Page five news reports are sometimes straws in the wind. Though insignificant in themselves they may point to significant social changes that bear serious reflection.
Two such events occurred last week. After a UNESCO World Heritage committee gave a provisional assessment that the Great Barrier Reef was endangered, the Federal Minister for the Environment suggested that the decision was politically motivated, so pointing the finger at China. Her response was a normal piece of deflection. Its significance was that the Minister believed that such a dismissal might be seen as credible.
The second event was the release of a Lowy Institute Poll showing a sharp drop in Australians’ trust in China. The assessment referred to attitudes to the Chinese Government and not to the Chinese people. Nor did the lack of trust extend to Chinese people in Australia nor to the desirability of trade with China.
It was consistent, however with growing mutual suspicion between the Australian Government and the Chinese Government displayed in mutual hostile criticism and restrictions on trade. In Australia the suspicion has been inflamed by a concerted and effective campaign to portray China as hostile to Australia both ideologically and strategically, and to cut relationships between the two nations. The energy behind this drive has come from security strategists and media commentators who have represented Australia’s choice as binary: to ally either with the United States or with China and to cut relations with the other.
This campaign has led to Australia limiting relationships between universities and China built through institutes and research partnerships, limiting Chinese investment in an increasing number of industries and resources, and investigating the dual allegiances of influential Chinese people in Australia. The corollary of these moves has been the Chinese pressure on trade with Australia by banning import of coal and other goods.
What are we to make of this? In the first place, the caution and growing suspicion in relationships with China corrects an equally one-sided insouciance in which the Chinese Government was seen as our friend whose behaviour could be overlooked because of our overriding economic interests. The attitude is captured in the application to trade of Richard Wilbur’s epistemological couplet:' We milk the cow of the world, and as we do/We whisper in her ear, ‘You are not true’.
The Chinese Government is certainly not our friend. It has an authoritarian political system single-mindedly focused on perpetuating Party rule. It denies its people