Tag Archive for: CCP

China military watch

Welcome to the second instalment of ‘China military watch’, a new monthly feature discussing recent trends in Chinese military affairs. This week, Charlie Lyons Jones and Malcolm Davis look at the People’s Liberation Army’s perception of Australia’s defence strategic update and the growth of China’s carrier fleet in the Indo-Pacific.

PLA views on Australia’s defence strategic update

If the Chinese foreign ministry’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats were to offer any guide to official policy, one could easily believe that Beijing was extremely unhappy with the Morrison government’s recent defence strategic update. Referring to Canberra’s new defence plan on 2 July, Beijing’s most ferocious wolf warrior and now foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, quipped that Australia should ‘stop purchasing unnecessary military equipment’. Zhao added that ‘[a]ll countries should avoid an arms race’, implying that Australia’s defence upgrade is destabilising.

Beijing’s indignation, however, seems confected. Buried on page 11 of the 20 July edition of the People’s Liberation Army Daily was a curious article penned by Wan Xiaozhi and Yang Qi—academics from the National University of Defence Technology and the Special Police Academy, respectively. The authors were unsurprised by Canberra’s planned defence build-up, noting that Australia’s renewed focus on the Indo-Pacific had been foreshadowed by its increased regional military engagement. ‘In recent years, Australia has been coordinating closely with the United States and [its] military activities in the Indo-Pacific have consistently expanded in scope’, Wan and Yang wrote.

Wan and Yang departed, if ever so subtly, from the official Chinese narrative that portrays Australia as a US lap dog. They noted that Canberra and Washington offer each other mutual benefits, with Australia providing the US with ‘a strategic location and regional influence’ and the US supporting Australia’s national security and military development by providing cutting-edge weapons systems and scientific research collaboration.

‘Particularly in recent years, Australia’s strategic value has continually increased [to the point that] it has now become a country key to the United States implementing its “Indo-Pacific strategy”’, Wan and Yang observed. So, Canberra is more of a vital partner than a lap dog.

Sober analysts who are willing to tell things as they are might still exist within the PLA system. But, as President Xi Jinping continues his crackdown on freedom of speech and extends his purge of the PLA, it’s likely that military commentators such as Wan and Yang will be under increasing pressure to toe the party line.

The climate of fear Xi has created within the PLA has the potential to distort strategic judgements, which would spell trouble for an Indo-Pacific that is likely to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic with much sharper elbows.

China’s escort carriers

The danger, however, doesn’t just come from poor strategic decision-making. China is getting the first of three Type 075 amphibious assault ships to sea and is already planning a larger vessel imaginatively dubbed the Type 076. Analysis of Chinese procurement documents suggests the Type 076 will be designed to launch not only rotary-wing aircraft, but also fixed-wing combat aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles using an electromagnetic launch system being developed for the Type 002 aircraft carrier Shandong.

The jet planned for deployment may be an updated version of the Shenyang FC-31/J-31, whose further development the PLAN is now supporting. The drone is likely to be an unmanned combat aerial vehicle like the GJ-11 Sharp Sword, which was seen in a parade in Beijing last year.

Vessels aside, the pace of Chinese shipbuilding could be a game-changer for the balance of aircraft-carrier forces in Asia. China has produced three Type 075s nearly simultaneously, and if the Type 076s are built at a similar rate, they could complement the planned four big-deck carriers by playing the role of ‘escort carrier’, which would rapidly expand the PLA Navy’s aviation capability at sea.

That would not only strengthen the PLA’s ability to conduct joint island attack campaign operations against Taiwan, but also give China much greater power to undertake tasks in the South and East China Seas. And it would shape operations such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief and civilian evacuations along the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (the oceanic part of the Belt and Road Initiative).

It would mark a further step towards the PLAN becoming a blue-water navy, especially if these vessels were deployed as part of a naval task force rather than independently.

With South Korea moving to build aircraft carriers equipped with F-35Bs by 2030, and Japan converting its Izumo-class vessels into F-35B carriers, the potential for a rapid expansion in China’s naval airpower could drive further growth of carrier aviation in Asia.

‘Pop-up’ helicopter carriers trialled

In recent exercises involving the PLA’s 71st Group Army, multiple types of helicopters conducted deck-landing training and fuel and ammunition replenishment on a civilian semi-submersible vessel. The exercise shows yet another dimension of China’s naval aviation capability. Reporting on the training scenario, the PLA Daily suggests China might have dozens of vessels that can support ‘lily-pad’ operations during an amphibious mission in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea.

Bilahari Kausikan: China buys Australian minerals because it needs them, not because it likes you

China imports raw materials from Australia because the quality is good and the price is right, says Singaporean international affairs specialist Bilahari Kausikan.

The former head of the island nation’s foreign ministry told ASPI’s online ‘Strategic Vision 2020’ conference that Australians concerned about balancing their security relationship with the United States and their economic relationship with China shouldn’t wring their hands in despair.

Australians could afford to disregard a lot of Beijing’s ‘bluster’, Kausikan said.

‘They are not buying Australian minerals because they like your face or because they are trying to do you a favour. They’re buying it because they need it, your quality is good, your price is right’, he said.

Interviewed by journalist Stan Grant, Kausikan said Prime Minister Scott Morrison was ‘spot on’ when he warned that the world was poorer, more disordered and more dangerous. ‘We are all going to be in recession of various degrees, for quite some time.

‘I don’t believe that the world is going to deglobalise, as some of the more alarmist predictions have it, but we are certainly going to see major disruptions. We’ve already seen it, and some of these disruptions may become permanent.’

Kausikan said that while heightened strategic competition between China and the US was complicated, there would be ‘a ceiling and a floor’ to it. ‘It’s probably going to be a more uncertain, a more volatile and a more dangerous world for quite some time to come.’

Covid-19 had accelerated global changes that were already underway, Kausikan said. ‘We will get over this eventually. Everything eventually ends, but it will not be the same place when it ends. I don’t think, for example, we will ever be able to travel as freely as we used to. I don’t think the supply chains are going to be exactly the same as they used to be. For one thing, it has shown the vulnerability of a single point of failure in the supply chains. Overdependence on a single point, in this case China.’ He said he did not think trade with China would stop. ‘That’s easier said than done, but there were already diversions beginning before the pandemic, and that will certainly continue.’

Kausikan said China underplayed the seriousness of the emerging pandemic for crucial days in January and it was very unfortunate that those days coincided with the Chinese New Year when many people were travelling inside China and outside of China. ‘They did fumble the ball initially, but having done that they acted ruthlessly to try to contain it and succeeded in a relatively short time. So, I think there was a dent to the Chinese Communist Party’s reputation, but they did recover it because of the ability to contain the virus.’

Now China’s leaders faced a new challenge, he said. ‘Much more than any other country in this part of the world, the legitimacy of the CCP depends on economic performance. All our governments depend on economic performance, but they much more because I don’t know anybody who believes in communist ideology, class struggle and that sort of thing anymore.’

China would face a period of slow growth. It had put stimulus measures in place but it appeared that unemployment was still a concern and that the small and medium-sized industries which were the largest part of its GDP were not doing well. That was complicated by the trade war with the US. Xi Jinping had stressed the need to rely much more on the domestic economy than on exports, but that had been the case for many years. China seemed to have stalled at around 40% of GDP, while most major economies were between 50% and 60%.

The more fundamental issue for China was that the CCP, as it acknowledged itself during its 18th national congress, needed a new model which placed more emphasis on economic efficiency and market efficiency. But that implied a diminution of control.

Kausikan said that had created a real dilemma for Xi Jinping because he’d gone the other way and the party claimed absolute control over everything. That was not entirely irrational because, in a huge country like China that was making a rapid transition, matters could get out of control.

‘But it does create a dilemma between the political logic and the economic logic, which they have not resolved yet. And, of course, the pandemic enhances it.’

By contrast, democracies reacted more slowly in a crisis. In the US under Donald Trump, dealing with the pandemic took much longer than necessary because there were periods of denial and complete confusion. ‘However, there are strengths too, and I think the strength of America is simply that what happens in Washington DC is not necessarily the most important thing that happens in America, never has been. What happens in the 50 states, what happens in the universities, research laboratories, Wall Street, has always been much more important. And change comes from bottom up in the US, much more than top down. This is almost a diametric opposite of China.’ The US took longer to organise itself, but it was much more resilient.

Kausikan said that while Southeast Asia was at a strategic crossroads, it was misleading to suggest that the region faced a new cold war. ‘It’s always been in the middle of a great-power rivalry and we have survived this in the past. We can survive this too, provided we keep our heads and keep calm.’

The emerging situation was much more complicated than the Cold War when the spheres of the Soviet Union and the West were only connected tangentially. The Soviet Union was never a major global economic player, except in its own sphere in Eastern Europe and a few other places. ‘Now China and the US are both vital parts of the global economy. They are interdependent in ways that are unprecedented between great powers.’

The two superpowers were connected by very intricate and widely distributed supply chains. And while some in the Trump administration might want to decouple from China and some in China wanted to create an alternative system, whether to further their own ambitions or as a response to the Trump administration’s actions, he did not think either would succeed entirely.

The USSR largely contained itself by pursuing autarchy within its system, but China was not like that, Kausikan said. China and the US were so intertwined that he did not think they could decouple from each other. ‘That doesn’t mean both sides are not going to try, and that’s where the complication is. It will not be as simple or as straightforward as during the Cold War proper.’

The world would be more complex. ‘You will have to accommodate some Chinese aspirations when they are legitimate, and they have legitimate aspirations. You will have to modify some of the rules because the rules were not made by China, but it’s not a stark dichotomy, again, between the West and the rest. It’s not that China is winning and the West is losing. The choices are never binary and we shouldn’t make them binary.’

He said the natural instinct of Southeast Asia, having lived for centuries in the midst of great-power conflict, was to hedge and balance simultaneously. ‘In Western political science theory, you balance, or you bandwagon, or you hedge. These are alternatives. In Southeast Asia we do all quite simultaneously and are quite happy about it.’

China’s cyber espionage surge in Australia: opportunism not punishment

One of the theories floated about China’s recent cyber espionage campaign against Australia is that it’s being used to punish us for banning Huawei from our future 5G networks and for introducing laws to combat foreign interference. Some in the UK expressed similar fears after the government’s decision to remove Huawei from the country’s telecommunications networks. But this cyber-operations-as-punishment theory is probably not correct. Although there has been a sustained increase in cyber activity targeting Australia, the Chinese state is not trying to punish us, or, if it is, it’s a misguided application of state power. If punishing Australia is a key foreign policy goal for Beijing, there are far cheaper and more effective ways to do that.

Historically, China’s cyber espionage targets have been closely aligned with its strategic technology goals. In addition to spying on governments and militaries—which many, if not all, countries do—the Chinese state has used cyber espionage to steal commercial intellectual property to further its technology goals. Recent Western victims of Chinese commercial intellectual property theft have often been in the technology sectors that feature in Beijing’s ‘Made in China 2025’ strategy, including next-generation information technology, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing and environmental technologies.

One well-documented example shows that the Jiangsu bureau of the China’s Ministry of State Security carried out a multi-year combined cyber espionage and intelligence-gathering campaign to steal technology used in making components for the domestic airliner being built by the Chinese state–owned aerospace company Comac. This reportedly included successful compromises of companies such as Ametek, Honeywell, Safran, Capstone Turbine and General Electric, each of which makes jetliner parts.

Technology acquisition is not merely a secondary priority for the Chinese state. Technology directly addresses a key Chinese Communist Party concern—the possibility of domestic unrest. By providing economic growth, and hence jobs and prosperity, technology acquisition reduces unemployment and discontent and therefore the risk of political instability.

Although China’s cyber espionage operations occur on a massive scale, they are still specialist capabilities and, crucially, they have large opportunity costs. Every hacker, unit, operation or campaign devoted to punishing Australia is effort diverted from addressing other key intelligence priorities, whether they be internal security matters (such as surveilling the Uyghur community or keeping tabs on domestic dissidents and the Hong Kong protest movement), external matters (such as monitoring international progress on Covid-19 treatments and vaccines), or normal military and government intelligence matters (such as those stemming from escalating tensions with the US).

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that has cruelled the global economy, China is suffering its first economic contraction in 40 years. Given that Beijing is also responding to a combative and unpredictable US leadership while dealing with multiple challenges, including domestic perceptions of its own handling of the Covid-19 crisis, the current moment seems an unlikely time for ‘punishing Australia’ to be a key intelligence priority.

These circumstances also point to other, more plausible reasons for the increased activity that the Australian government has observed. It could be that the Chinese government, facing tremendous economic pressure during the Covid-19 pandemic, has altered its intelligence priorities and its collection agencies are scrambling to refocus their efforts. This could, for example, include a new focus on Covid-19 vaccine and treatment research. Another possibility is that the intelligence agencies are scrambling to take advantage of the heightened emotions surrounding the pandemic that provide fertile opportunities to use Covid-related themes for phishing attacks as fear and urgency override caution.

Using cyber espionage as punishment is also not a very clear or direct form of signalling. For the Australian government to understand the message, it would have to combine and correlate hundreds or thousands of potentially unrelated hacking incidents into what could be described as a ‘campaign’, track this campaign and assemble clues to determine the responsible party, and then apply professional judgement on the assembled data to ascribe a motive.

The Australian government has done the analytic work to convert incidents into a coherent campaign, but how exactly are officials meant to interpret a broad-based and widespread hacking campaign as punishment?

The process from our being hacked to the government understanding that we are being punished is simply too long and indirect—effective signalling should be clear, specific and timely, and using cyber operations as punishment is none of those.

In contrast, economic coercion—whether the leverage is import restrictions on commodities such barley, beef and coal, the threat to reduce Chinese student numbers in Australia, or even a potential Chinese consumer boycott of Australian products—sends a very clear message that the Australian polity receives loud and clear. Because these forms of economic coercion are overt, they have the additional benefit of mobilising interest groups to lobby government to ‘fix’ the China relationship. This approach has a huge advantage over covert cyber operations.

Public forms of economic coercion can, from a CCP point of view, be cheap or even costless. Threats to reduce student numbers, for example, cost nothing when international travel is extremely limited due to the pandemic. Similarly, the threat of a consumer boycott costs nothing to the Chinese government, and costs Chinese consumers only if it actually takes place.

Cyber operations have large opportunity costs and their typically covert nature means that they’re not well suited for punishment or deterrence. It is possible that Beijing is trying to punish us with cyber operations; not all actors in cyberspace are rational. But without firm evidence we shouldn’t uncritically accept this theory as it could blind us to the real motives of Chinese intelligence agencies.

China military watch

Welcome to ‘China military watch’, a new monthly feature in The Strategist from ASPI’s defence analysts examining developments in Chinese military affairs.

‘Mighty Dragon’ enters mass production

China has announced the beginning of mass production of the J-20B ‘Mighty Dragon’ fifth-generation fighter. The J-20B is an upgrade of the J-20A and adds vectored thrust-engine technology for increased manoeuvrability during air combat within visual range, which is intriguing because it implies that the PLA Air Force still sees ‘dogfighting’ as important.

Although many Western air forces are emphasising stealth technology and beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile engagements over short-range air combat, there’s still a need to be able to dogfight. The addition of vectored thrust will make the J-20B more deadly, especially if a force of J-20Bs can overwhelm an opponent with sheer numbers and force them into a close-in engagement.

A challenge for the J-20B is that it still uses WS-10C engines, since the development of China’s much more powerful indigenous WS-15 engine is still behind schedule. The addition of the WS-15 would mark the final maturation of the J-20 platform. The WS-15 will enable China to end its dependence on Russian aircraft engine technology and potentially to develop new types of combat aircraft.

Taiwan, missile defence and amphibious warfare

Wu Qian (吴谦), a spokesperson from China’s Ministry of National Defence, issued a statement opposing a US$620 million upgrade to Taiwan’s Patriot advanced capability (PAC-3) missile air defence system. The statement, republished in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, said, ‘China strongly demands that America immediately stop supplying weapons to Taiwan.’ Wu’s remarks then took a predictable ethno-nationalist turn, claiming that ‘any plot to split China will always receive firm opposition from all sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, including overseas Chinese’. That’s a bold threat for a few PAC-3 missiles.

Despite the bluster, recent coverage in state media suggests that the PLA has taken a sober view of potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait. On 1 May, CCTV’s channel devoted to affairs in the PLA broadcast an episode on amphibious warfare for its television series National Defence Science and Industry (国防科工). The episode took a close look at the amphibious operations conducted by the US Marine Corps in the Battle of Iwo Jima (February–March 1945) during the Pacific War.

The presenter claimed that US amphibious forces believed ‘there wouldn’t be much resistance along the volcanic ash deposits of Iwo Jima’s sandy beach’, yet Japan fought admirably, ‘deliver[ing] a full-frontal assault with around 7,000 American soldiers perishing and 20,000 soldiers suffering injuries’. The episode’s message was clear: amphibious assaults are a tricky business and the PLA ought to expect significant casualties if it ever decides to try annexing Taiwan that way.

The link between logistics and literacy

The PLA is working hard to become an ‘informationised’ force that uses autonomous systems to improve decision-making and battlefield effectiveness. Nowhere is the task of ‘informationisation’ (信息化) more important than in the PLA’s ‘support’ (保障) activities on land, on water and in the air. On 2 July, the People’s Liberation Army Daily took a close look at the sort of equipment and technology the PLA will need to support high-intensity combat operations in an information-dense environment.

The article called for ‘research and development into intelligentised, autonomous supply platform technology, [while] strengthen[ing] the development of intelligent, efficient and easy-to-protect unmanned land supply bases, unmanned supply ships, unmanned underwater vessels and unmanned aerial tankers’. The vision put forward was of a PLA that can deploy autonomous systems as crucial logistical enablers.

However, the PLA’s vision might prove hard to realise with current staffing. Subsequent articles in state media made clear that the PLA is facing systemic challenges relating to the quality of its personnel.

One article published on 15 July raised a pressing illiteracy crisis across the PLA. The problem, known in Chinese as ‘lifting a pen and forgetting the character’ (提笔忘字), arises because people have forgotten how to write certain words with a pen and paper after years of writing only on a smartphone or computer.

A soldier from the 78th Group Army stressed in the article that ‘Chinese characters are not only a tool for expressing the written word, but they are also an important medium for indicating the state of military affairs and transmitting military information.’ The author warned that this form of illiteracy might affect the PLA’s combat power, but nevertheless thought the problem could be overcome, claiming that ‘the phenomenon of forgetting how to write during training also happens from time to time’, especially ‘in the wake of our military’s rapid development of informationisation’.

Just how confident the PLA is in its ability to deal with these challenges while transforming into a high-tech force remains to be seen.

Political commissars and decision-making in the PLA Navy

Cold War dramatisations of nuclear tensions between the Soviet Union and the US often had someone in the role of the zampolit, or ‘political commissar’. These officers were generally portrayed as rigid ideologues who monitored their colleagues for possible treachery. The PLA also has political commissars, and a fascinating report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies examines their role at sea and explains the unique ‘dual-command authority’ in which the commissar and military commander make administrative and operational decisions together.

The report suggests that political commissars have more influence over Chinese naval operations than military commanders. The commissar acts as secretary of the ‘party standing committee’ aboard the ship, and the military commander serves as deputy secretary. The report notes that the collective approach to decision-making by a ship’s party standing committee—spread across five or six officers including a political commissar and two deputy political commissars—may result in delayed response times in critical situations. Other possible issues with the dual-command system include a lack of flexibility to adapt to senior leaders’ contrasting viewpoints, increased miscommunication, and poor crew initiative.

TikTok is a political football of Beijing’s making

Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is facing an existential crisis. By its own estimation, its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, is set to lose US$6 billion after being kicked out of India. A decision on a ban in the United States, telegraphed for days by multiple US officials, is set to come ‘in weeks, not months’, according to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

With its back to the wall, the company is throwing everything it can at staving off further bans around the world—including in Australia, where last week even just one call for the app to be banned, first anonymously in the News Corp tabloids and then publicly by National Party MP George Christensen, caused a media frenzy. When asked about the app today, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the federal government was taking a ‘good look at it’ and that if the app presents a security risk ‘we won’t be shy’ about taking action.

In response, the company has launched a large-scale media campaign to try to convince the public that they have nothing to fear from its links to the People’s Republic of China. In the US, the company has hired an army of over 35 lobbyists—including, the New York Times notes, ‘one with deep ties to President Trump’—who have already conducted more than 50 meetings with congressional staff and lawmakers.

Here in Australia, TikTok has enlisted the help of Thrive PR—a communications agency that touts its expertise in helping Chinese brands enter the Australian market—to produce slick made-for-TV interviews of the company’s executives reeling off expertly drilled talking points. A PR offensive is set to run for several weeks with ads in print, digital outdoor and video platforms across the country.

The campaign’s slogan—‘Don’t make TikTok a political football’—is a shot across the bow at any skittish MPs who are weighing up whether a TikTok ban will pass the pub test. ‘Millions of people have made TikTok one of Australia’s most loved apps’ the print ad emphasises. (Translation: Woe betide any politician who pushes for a TikTok ban. It’s a vote loser.)

That blunt warning was splashed across various Australian newspapers this week in full-page ads and, if that wasn’t obvious enough, was accompanied by a letter drop to every single federal MP from TikTok Australia General Manager Lee Hunter that sought to ‘correct the record regarding a number of false claims that have been made about TikTok over recent weeks’.

‘Contrary to some claims, it is critical you understand that we are independent, and not aligned with any government, political party or ideology’, Hunter informed MPs in his letter. ‘TikTok is a privately owned company interested in helping our users make and share creative and fun videos.’

That may be what Australia’s TikTok executives genuinely believe, but it’s certainly not what their boss ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming thinks. In 2018, the company faced a different existential crisis. With the flick of a pen, the party-state suspended Jinri Toutiao, the company’s news aggregator, and shut down Neihuan Duanzi, a popular app for sharing short videos, GIFs and jokes, making it abundantly clear to the company who ultimately calls the shots with its business.

In response, Zhang published an open letter in which he apologised for failing to respect the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘socialist core values’ and for ‘deviating from public opinion guidance’—one of the CCP’s terms for censorship and propaganda.

‘All along, we have placed excessive emphasis on the role of technology’, Zhang wrote, ‘and we have not acknowledged that technology must be led by the socialist core value system, broadcasting positive energy, suiting the demands of the era, and respecting common convention.’

The apology could not have been more abject and its message more clear: we know that we can’t simply be a commercial operation; we know we have to work in concert with the goals of the party. Or, in Australian sporting parlance: when the CCP lobs a political football at you, you have no choice but to run with it.

Whether TikTok Australia’s executives know it or not, that sword of Damocles remains dangled over the heads of their bosses in Beijing, giving the CCP more leverage than it could possibly ever need over the highest valued tech start-up on the planet. It’s what drove the company at the time to boost its army of censors by an extra 4,000 people (candidates with party loyalty were preferred) and it’s what continues to motivate ByteDance  to conduct ‘party-building’ exercises inside the company.

Far from being ‘independent, and not aligned with any government, political party or ideology’, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance literally has an internal communist party committee as part of its governance structure. ByteDance employees regularly get together to study Xi’s speeches and pledge loyalty to the party.

You don’t have to read Chinese to realise any of this. Just take a look at this single photograph. Yes, that’s the company logo in the bottom right-hand corner of the PowerPoint presentation, and yes, that’s a flag with the hammer and sickle on it hung up in the corner of the room. We’re not in Silicon Valley anymore, folks.

It is this very particular context that TikTok comes from and that it remains inextricably entangled with. It’s also where TikTok user data is being sent. By TikTok’s own admission, the company is still sending data back to Beijing. In an April blog post, Chief Information Security Officer Roland Cloutier conceded that it is the company’s ‘goal’ to ‘minimize’ access to TikTok user data by employees in the PRC. That’s hardly watertight.

It’s at this point that critics of companies like ByteDance point to the suite of national security laws that give the party-state extraordinary powers to compel anyone to hand over any data it desires. It’s an important point, but ultimately a moot one. In the PRC, the law is whatever the CCP decides it is.

They’re not exactly subtle about it either. The CCP leads everything in Chinese society, says Xi: ‘Government, the military, society and schools, north, south, east and west—the party leads them all.’ Chinese citizens, he says, are like ‘stars revolving around the revered moon’ of the CCP.

As Beijing’s power grows, the rest of the world is starting to look more like obstinate stars that are stubbornly refusing to orbit the revered moon of the CCP. One only has to look at how Beijing reacted when Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, dared to post his own opinion on an app that’s blocked in the PRC to understand how seriously the CCP takes shaping the narrative outside its borders on issues it considers matters of national security.

TikTok Australia’s ‘big goal’, according to its general manager, ‘is to truly embed TikTok at the heart of Australian culture’. Once it’s fully embedded, does he really believe the CCP won’t be tempted to use that conduit to its own advantage?

Deficit blows out in China’s trust account with the world

The biggest driver of Australia’s 2020 defence strategic update is the waning of Canberra’s trust in the decision-makers in Beijing. A secondary driver is the recognition that how the US uses its power will not always align with our interests. Both mean Australia must do more for its own security and prosperity in the poorer, more dangerous and more disorderly world Prime Minister Scott Morrison has described.

Trust gives governments, companies and populations the ability to form partnerships, enter contracts and rely on others in times of crisis—public health crises like the pandemic or security crises like conflicts and war. Trust between governments enables trust in contractual agreements between companies. Active distrust—or worse, government intervention over the top of contractual arrangements—is corrosive to business confidence and investment.

As the world faces the health and economic tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic, trust is in decreasing supply and increasing demand. As discussed in my podcast interview with The Strategist editor Brendan Nicholson, trust is appreciating in value globally.

It’s striking that Beijing has chosen now to run down its stocks of trust, first by aggressively denying any issues with its handling of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, then with the belligerent ‘wolf warrior’ behaviour of its representatives, and its military aggression in the South China Sea and on the India–China border. Economic coercion, like that against Australia over the barley trade, is corroding confidence in economic engagement with China.

Australians’ trust in China hit a high point in 2018, with 52% of respondents to the Lowy Institute’s poll saying they trusted Beijing to ‘act responsibly in the world’. But by April 2020, Beijing’s actions had changed that with the militarisation of the South China Sea, cyber hacking of Australia’s parliament and major political parties, and interference in Australian domestic politics through funding scandals or stoking pro-China demonstrators on university campuses, all combined with the growing Chinese presence in our near region.

Australians’ trust in Beijing to act responsibly has collapsed in the Lowy poll, from 52% to 23% in two years. If the poll were taken now, just three months on, that figure would be lower again, because Beijing has both threatened and put into effect economic coercion against Australia. The Chinese ambassador to Canberra threatened punitive trade measures affecting students, tourists and exports. Beijing has since threatened to widen its economic coercion to other goods, resources and services.

Australians are not alone in trusting Beijing less. European leaders and officials are talking seriously about revitalised ‘economic and industrial sovereignty’, to remove vulnerabilities Europe faces from its reliance on production chains from China. They are also pushing back against aggressive ‘mask diplomacy’, supporting Australia’s call for an inquiry into the causes of the pandemic, and revisiting thinking on suppliers for their 5G networks.

According to the Singaporean think tank ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s State of the region 2020 survey released in January (before the pandemic), ASEAN nations’ officials, academics and businesspeople assessed China as the major power least trusted to ‘do the right thing’. Almost no one (1.5% of respondents) saw Beijing as a benign and benevolent power. And some 39% viewed China as a revisionist power that wanted to make Southeast Asia its sphere of influence. Trust has declined since the 2019 survey.

Similarly, Indian consumers are aligned with their government in reducing consumption of Chinese goods and services. New Delhi has banned numerous Chinese companies’ apps and digital products owing to its lack of trust in Beijing given the Chinese military’s aggressive behaviour on the India–China border.

This matters because trust is the new international currency that will enable countries and companies to rebuild prosperity and security in the post-pandemic world. Trust is what allows governments and companies to live with vulnerabilities and exposure to others.

Governments and companies that show they can be trusted to deliver during the crucible of the pandemic will make great partners in our future world where vulnerabilities aren’t magically managed by a dispersed global market driven by cost. Far less reliance will be placed on governments and companies whose word cannot be trusted in a crisis.

It’s doubtful that Xi Jinping and those around him understand the enormous negative impact of this realisation for China’s strategic, political and economic future—because now is the time he’s chosen for China to run a huge trust deficit with the world by introducing the new national security law in Hong Kong.

If any waverers in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Americas or Africa still thought Beijing would act responsibly on the global stage, the tragedy that Xi is inflicting on the 7.5 million people of Hong Kong should end their doubts. Despite loud claims that anyone criticising Beijing for this is interfering in China’s domestic affairs, even Xi must know that’s not true.

The repressive law makes it a crime to speak freely, to protest, to mention democracy, to criticise Beijing’s decisions, or even to talk with foreigners about political issues between Hong Kong and Beijing. It also sidelines Hong Kong’s independent judiciary by creating a power to try cases under the new law separately, without appeal processes in Hong Kong courts. This removes a fundamental protection Hongkongers had against abuse of power.

All these freedoms, and the independent judiciary that makes them meaningful, were simply and clearly guaranteed by China for 50 years in the text of the 1984 joint declaration.

Beijing has broken those commitments. What it has done in Hong Kong is a fundamental breach of the joint declaration, not a minor compliance issue. The question at stake is not about how China manages its internal affairs and what we may all think about that. It’s about whether Xi and his colleagues can be trusted on any other commitment they make to any nation. That engages the fundamental interests of every country and gives us a collective interest in pressing Beijing to keep its word.

So, pushing Beijing on Hong Kong is the opposite of interference in internal affairs. Only by reversing course on Hong Kong, living up to its 1984 commitments and returning the freedoms and judicial independence it has taken from the people of Hong Kong can Beijing begin to repair the major trust deficit its actions have created.

It may sound idealistic or fanciful to call for Xi to return to those commitments, but achieving this should be the international community’s goal. Steps towards that goal are already being designed by various governments, as in the UK giving a path to citizenship for the almost three million Hongkongers entitled to a British national (overseas) passport, and Australia and others providing migration paths for those seeking to escape the controlling hand Beijing has placed over the territory.

Ironically, if Beijing does reverse course, China’s economy will be the major beneficiary, because Hong Kong is still the gateway for foreign money and investment into the mainland—and China’s economy now needs all the help it can get. We all have a stake in the choices Beijing makes from here, and we all have a stake in shaping those choices to our collective benefit.

A future where Xi and his colleagues make deposits into the trust account China has with the rest of the world, rather than further withdrawals, is a future all of us should work towards.

China and Australia face off in irate and icy pandemic diplomacy

A new layer of snow has settled atop the iciness of Australia’s relations with China.

Beijing and Canberra bite and bicker over Covid-19. The words are hot but they speak of frigid relations.

The diplomatic dance is performed as a melee.

Australia launched the latest spat by calling for an independent international inquiry on the origins and development of the pandemic.

On 19 April, Marise Payne said Australia will ‘absolutely insist’ on the review and China must show ‘transparency’. The foreign minister said the international inquiry would be similar to past reviews into ‘egregious human rights issues’.

When I saw that interview—especially the ‘egregious’ comparison—my reaction was, ‘Wow, go to battle stations.’ Payne is a deliberate player with a safe pair of hands, more a low-key than high-note performer. From her, that was a head-kicking message: the government had decided to go in hard.

The kick-back arrived quickly.

China’s ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, told the Australian Financial Review that Australia was ‘politically motivated’ and was joining the US in ‘resorting to suspicion, recrimination or division’.

Journalist Andrew Tillett dangled this question: ‘But if Australia continues to do it, would China stop buying our iron ore and coal and gas and look elsewhere for it?’

Cheng said Australia’s idea wouldn’t ‘make any substantial progress’ but the Chinese public was ‘frustrated, dismayed and disappointed with what you are doing’. Chinese parents mightn’t want their children to study in a ‘hostile’ country, he said, and people could stop drinking Australian wine or eating Australian beef.

The AFR’s headline was made: ‘China consumer backlash looms over Morrison’s coronavirus probe’.

China’s threat of a trade squeeze turned the melee into a rumble. The secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Frances Adamson, phoned the ambassador. The embassy then ‘verballed’ Adamson with this version of the conversation:

Secretary Adamson tried her best to defend Australia’s proposal about the independent review, saying the proposal neither has political motive nor targets China. She also admitted it is not the time to commence the review now and Australia has no details of the proposal. She further said that Australia does not want the matter to have any impact on Australia–China relationship.

Canberra cried diplomatic foul and trade blackmail. Beijing bloviated about Australia as ‘gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe’.

See it all as another cold front in a freeze that’s into its fourth year. In this week in 2018, I was columnising about the new Oz–China icy age blowing through Australia’s security, economic, trade, social, diplomatic and political worlds.

On my count, we’re in the fifth such icy age between Australia and the People’s Republic of China, although well short of the depth of the first age between 1949 and 1972 when Australia refused to give diplomatic recognition to the PRC.

The chill winds of this fifth age gathered in 2017 when Australia’s language became shriller, offering a ‘dark view’ of a ‘coercive China’ seeking regional domination. Pointing to Chinese interference in domestic affairs, Australia announced legislation to ban foreign political donations and broaden the definition of espionage.

It’s been more snow than sunshine ever since.

The public stoush merely reveals how things have been behind the diplomatic screen. The Chinese leadership doesn’t bother talking to Australia.

President Xi Jinping hit the phones to talk to the leaders of 29 nations and international organisations about the pandemic last month. Prime Minister Scott Morrison didn’t get a call. As Karen Middleton comments: ‘That a fellow member of the G20 did not make the Chinese leader’s top 20 or even top 30 priority list for consultations says everything about the state of bilateral relations.’

Australia has become accustomed to higher pain levels. The diplomatic cost–benefit equation has shifted. An angry China—what’s new? And so Canberra takes aim at Beijing as it calls for the equivalent of international weapons inspectors to investigate disease outbreaks.

Plucky Oz speaking blunt truth. Or silly Oz, the nail that sticks up its head to be hammered. Or Oz standing way too close to US President Donald Trump. Take your pick.

John McCarthy, who served as Australia’s ambassador to seven countries, calls it a hoary domestic political bellow, but a policy mistake: ‘Like it or not, if the world, and particularly the Asia–Pacific region, is to recover from the economic abyss which it faces, China has to be involved—and it will make sure it is.’

Former foreign minister Julie Bishop gave her old colleagues some classic diplomatic advice, saying that the rhetoric should be dialled down and that more ‘calm and quiet diplomacy’ was needed.

Beyond the latest bout of frostiness, the real test for Australia will be getting international agreement for a pandemic inquiry.

Morrison has laid out what he calls an obvious case:

This is a virus that has taken more than 200,000 lives across the world. It has shut down the global economy. The implications and impacts of this are extraordinary. Now, it would seem entirely reasonable and sensible that the world would want to have an independent assessment of how this all occurred, so we can learn the lessons and prevent it from happening again.

In diplomacy, the reasonable and the sensible don’t always win. Australia has proclaimed the target. Now it must do the complex diplomatic work to get international agreement on the task and how it should be done.

Morrison last year warned against ‘negative globalism’ and ‘an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy’ with the injunction that globalism ‘must facilitate, align and engage, rather than direct and centralise’. DFAT has nearly completed the ‘comprehensive audit of global institutions and rule-making processes’ ordered last October by the prime minister.

Australia is about to test how well it can navigate those global institutions and do diplomacy to facilitate, align and engage. Expect China to fight every step of the way.

And if Australia stands up for Taiwan to have its rightful place in the World Health Organization …

Finding ourselves in the post-coronavirus world

The huge damage caused by Beijing’s initial mishandling of its public-health response to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s gross and mainly unsuccessful attempts to control the global narrative, have highlighted aspects of the Chinese state that many with no interest in world affairs can understand—and be annoyed by.

In the space of a few short weeks, popular perceptions of the Chinese state in Australia have shifted in ways that, if replicated elsewhere, are going to be truly damaging to China’s international standing in the years to come.

From big-business types with vested interests in China’s economic growth to average voters tired of short-termism in their domestic politics, those who quietly admired the CCP’s ability to look over the horizon, keep things secret and just get stuff done are now fewer in number. Those still of this view are probably now questioning how long they can hold out.

Lots of things look different in this new light.

That Prime Minister Scott Morrison hasn’t spoken to President Xi Jinping this year (presumably because Xi doesn’t want to speak to him) could in the pre-coronavirus world be played down or perhaps even dismissed as China being China, trying to punish us for something it thinks we could probably try harder to fix. But in the current circumstances, with so many lives in the balance, this lack of high-level contact seems irresponsible and just plain rude. And it’s not what you would expect from a comprehensive strategic partner.

Is it possible, should we wonder, that China’s failure to inform the world in a timely fashion of the threat posed by the coronavirus is somehow our collective fault?

Thankfully, we don’t do such confidence-sapping navel-gazing anymore.

The habit of linking Australia’s value and virtue as an international actor to our ability to maintain ‘good relationships’, especially with China, is not as deeply ingrained in Australia’s foreign policy decision-making as it once was, and it will be even less so in the post-coronavirus world.

While this maturation of Australia’s foreign policy has been happening for a while now, the popular scepticism generated by the Chinese state’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic will have a freeing effect on decision-makers, with implications for how they engage with Australia’s external environment.

How Australia’s politicians use or misuse this freedom will have an impact that extends beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

Without as much popular fear of offending the Chinese state and its leaders, there’s a risk that Australian politicians of all shapes and sizes will feel compelled to be faux-robust in their comments about China’s international behaviour, even when they have nothing much to say or offer.

Bluster for bluster’s sake should be discouraged.

The post-coronavirus environment will provide more opportunities for those who know what they’re talking about to more clearly articulate an Australian vision of the future of the region and the world.

Concern about the CCP’s growing reliance on force and coercion to achieve its goals must form part of this picture, not the whole picture.

The first opportunity to get that message right is coming in the form of our response to the Chinese government’s reaction to international calls for a global inquiry into the origins of the initial coronavirus outbreak.

Australia should not cast blame for blame’s sake, but seek to demonstrate our willingness to defend our sovereignty and national interests in ways that are easy to understand.

The Morrison government should not be deterred if China’s leaders seek to block the inquiry, as they appear to be doing. Firmly and repeatedly making the case for an investigation, but in a way that doesn’t open the door for all and sundry to misuse the heightened levels of popular mistrust in the Chinese state and its leaders, will demonstrate our own ability to stay on task and look over the horizon.

Hong Kong’s autonomy, dying in full view

It may have gone unnoticed as the world continued to deal with the coronavirus pandemic that the Chinese Communist Party has taken the opportunity to effectively kill off Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ experiment.

The system agreed to when the territory was returned to China did not die of natural causes or attrition. The CCP, with the acquiescence of vassals in Hong Kong’s government, killed it and announced its demise in a press release shrouded in legalese.

Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the mini-constitution that has regulated China’s relations with the city for 23 years, says that ‘no department of the Central People’s Government … may interfere in the affairs’ of Hong Kong. The clear principle of non-interference was never in dispute, until now.

In a stunning turn on 17 April, Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong issued a broad new interpretation, saying that it and the companion Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office in Beijing ‘most definitely’ had the right to get involved in local issues, including commenting on political disputes. The liaison office said it was ‘authorised by the central authorities to handle Hong Kong affairs’. In other words, the principle of non-interference no longer applies.

Even more shocking for many residents, their China-appointed leaders agreed. Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, the unpopular chief executive whose approval rating stands at negative 54 points, said the mainland government had given Hong Kong a level of autonomy, but she added, ‘That doesn’t mean it lost the power to supervise the city.’

This change came after the liaison office warned that elected opposition lawmaker Dennis Kwok of the Civic Party was abusing his office by filibustering the appointment of a key committee chair to vet government-proposed bills. The filibuster has for centuries given minority politicians some sway over decision-making. Beijing sees it as a weapon for political subversion.

In further evidence that autonomy is now effectively dead, top Hong Kong judges complained about mainland interference in judicial affairs after the Chinese state-run media warned them not to ‘absolve’ protesters.

And pro-Beijing voices have begun referring to the protests as ‘terrorism’. The new, hardline head of the liaison office, Luo Huining, said on 15 April that Hong Kong needed to quickly pass a long-stalled law against subversion that would give police sweeping new powers.

Early on 18 April, 15 prominent opposition figures and pro-democracy leaders were arrested, purportedly for their roles in ‘unauthorised protests’ in August and October. They included media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, whose newspaper, Apple Daily, is the most openly pro-democracy, and 81-year-old lawyer Martin Lee, a former head of the Democratic Party known as the ‘father of democracy’. The timing, as the liaison office stepped up attacks, appeared suspicious.

The massive protests from June 2019 until January this year erupted over demands that the government withdraw a bill to allow suspects wanted in China to be arrested in Hong Kong and taken to the mainland. But after an often violent crackdown, with police firing tens of thousands of rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets and beating demonstrators, the protests quickly morphed into demands for police accountability, amnesty for those arrested and a revival of Hong Kong’s stalled political reform process.

The protests halted as fears of the coronavirus spread and people stayed indoors, schools and public facilities were closed and gatherings were restricted to no more than four people. The police seem to be using the hiatus to gain the upper hand before the protests resume.

Beijing’s immediate concern is September’s legislative council election. In district council elections, pro-China and pro-establishment candidates suffered a shocking defeat. Pro-democracy and localist candidates won control of 17 of 18 councils and tripled their number of seats, devastating the pro-Beijing camp.

Beijing and the local government appear to be using the coronavirus ‘lull’ to clear the decks, hoping to prevent another landslide defeat. They may seek to pass the anti-subversion law before losing control of the legislature.

In the process, they have shown that they’re willing to forgo what’s left of the idea of Hong Kong as an autonomous city.

The ‘one country, two systems’ approach was always unlikely to succeed. In 1997, China, run by a brutal and authoritarian one-party dictatorship, claimed sovereignty over a modern and successful city with a free press, an independent judiciary and a quasi-democratic political system that respected human rights and personal freedoms. There was no modern precedent.

China was supposed to be responsible for foreign policy, defence and other matters of state, while Hong Kong would be largely left alone to run its economy and its internal affairs, including its politics and its legal system. That arrangement was supposed to remain in place for 50 years, until 2047.

Everyone observing the transition knew Beijing’s leaders wouldn’t be able to refrain from meddling for that long. Hong Kong, after all, was anathema to China’s communists, who prize obedience and control while crushing dissent.

The experiment has ended quickly.

Beijing tried to limit Hong Kong’s autonomy over the first two decades, but mostly relented in the face of local opposition. In 2003, when China tried to force Hong Kong to adopt a draconian anti-subversion law, Article 23, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets to protest and Beijing gave in. When China tried to force Hong Kong to implement a ‘patriotic education’ law, requiring local pupils to declare a love of ‘the motherland’ and extol the CCP’s virtues, people again took to the streets to protest and the plan was scrapped.

The biggest outbreak of dissent, before last year’s protests, was the 2014 ‘Occupy’ movement that paralysed part of the business district for 79 days. Then, Beijing accelerated attempts to bring Hong Kong to heel.

The 2015 booksellers case, in which five members of a local publishing house were kidnapped by Chinese agents, showed that mainland security officials were willing to breach local autonomy to snatch someone they considered a threat.

Then came the unprecedented de facto expulsion of Financial Times journalist Victor Mallet, who was denied a visa to work in Hong Kong, out of retribution for a luncheon talk at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club by a local pro-independence activist, which infuriated Beijing.

Since then, Hong Kong immigration authorities appear to have weaponised the right to deny entry in order to enforce mainland political priorities, a common practice in China but one unheard of in Hong Kong. This shift was underlined in March when Beijing expelled American journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, and then stipulated that they wouldn’t be allowed to work in Hong Kong.

For decades, journalists forced to leave China have found Hong Kong a safe haven.

The Hong Kong government refused to comment on immigration matters, saying only that cases were decided ‘in accordance with the law’.

Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997 passed largely anticlimactically, overshadowed by a local health epidemic, H5N1 or ‘bird flu’, and a financial meltdown that bankrupted corporations, collapsed the value of currencies and wiped out a generation of wealth across Asia.

Now the city’s autonomy is similarly overshadowed by a zoonotic pandemic and a looming global economic crisis. The death of Hong Kong is happening in plain sight, if anyone is paying attention.

The Chinese state and Australia’s economy: ‘snapping back’ must not mean business as usual

The one thing Australia can’t do as we get the pandemic under control is ‘snap back’ to the old ways of doing business with the one-party state that is the People’s Republic of China.

The fundamental design and operation of China’s authoritarian government, and the way it’s running the massive chunk of the world’s economy and environment it controls, mean it will deliver us more large shocks.

The Chinese Communist Party is motivated by self-protection and self-preservation at all costs—whether those costs are borne by China’s 1.4 billion people or by the citizens of other nations.

That’s why officials covered up the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, threatened doctors and downplayed the risk of human-to-human transmission as they locked down Wuhan. And it’s why the Chinese government criticised others for banning travel while instituting severe travel restrictions at home.

The CCP prioritised its survival over the health of its own people and of the rest of us—and it will always take that approach.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre demonstrated this design principle at work. The CCP turned its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army, on its own people because, by calling for participation in political decision-making, they threatened the party’s rule. Last year, China’s defence minister said the massacre was correct policy, implying he’d do it again. The clampdowns in Hong Kong—continuing amid the pandemic—and the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang are other examples.

The spread of HIV/AIDS through botched blood-collection programs and the contaminated food and tainted baby formula scandals are all examples of mismanagement brought on by the corruption and distortions of CCP rule.

The 2003 SARS epidemic and now Covid-19 are part of this long heritage of adverse consequence as the party’s obsessive self-protection instinct wins out over the people’s wellbeing.

In the globalisation model that Australia and others have adopted, almost all manufactured products, including those needed in a public health emergency, are produced by a vulnerable chain of global relationships. The supply chains wend their way into and through China, bringing inordinate risks.

Before the Covid-19 crisis, we treated the Chinese state as an externality, which meant we didn’t need to factor it in to our decision-making while we all made a lot of money.

That allowed us to ignore the effects of Chinese state actions on our own level of risk and wellbeing. The clearest case at the government level was Premier Daniel Andrews’s decision to sideline national security issues as he’s sought to tie Victoria deeper and deeper with the Chinese economy and provided window dressing for Beijing’s signature strategic influence program, the Belt and Road Initiative.

In economics, externalities are great when someone else is managing them, but when no one is taking care of them they can be extraordinarily damaging. Covid-19 is in the latter category. Every government and company that outsourced pandemic prevention and preparedness to the World Health Organization and relied on reassuring but misleading statements from Chinese state authorities has now experienced what happens when an externality comes home to roost.

With Covid-19, the Chinese state has created unacceptable risks for the rest of us and it will continue to do so unless it changes or until we reduce our dependence on activities within its jurisdiction.

That’s the underlying driver of the strong bipartisan signal Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne and her opposition counterpart Penny Wong sent recently about needing to know what happened in China at the start of the pandemic.

All of this may sound obvious, but economists and policymakers are strange creatures. As the pandemic recedes, we’ll find on display the stickiness of policy thinking in the government, corporate and university arenas that makes them reluctant to change approaches even when the environment changes.

So, as the world slowly gets back to business, expect myriad calls to restart our economic relationship with China as it was before, or to double down on it as the ‘bridge back’ to prosperity.

In some sectors, notably resources, where we’re the seller and Chinese firms are the buyers, we can probably resume much as we were without adverse consequences for us or for the Chinese, depending, of course, on the strength of Chinese demand. But that will not be a general recipe for success in our changed world.

The calls for a return to the past will come from treasury types in Western governments as well as those with deep self-interest—a lot of wealthy people and leaders sprinkled across our corporate and university landscapes. But we can’t pretend that the Chinese state can be returned to its pre-Covid-19 place in our minds.

The ‘China inevitabilists’ will also return to the stage, saying that somehow the glaring failings and weaknesses that created the conditions for the global pandemic and economic depression are actually demonstrations of China’s unstoppable rise. They’ll probably even believe this.

Alcoholics Anonymous pegged this type of thinking correctly when it adopted the adage that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. While we should expect to hear the voices of rusted-on self-interest advocating that we maintain or even increase our dependence on China, we must discount them as we make decisions.

Instead, ‘snapping back’ means using what we’ve done to cope with the pandemic to create new forms of prosperity and security for Australians. Our institutions, government agencies and civil society are not some failing, fading Western model on the brink of being replaced by resurgent authoritarian alternatives.

We’ve shown that Australian institutions, companies and society are able to rise to a challenge that many others have failed to meet. We can make what we need here when pressed to do so. We can become a leading digital economy if we keep the practices we’ve developed during this time of socially distant work. We can take and implement better decisions than many other places.

Let’s snap back to being a nation that controls its own economic destiny. Let’s build partnerships with those we can rely on in crises and increase our ability to do what we need to do and to make what we need to make in times of challenge, civil or military.

Australia has unique strengths we haven’t yet tapped, including the wealth in our superannuation savings. This can work with government stimulus to create the new economy we can see growing out of this crisis.

This positive focus on future wellbeing, security and prosperity is exciting. It’s time to do something different, to stop putting more and more of our economic and security destiny in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.