Leading strategic scholars have backed what they say is a hard-headed and realistic new foreign policy blueprint, with one expert saying the strong security focus is "a sign of the times".

As the Turnbull government released its foreign policy white paper, its pledges to do more to support United States leadership in Asia were underscored by the announcement that American long-range B-1B bombers were arriving in Australia for a two-week rotation.

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http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/hardheaded-foreign...

China says Malcolm Turnbull’s allegations of foreign interference have poisoned the atmosphere of relations with Australia and undermined mutual trust.

Beijing has now lodged a “serious complaint” with Australia over the allegations of Chinese interference.

During a regular briefing on Friday, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang expressed shock at Turnbull’s remarks during the parliamentary debate on Australia’s new foreign interference laws this week.

“We are astounded by the relevant remarks of the Australian leader,” Geng said, according to Associated Press. “Such remarks simply cater to the irresponsible reports by some Australian media that are without principle and full of bias against China.

“It poisons the atmosphere of the China-Australia relationship and undermines the foundation of mutual trust and bilateral cooperation. We express strong dissatisfaction with that and have made a serious complaint with the Australian side.”

Turnbull introduced the foreign interference laws to parliament on Thursday. The laws, among other things, ban foreign donations and require former politicians, executives, and lobbyists who work for foreign interests, to register if they intend to attempt to influence Australian politics.

Under the proposed legislation, it would become a crime for a person to act on behalf of a foreign principal to influence a political or governmental process in a manner that is either covert or involves deception.

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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/09/china-says-turnbu...

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The heading means : Talking caricatures ... talking cartoons.

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BEIJING — China has slapped extra tariffs of up to 25 percent on 128 US products including frozen pork, as well as on wine and certain fruits and nuts, in response to U.S. duties on imports of aluminum and steel, China’s finance ministry said.

The list of tariffs, to take effect on Monday, was released late on Sunday and matches a list of potential tariffs on up to $3 billion in US goods published by China on March 23.

China has imposed the tariffs amid escalating trade tension between Beijing and Washington.

President Donald Trump is preparing to impose tariffs of more than $50 billion on Chinese goods intended to punish Beijing over US allegations that China systematically misappropriated American intellectual property.

China has repeatedly promised to open its economy further, but many foreign companies continue to complain of unfair treatment. China warned the United States on Thursday not to open a Pandora’s Box and spark a flurry of protectionist practices across the globe.

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https://nypost.com/2018/04/01/china-imposes-new-tariffs-on-128-us-products/

The Australia/China relationship is at its lowest point since the bloody crackdown in Tian’anmen Square on 4 June 1989 which provoked western sanctions against China.  Arguably,  it is even worse now.  Back then the Chinese Government was bending over backwards to entice ministerial-level visits from Australia.  Today the Chinese Government is telling our Ministers not to bother applying.

The Australia/China relationship has always been difficult to manage, but never more so than today.  For the past decade, Beijing has adopted an increasingly muscular foreign policy stance commensurate with its rise to economic pre-eminence and with its vision of itself as a leading global nation and actor.

With China’s rise, the global order has changed and Canberra is having great difficulty coming to grips with this.  The steep deterioration in the bilateral relationship needs to be understood against the background of a rapidly changing geopolitical order and an ideologically pre-conditioned policy-making establishment in Canberra which is quixotically hoping for the return of the old, US-led order.  This is now damaging Australia’s interests.

The Australia/China relationship is by far the most important foreign policy priority for any Australian Government.  On one hand, China is absolutely essential to the future well-being of all Australians.  China today permeates Australian society – some form of Chinese is the second most widely spoken language in Australian homes; fee-paying Chinese students largely support Australia’s higher education sector financially, while Chinese tourists have long been the biggest spenders. They are now also the most numerous.  All of these trends will continue to deepen.

Yet China presents Australian Governments with complex foreign policy challenges.  China stands far apart from the international norms of political and social organisation that prevailed in the old order.  Consequently, issues such as human rights and freedom of speech and media constantly arise and need careful management.  At the same time, China has successfully challenged the US’s pre-eminence.

In response, the Security Establishment (Defence, ONA, ASIO, ASIS, PM&C’s International Division, and the think tanks they fund such as ASPI) some time ago concluded that the China relationship was too important to trust to DFAT.

The Foreign Minister’s, and hence her department’s role in managing this critical relationship has become inconsequential.  To try to play herself back into the Canberra China game, the Foreign Minister gave a bizarre speech, written by her office, in Singapore last year in which she declared China to be unfit for regional leadership because it was not “democratic”.  The Department did not see the final text until it was delivered.  Part of the problem for DFAT is that their Minister is not trusted by the Prime Minister.  A Deputy who has survived three leaders does bear watching.  The contrast between Howard and Downer could not be starker.

Before becoming Prime Minister, the Security Establishment was concerned that Turnbull was “soft” on China.  They had done a good job with Abbott who also, before becoming Prime Minister, and as a point of differentiation following the poor management of the relationship by the Rudd Government, had indicated he wanted to re-set relations with China based on a greater level of trust.

But it was not long before Abbott was embracing Prime Minister Abe as his friend, describing Australia’s relationship with Japan as our closest in the region, and during Abe’s visit to Sydney praising the bravery of Japanese soldiers during the Second World War.  The RSL had to remind him that not all Australians saw it that way.

In response, Turnbull gave an important speech in London in which he pointed out that had it not been for China tying down over a million Japanese troops during  WW2 with their resistance and at horrendous loss of life and suffering,  Japan would have occupied Australia.  When this idea for the speech was suggested to Turnbull he quipped that it was “seditious”.  Perhaps, but it certainly helped to inject some balance into the discussion and was noticed in Beijing.

More worrying for the Security Establishment, though, was Turnbull’s publicly announced intention to re-examine the Rudd Government’s ban on Huawei’s participation in the NBN.   Despite the fact that like-minded countries, such as the UK, New Zealand, Singapore and India, permit Huawei to supply equipment to certain parts of critical telecoms infrastructure, Australia maintains a blanket ban.

The blanket ban remains regardless of the technical solutions to ensure that, even if Huawei were acting as an agent of the Chinese State, the integrity and privacy of data could be protected.  Australia has the most stringent restrictions on Huawei of any country other than the United States.  This is maintained in the absence of any evidence in the public domain that might justify such a position.

Moreover, the discussion has never been conducted in terms of costs and benefits to the Australian public.  Rather than primarily a security issue, the case ought to be made in terms of consumer welfare and returns to taxpayers.  Huawei is considerably cheaper than the alternatives, hence Turnbull’s openness to involving Huawei in certain parts of the network when he was Minister for Communications.

The main beneficiary of the blanket ban on Huawei from the NBN is its US rival, CISCO.  It is relevant that ex-CIA and US defence employees find their way onto CISCO’s payroll when their public service careers end.  A study of these links and their connections to Australia’s Security Establishment would be revealing.

In case there were any doubt about the enormous influence of the Security Establishment on the Turnbull government over China policy the appointment of David Irvine as Chairman of the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) says it all.  He is the first appointment without any background in Treasury or business.  His qualifications, impressive in their own right, are as a long-serving head of Australia’s intelligence services and a former Ambassador to China who has worked on China throughout his distinguished career.

In short, FIRB is now about China and China’s investment in Australia.  And so another important Australian institution is being subverted not by China, but by those who believe Australia must resist China at every turn.  In the wake of the Landbridge acquisition of a clapped out WWII dock in Darwin – not the Darwin Port as it is presented in the media – new laws on investment in “critical” infrastructure were enacted.  Irvine’s appointment resulted from this.

It is evident that ASIO, as part of its China-threat campaign, has taken it upon itself to brief selected media against certain individuals who it suspects – rightly or wrongly – of being Chinese agents of influence.  The scurrilous Four Corners program of a year ago reported that a former ONA officer’s house had been raided and that a classified document had been found.  Assuming the individual himself had not told the ABC, then the information presumably could only have come from ASIO.  Similarly, ASIO would appear to be the most likely source of the media briefing about former Senator Dastyari’s cautioning of businessman Huang that his phone was being tapped.

Why is ASIO  politicising itself and in doing so undermines its integrity and independence and so weakens Australia’s security.

The response to those seeking to promote a more constructive and balanced approach to how to respond to China’s rise and the changed international order is to attack them as apologists for China, fellow travellers, mercenaries and Panda huggers – the last is the most damning.  It is intended to stifle legitimate policy discussion and development.   The mess that Australia’s China policy is now in attests to this.

Geoff Raby was Australia’s Ambassador to China 2007-11 and is now Chairman of Geoff Raby and Associates a Beijing based advisory firm.

Read at: https://johnmenadue.com/geoff-raby-the-current-mess-in-australia-china-relations/

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 AUSTRALIA AND THE BRI: WHY SO RELUCTANT?

By James O’Neill*

The Sydney Morning Herald has recently published a series of articles (18-23 June 2018) on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The articles come at a time when relations between China and Australia are getting distinctly cooler. The articles will do nothing to thaw the relationship. On the contrary, they are replete with the assumptions, allegations, falsehoods and queries that if anything, will reinforce Australia’s faulty perceptions as to what the BRI is, how it is transforming the development model that has prevailed since World War II, and how it is illustrative of China’s changing role, not just in Asia, but in Europe, Africa and South America.

The headlines of several of the articles provide a clue as to the editorial intent. The newspaper’s foreign editor Peter Hartcher’s lengthy piece is entitled “China’s Modern Trojan Horse,” (19 June 2018) a clear allusion to an ancient Greek subterfuge. He quotes Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur dissident (not disclosing that she lives in exile in Virginia, USA, as a source on China’s alleged human rights violations of the Uyghur, and also The Economist (UK) that “Xinxiang is apartheid with Chinese characteristics.” Hartcher concludes his piece with the observation that BRI is another way of spelling bought and sold with Chinese characteristics.

Lindsey Murdoch (21 June 2018) wrote an entirely negative piece on China’s investment in Cambodia. Chinese investment he says, accounted for about 30% of total foreign investment in Cambodia, a figure intended to raise alarm. The 25.9% of Australia’s foreign investment sourced from the United States does not rate a mention, let alone a comparable degree of alarmism.

Murdoch does not mention for example that Cambodia sought tenders for the building of its biggest hydro dam at Stung Treng. The Japanese were competing bidders for the contract and were unsuccessful because they were too expensive, both in contract price and at the interest rate they sought to charge.

It is a recurring theme in the Australian media that references to the BRI represents a potential ‘debt trap’, and that  an inability to repay loans will lead to a loss of sovereignty. That there is not a shred of evidence to support this contention in respect of Chinese investment does not prevent its endless repetition.

There is also the point that none of the countries that have signed up to the BRI (now more than 100) have done so as a consequence of pressure from China. They are in fact exercising their sovereignty in doing so and it betrays a lingering neo-colonialism for Australia to issue threats and “warnings” to sovereign nations, as was recently the case in Vanuatu and the Solomons, about what their leaders should and should not do when offered the opportunity of Chinese investment. That potential investment was portrayed is intruding upon Australia’s sphere of influence and upsetting what was perceived in Canberra as the strategic balance in the Pacific.

David Wroe (19 and 23 June) repeats this sovereignty canard, citing Julie Bishop that the “the funding mechanisms of the BRI are unclear.” If Wroe or Bishop had bothered to look, there is ample literature on the funding of the BRI, coming as it does from specific funds allocated for that purpose.

The Memoranda of Understanding signed by each of the participants in the BRI are readily available, as are the contracts dealing with the financing of specific projects. Australia did in fact sign a Memorandum of Understanding in September 2017, albeit limited to projects involving third countries. Whether or not that memorandum required transparency in the financial arrangements we do not know because the Australian government has refused to release a copy of the signed version. Transparency is not something that one automatically applies to the Australian government and this is just another example. Instead of repeating the tired cliché that China is less than transparent, the Australian media should look to their own government and its habit of keeping from the voting public details of arrangements they should know about.

Michael Bachelard quotes Bishop again on the Solomon Islands, where she says, perhaps with unconscious irony, that “the [Australian] Government felt compelled to intervene to keep China out.” 

Bachelard does make some attempt at balance by quoting a spokesman for the Asian Development Bank is saying that the BRI “is unlikely to cause a systemic debt problem.”  He rather undoes that attempt at balance by making the claim that “America may still rule the waves, but China is seeking to rule Eurasia.”  Making two errors in the same sentence is no mean feat.

President Xi certainly does seek some fundamental changes in the geopolitics of Eurasia, but to claim that he seeks to “rule” Eurasia is manifestly absurd. Bachelard does touch upon what may well turn out to be the most important geopolitical change of the first decades of the 21st century: the displacement of the US dollar as having the dominant role in international trade.

Bachelard quotes former French President Giscard d’Estaing on the dollar’s role as an “exorbitant privilege”, but fails to follow-through on the implications of the financial changes currently underway. The dollar’s dominant role in the post-World War II geopolitical framework has permitted the exercise of US hegemony, militarily, economically and politically for the past 70 years.

That is now changing with a rapidly growing number of countries paying in their own currencies or with the Chinese Yuan, backed as the latter is with the gold trade convertible note through the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges. Without the historical demand for US Treasury bonds, the capacity of the US economy to defy economic logic will diminish rapidly. This trend is reinforced by the growing cooperation between a number of economic and geopolitical groupings such as the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the SCO,  and BRICS which between them account for more than half of the world’s population and more than half of the world’s GDP. Very few if any of the members of those organisations have any interest in assisting the US dollar maintain its historical role.

With the profound changes occurring in the world’s trading system and its associated financial structures there is going to inevitably be a change in the geopolitical balance. It is a recognition of and resistance to these changes that are arguably the principal reasons why Australia is so reluctant to enter a serious dialogue about a possible role in the BRI.

David Wroe, in his article of 23rd of June comes closest to capturing the real issues. He quotes John Brumby, the former Premier of Victoria, President of the Australia China Business Council and a director of Huawei (itself a target of the Australian government) that:

“a lot of the caution that we see in relation to China is not based around legitimate security concerns. It’s based around protectionism of the US and an inability to grasp that the world order is changing.”

It will be recalled that when Australia was contemplating joining the AIIB it was urged not to do so by the Obama administration. The exact same fears of “Chinese domination”, “lack of transparency” and “debt traps” were advanced then. None of those fears have been realised and the AIIB this is now regarded as a model of its kind  (Journal of Infrastructure, Policy an Development (2018) Volume 2, Issue 1).

Australia made one of its rare departures from American wishes when it joined the AIIB. It is time to acknowledge the truth noted by former Howard government minister Warwick Smith (head of the Australia China Council and a director of the ANZ bank) that “there is a reality about this (the BRI) that is inescapable. The wheels of commerce keep turning. Money will flow trade and trade will follow money.”

It is long past the time with Australia displayed a similar degree of realism, acknowledging the view recently expressed by Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szjjarto that “we in this region have looked at China’s leading role in the new world order as an opportunity rather than a threat.”

If there is a “ threat” associated with the BRI it is to the role of the United States. Australia has been a loyal acolyte to that role and the grave risk that Australia faces is in not recognizing that the emerging world is a multipolar one, and that relations between countries as exemplified by the BRI represent a profound change. The United States was offered the opportunity by China to join the BRI and like Australia it refused.

It is difficult if not impossible to address issues of transparency, accountability and sovereignty if one is not a member or active participant in the process.  Australia prefers, it would seem, to cling to a version of the world order that is increasingly irrelevant and outdated.  It is delusional to believe that the present anti-China rhetoric found in the statements of government ministers and repeated in the recent series of articles in the SMH will not have consequences for Australia.

*Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst.  He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au

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See also:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-27/china-ghost-cities-show-growth-driven-by-debt/9912186

Built for a population that never came, about 50 of these surreal sites lay desolate across the country. But still the construction continues.

These new cities are usually built in rural areas on the outskirts of existing cities.

Designed for populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the mass construction projects can include towering high-rise condominiums, huge shopping centres, city squares, street lights and replicas of cities in Europe and elsewhere.

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"Planning is not done for the past nor the present..." Chinese proverb. Take note.