to make it seminal.

The number of mentions isn’t the only measure of the importance of a key idea—although the usual White Paper habit is instruction and injunction by multiple iterations. Say the same thing repeatedly so everyone gets the point.

The full rhetorical flowering of the idea that Australia could defend itself came in Labor’s 1987 White Paper. Australian ‘self-reliance’ got 43 mentions and ‘self-reliant’ defence got a further 13 goes.

By 1994, self reliance/reliant was worth 24 mentions. The Cold War was gone. Asia would ‘increasingly’ determine its own affairs and ‘a new strategic architecture will evolve.’ The new architecture was supposed to deliver order.

In John Howard’s 2000 White Paper, self-reliance was given due weight with eight mentions.

In Kevin Rudd’s 2009 Paper self-reliance was worth 15 goes, while Julia Gillard gave it seven. The 2016 White Paper salutes ‘self-reliant’ twice.

Self reliance may remain a central concept; it just doesn’t get referred to as much. By contrast, the number of times the United States gets mentioned keeps growing (from 12 times in the 1976 Paper to 129 in 2016).

John Howard is notable for delivering both process and cash.

Howard created the National Security Committee of Cabinet and it put in the hours on the 2000 Paper. Howard boasted it was ‘the most comprehensive process of ministerial-level decision making about Australia’s defence policy for many years’. And in a big difference from all previous White Papers, the promised cash arrived in the years that followed.

The Coalition budgets from 2000 to 2007 matched Howard’s words about ‘the most specific long-term defence funding commitment given by any Australian Government in over 25 years’.

As self reliance faded in usage, the need for rules rose.

Kevin Rudd’s Strategic Interests chapter had a section headed, ‘A Stable, Rules-Based Global Security Order.’ There were 11 ‘rules-based’ mentions. The 2013 Paper matched it with a dozen references to the need for rules, while its heading was ‘A Stable, Rules-Based Global Order’.

Come to 2016 and ‘rules’ is used 64 times—48 of these in the formulation ‘rules-based global order’. Rules turns up in three section headings: ‘The rules-based global order’, ‘A stable Indo-Pacific region and a rules-based global order’, and ‘Australia’s interests in a rules-based global order’.

Talk about hammering the point. And the point is fear of what is fraying.

‘Rules-based global order’ is a big phrase to cover such disparate forces as jihadism and China’s rise. Mostly, though, it’s about China.

The first of the topography-from-typography columns observed that these days when Australia talks about the US, often it’s really thinking about China. Much the same goes for ‘rules-based global order’.

As the repeated message of the 2016 White Paper, ‘rules-based’ is the meme for an Australia proclaiming a bigger defence budget, driven by a region throbbing with political nervousness, diplomatic neuralgia and strategic angst.

China’s role in the world continues to evolve strategically and economically. For those watching from a safe distance—such as the capitals of Europe—China’s strategic trajectory doesn’t even rate a mention amid the scramble for profit. In contrast, for those of us in Asia, the warm glow of the Chinese economy is tinged by growing strategic uncertainty.

A good many commentators contend that China’s rise necessitates a regional ‘security architecture’. To be honest, the notion escapes me; we already have an alphabet soup of largely ineffective regional summits, and it’s fanciful to think that countries will surrender a skerrick of their sovereignty to a new super-national entity. Asia isn’t Europe. Moreover, references to architecture implies design, yet, in the absence of a grand bargain—like Kissinger and Mao circa 1972—China’s role is more likely to evolve through piecemeal negotiation and, I fear, crises that progressively define the limits of its (and other’s) freedom of action.

While it’s fashionable to ignore the ideological differences between China and liberal democracies such as Australia, I think that the differences matter when it comes to China’s emerging role. I contend that the ideology of the CCP will, in and of itself, predispose it to pursue a particular sort of role for China in the international system.

In the aftermath of WWII, the US led the creation of an international system that broadly mirrored its own domestic constitution. At its heart was a rules based-system built upon the prohibition of economic and physical coercion. Of course, the US has often used its power to go outside of the system it created, though less frequently than it could have, and most usually out of folly rather than self-interest. Indeed, despite the vagaries of US exceptionalism, the US crafted an international system in its own image, one in which the nations of the world are effectively accorded the rights of citizens.

In a perverse way, China appears to have a similar vision of how the world should work; except that the Chinese leadership has a very different relationship with its citizens. While the US recognises clear limits on the power of government—including multiple checks and balances—no such constraint inhibits the absolute power that the CCP exerts over its people. It’s a case of Magna Carta verses Heavenly Mandate. Consistent with a domestic worldview of self-legitimised and unbridled central power, China’s vision for an Asian security architecture centres on its so-called ‘new model of great power relations’, which amounts to turning Asia into a Sino–US power-sharing condominium (and probably only so long as it takes to eject the US holus bolus out of the region).

The US is unlikely to accept a grand bargain based around a G2—such a move would run against its vision of the world and of itself. Instead, to use a hackneyed phrase, we will surely see a mixture of cooperation and competition. Where agreement can be found—such as trade—China will continue to integrate into the global community. Where agreement can’t be found—such as in the South China Sea—there will be competition. By negotiation and sharp-elbowed jostling, the freedom of action of nations large and small will be decided.

So far, in terms of both cooperation and competition, the US and its partners, Australia included, have played their cards poorly—and they were dealt a bad hand to begin with.

On the cooperation side, it’s a story of lost opportunities. In particular, the West has been far too slow in according China a role in global economic governance commensurate with the size of its economy. To make matters worse, the US chose to sell the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a zero-sum blocking of Chinese influence, rather than as a compliment to the other regional trade initiatives. Most visibly, the failed US attempt to block the Chinese-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank resulted in an own-goal for the Americans.

As far as competition goes, it’s largely a one-sided affair. China has asserted itself in the South China Sea and the region has wrung its hands. The much vaulted freedom of navigation operations by the US were as tardy as they were ambiguous, and have made no difference to the facts on the (newly dredged) ground. Worse still, nobody else has had the guts to follow suit. In fairness, the limp response reflects the ambiguity of the situation. China has generated a low-level crisis below the threshold that would justify a robust response. Nonetheless, the US has been left looking impotent and the region un-united. Nobody said the game was going to be fair.

There’s no doubt that there’s more the West can and should do to engage China constructively on economic issues. With an emerging-market debt crisis on the horizon, we should be talking with China now about how to contain the damage. We have to do better than the botched Western response to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.

In terms of the emerging strategic competition, the game will be won or lost by the extent to which the US and its partners are willing to stand up to China. The critical question is how much risk we are willing to take to impose costs on China. The answer, to date, is very little.

Credible reports are circulating that China has deployed an HQ-9 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system and an associated targeting radar to Woody Island, part of the Paracel group of islands in the South China Sea. Woody Island is approximately 400km off the Vietnamese coast (16°53′N 112°17′E) and to the South-east of China’s Hainan Island. In 2015 the Chinese undertook significant lengthening and strengthening of the Woody Island runway, now reported to be 2,920m in length and suitable for Chinese heavy lift military aircraft.

The HQ-9 SAM deployment was first reported by Fox News in the US, which has released commercial satellite imagery of before-and-after images of what’s claimed to be two batteries of eight SAM launchers and a supporting radar system deployed on a beach. Those details have been broadly confirmed both by the Taiwanese and US Defence Departments. The Pentagon has previously publicly claimed that the HQ-9 is a missile system based on the Russian SA-10, incorporating technology from advanced western systems and designed to counter ‘high-performance aircraft, cruise missiles, air-to-surface missiles (ASMs), and tactical ballistic missiles (TBMs)’ (PDF). The missile’s maximum range is reported to be 200km, carrying a warhead of 180kg.

For a number of critical reasons this is a strategic game changer for the Asia–Pacific region, and potentially for China–US relations. The HQ-9 deployment runs counter to assurances President Xi provided to President Obama in Washington last September, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi repeated earlier this month to Secretary of State John Kerry on the South China Sea that ‘China has given a commitment of not engaging in so-called militarization, and we will honour that commitment’. The deployment also directly challenges a core US policy objective to prevent the further militarisation of the South China Sea, a goal that was endorsed at President Obama’s just-concluded ASEAN Special Leaders’ Summit at Sunnylands in California.

The ink on the Sunnylands’ declaration could hardly have been dry when the Fox News story broke. The summiteers reaffirmed ‘the key principles that will guide our cooperation going forward’, including:

‘Shared commitment to maintain peace, security and stability in the region, ensuring maritime security and safety, including the rights of freedom of navigation and overflight and other lawful uses of the seas, and unimpeded lawful maritime commerce as described in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as well as non-militarization and self-restraint in the conduct of activities.’

The statement highlights the distinct incompatibility of China’s approach to South China Sea security with that pursued by the US and Southeast Asian nations.

Although Chinese Lanzhou-class destroyers carry the maritime version of the HQ-9, the deployment to Woody Island is the first permanent stationing of a highly capable SAM in the South China Sea. Such stationing shows a Chinese intent to match, and indeed exceed, any step by the US to assert overflight rights and to undertake Freedom of Navigation operations. The deployment raises the stakes throughout the entire region for any country looking to join the US in undertaking similar operations.

What are the implications of the HQ-9 going forward? First, the Chinese political claim that their islands and artificial facilities would not be militarised has been shown to be nothing more than an exercise in buying time for further military build-up in the South China Sea. Second, President Obama will surely be revising his estimate of the relationship he has with his Chinese counterpart. We are clearly nowhere near achieving a meeting of minds between the two leaders on security issues. A significant trust deficit will be hardening.

A third implication is that all countries over-flying the region will have to factor in the potentially greater risk that comes from the HQ-9 deployment. Its 200km range covers only a small part of the region, but the political intent is unmistakable. If China was prepared to deploy the SAM system to Woody Island it may well plan to locate HQ-9s on other islands in the region. A further Chinese step may be to announce an air defence identification zone over part of the South China Sea, presumably in the approaches to Hainan Island.

For countries in Southeast Asia, as well as Australia, Japan and any others concerned about China’s rapid physical assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea, the HQ-9 deployment further raises the stakes. Backing down on the importance of freedom of navigation and overflight rights will damage our own credibility after vigorously asserting that such access is a critical strategic interest. Thus the terrain of incompatible strategic interests between China and its neighbours becomes starker, and the risks of miscalculation and potential conflict grow.

It hardly needs to be said that the name and mind-set of persons who might be persuaded to join some oppositional CCP grouping against President Xi remain entirely obscure. They’re unlikely to raise their heads as long as Xi’s policies appear successful. However, given the possibilities for opposition, Xi cannot avoid further cultivating his own friends and supporters, especially the men who must have served in the decision-making chain that brought him to the presidency in the first place.

It seems safe to suggest that there are at least two senior groups that Xi must be able to rely on in this way. One group will be the senior bankers and currency manipulators in, and beyond, the People’s Bank of China. They constitute, so to speak, China’s special forces not merely in the expansion of China’s global trade but in the continuing effort to increase the reach and power of the Yuan and challenges to the global dominance of the US dollar. The other is the senior officer corps of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), on which depends the security of a China that’s remarkably devoid of allies.

The senior people in China’s banking world are also largely obscure to the outside world, although their efforts to cope with serious interrelated problems in their field may well be decisive for Xi’s efforts to modernise the economy and, with it, China’s position in the world. One problem is the management of the large debt problems in China’s banking field without severe difficulties both for the domestic economy and for China’s external financial and trading position. That may include difficulties in achieving wide and ready international acceptance for the Yuan, especially in any kind of competition with the US Federal Reserve, whose increasing stature makes it, in effect, the world’s banker. In this field, Xi’s political fate is likely to depend squarely on the wisdom and skill of his bankers.

Equally decisive roles are played by the PLA. One is the continuing suppression of any signs of domestic unrest. That’s no small matter. The military, as well as the police and security service, have for some years sternly repressed any sign of political dissent. They’ve played an especially notable role in extending road, rail and transport facilities to Tibet, with its largely anti-Chinese population, as well as increasing the number and scope of its Tibetan military facilities. Similarly, various parts of the PLA have played a role in the control of nationalism and dissent among Uighurs in Xinjiang, in the growth of Chinese industry there, and the suppression of any links between the Uighurs and Islamic movements in neighbouring Central Asia. In neither Tibet or Xinjiang have signs of local separatism been tolerated.

Other segments of the PLA, especially the Navy and Air Force, have played vital roles in the perceived need to extend China’s border across the East and South China seas and to curtail, or end, the use of Chinese coastal and near-coastal waters by foreign navies, not least that of the US. In addition, the PLA Navy evidently has the task of asserting dominance in the Indian Ocean and other waters that feature in China’s increasing trade with (and through) the Middle East and Africa. All that in addition to the constant and continuing information, cyber and intelligence ‘war’ with the US, Japan, Germany and others, and the benefits of ‘hacking’ into other countries’ scientific efforts, technologies and procedures.

In both economic and military terms, China under President Xi is clearly determined to make up for its long inferiority to the West in the 19th and 20th centuries and to return to the position of one of the world’s leading states. In that process the old theologies of Maoism have been entirely replaced, on the one hand by the search for wealth and on the other arguably even more important hand by a nationalism that satisfies those present external claims, as well as reinforcing domestic cohesion. In that process the Generals and Admirals of the PLA must to some extent be given their heads. Xi cannot, even if he wanted to, unduly constrain their nationalist ambitions. He certainly can’t risk allowing any minor resentments to congeal into outright opposition even when, as now, the US is patently giving him considerable room for manoeuver.

Quite how the CCP as a whole, and in the longer term, will react to Xi’s efforts to promote nationalism together with wealth and power isn’t yet apparent, though continuing success is sure to garner domestic applause. That he must continue along his present path of carefully balancing the nationalist pride of the military against the need to avoid external hostilities, seems certain. But given the continuing, albeit not obvious, dangers of his position in the midst of such problems, he will in any event have to watch his back. He certainly can’t afford to see his party split or his military commanders help to send him down the same path as Mr Zhou.

As widely expected, the Taiwanese presidential and legislative elections on 16 January produced a landslide victory for the pro-independence, opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DDP) under the leadership of Tsai Ing-Wen. The first female president in the country’s history received 56.1% of the popular vote, defeating the incumbent Kuomintang (KMT) and its candidate Eric Chu by a 25-point margin—the biggest since Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election in 1996. The DPP for the first time also won an absolute majority in the legislature, securing 68 out of 113 seats, which frees the party up to pursue its legislative agenda and mandate.

The result has a couple of strategic implications. The most important is that a peaceful reunification on China’s terms is an increasingly distant prospect. To be sure, Tsai’s victory was partly due to growing voter frustration with the KMT’s handling of domestic problems which included a stagnating economy, rising labour costs and a widening income gap. However, the DPP’s decisive win also reflects increasing concerns about Taiwan’s growing dependence on China under President Ma Ying-Jeou and the perceived dangers to Taiwan’s democracy. Opinion polls prior to the election showed that a wide majority of citizens identify as ‘solely Taiwanese’ and that there’s hardly any support for reunification with the mainland.

Many voters therefore aimed to reassert their Taiwanese identity and way of life through their electoral choice. Indeed, the incompatibility between the political systems across the Taiwan Straits has grown. Taiwan’s election was the third peaceful transfer of power and ample proof of the vitality of its democratic system. Not only did Taiwan elect a female president but 38.1% of its legislators will be women, which will see the Republic of China (ROC) rank 10th in the world on the question of female parliamentary participation.

In short, the election was a milestone in Taiwan’s political system in that it has become almost structurally impossible for any ROC government to advocate for reunification, or getting closer, with the mainland. Tsai’s victory speech reflected that new reality. She refused to accept the ‘One China’ formula of the ‘1992 Consensus’ between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Instead, she vowed to ‘build a consistent, predictable, and sustainable cross-strait relationship’ based on the Republic of China’s ‘constitutional order, the results of cross-strait negotiations, interactions and exchanges, and democratic principles and the will of the Taiwanese people’. Moreover, she emphasised that ‘both sides of the strait have a responsibility to find mutually acceptable means of interaction that are based on dignity and reciprocity … Our democratic system, national identity, and international space must be respected. Any forms of suppression will harm the stability of cross-strait relations’.

Thus, while it’s unlikely that Tsai will follow the example of her DPP predecessor in office, Chen Shui-bian, and engage in provocative pro-independence rhetoric, she asks Beijing to respect the ROC’s de facto independence as the basis for the future relationship.

Consequently, the big question is how China’s leadership under President Xi Jinping will react. Predictably, China’s official response reiterated its support for the 1992 Consensus and urged Taiwan to refrain from any secessionist policies that would lead to war. But what’s less clear is how Beijing will seek to manage its relations with a DPP government. Xi, who has so far taken a hard line on sovereignty issues, could seek to punish Taiwan through suspending official exchanges or through trying to diplomatically isolate it even further. Any move to coerce the new DPP leadership could set off a negative spiral in cross-Strait relations. Alternatively, he could recognise the new political realities in Taiwan and quietly work towards a mutually acceptable compromise.

It’s too early to tell which approach China will choose. But it’s likely that the cross-Strait status quo will remain tenuous. That’s also the case because in recent years Beijing has changed the cross-Strait military balance in its favour. Thus, assuming that the US won’t come to the defence of Taiwan, Xi might seek to coerce the DPP leadership into accepting its position. That could be a serious misjudgement as the US is likely to go to war in the event of an unprovoked attack on the island nation. The US State Department’s statement on the election contained a subtle warning to China but also recognised the significance of the result for Taiwan’s democratic system:

‘We congratulate the people on Taiwan for once again demonstrating the strength of their robust democratic system, which will now undergo another peaceful transition of power. We share with the Taiwan people a profound interest in the continuation of cross-Strait peace and stability. We look forward to working with Dr. Tsai and Taiwan’s leaders of all parties to advance our many common interests and further strengthen the unofficial relationship between the United States and the people on [sic] Taiwan.’

The last sentence indicates that the US is willing to support moves to preserve Taiwan’s strategic and political breathing space. As part of the US rebalance to Asia, Taiwan becomes more, not less important to Washington.

It’s time that Canberra puts Taipei back on the radar screen and equally considers ways to strengthen Taiwan’s political and economic position.