Continued Chinese maritime ‘gray zone’ aggression in the South China Sea (as well as further afield) requires that Australia make strategic choices now to avoid being militarily dominated or economically marginalised by Beijing in the future.

China is Australia’s largest trading partner, accounting for more than 25% of Australia’s total export market. The recently-concluded China–Australia Free Trade Agreement means that Australia has unprecedented access to Chinese markets for its agricultural produce, natural resource extraction industries and a range of service offerings. If Australia’s only concern was maintaining or expanding current levels of economic activity between the two countries, the question of whether or not to conduct a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea would be self-evident.

But Australia has much more at stake than balance sheets, and therefore a more problematic set of choices to confront. The greatest challenge for the Turnbull Government and its successors is how to create manoeuvre space between the two superpowers and thus avoid the fate of either tributary state or ‘expendable ally’.

Conducting ‘FONOPs with Australian characteristics’ risks alienating both China and the US—not the worst outcome but certainly not a desirable one. On the other hand, the choice to abandon ANZUS would almost certainly bring short-term economic benefits to Australia. As Chinese economic influence grew, however, it would bring with it unacceptably high levels of coercion against such core Australian values as freedom of expression, defence of human rights and the rule of law. Similarly, although a majority of Australians support the US alliance, only a minority advocate making Australia a wholly-owned subsidiary of US geostrategic policy.

There is a third path forwards. Australia can retain its freedom of action, maintain cordial relations with both China and the US, and enhance its influence in the region by deepening its ties to South Korea in the same way it has already done so with Japan. The 2014 Korea–Australia Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA) is producing positive results for Australia, including an annual trade surplus in excess of $10 billion. Building on the foundation of the ‘2+2’ meetings of foreign and defence ministers of the two nations, Australia needs to market itself as a valuable and value-added partner. There are good reasons for doing so.

First, both Australia and South Korea are ‘middle’ powers whose economies play a significant role in in East Asia. China is South Korea’s largest overseas trade partner, a status that President Park Geun-hye seeks to protect despite a growing number of challenges to the overall relationship. She’s smart to do so; no matter how or when Korean reunification occurs, China’s support will be decisive to success. Although less dependent diplomatically on China than Korea, Australia is just as intertwined with China economically. Expanded commercial ties with Korea are desirable in and of themselves, and would mitigate the effects of potential Chinese retaliation in the future (e.g., when Australia affirms the anticipated Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling in favour of the Philippines and against China).

Second, Australia has a vested interest in regional stability. North Korea’s increasingly erratic bellicosity cannot be ignored. The 2015 Blueprint for Defence and Security Cooperation Between Australia and the Republic of Korea calls for increased ADF participation in both tactical training and operational exercises inside South Korea. It’s vital that the ADF embrace this. In particular, the ADF must follow the example of the US Army Pacific’s Pacific Pathways program and rehearse the entire deployment process from alert through integration and tactical employment. The requirements for placing forces in harm’s way while maintaining their fighting ability are seldom addressed adequately during routine bilateral exercises (which tend to focus on tactical interoperability), but military forces that neglect that aspect of readiness do so at their own peril.

Third, growing the defence relationship with South Korea demonstrates value to the US in a way that complements ANZUS while lowering the potential threat to Australia’s relationship with China. A sudden collapse of the North Korean regime isn’t out of the question. A new ‘K Force’ might be required—not for combat but to respond to a humanitarian assistance or area security requirement following the departure or destruction of the Kim regime. Should the DPRK actually initiate hostilities, both South Korea and Australia could leverage their mutual specialty in maritime security to guard against DPRK submarines (the ones that don’t sink themselves) and sea-borne infiltration of special operations forces. Given Australia’s current relationship with Beijing and a propensity to act independently when desired, an Australian Army presence north of the 38th Parallel in support of ROK forces might be more palatable to China than a cross-border operation by a reinforced Eighth US Army. Finally, the deployment of the ADF to a Korean contingency could satisfy US expectations vis-à-vis ANZUS. That would allow Australia to avoid an overt clash with Beijing should the US find itself embroiled in simultaneous military crises in Korea and the South China Sea.

An enhanced Australia–Republic of Korea relationship is neither a new suggestion nor limited to economics and defence. The Turnbull government should seize this opportunity now. Doing so allows the government to remain faithful to the spirit and letter of the Defence White Paper and the traditional close association with the US while navigating an independent course in regional affairs.

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.