Abbott's Beijing speech got the balance right
August 02, 2012
THE single most important quality in getting China policy right is balance. China's economic development has created wonderful improvements for the Chinese, and helped make Australia rich. 
The story is generally positive. But there is a dark side.
China remains a repressive dictatorship with a poor human rights record. Recently it has engaged in outrageous bullying of its neighbours in the South China Sea and elsewhere.
Any Australian prime minister will naturally emphasise the positive, and spend the majority of their energy on areas where China and Australia can co-operate. But it would be the height of folly, analytically crippling, politically emasculating and morally indefensible to take a vow of silence on all difficult aspects of China's rise.
Tony Abbott's speech in Beijing last week was most notable for the deep continuity it maintained with the Hawke. Keating, Howard, Rudd and Gillard policies towards China. That commentators reacted so hysterically to what they saw as minute departures from orthodoxy by Abbott is a reflection on their own policy neuroses and general discomfort with nuance.
As Abbott said: "Since Deng Xiaoping first introduced market reforms and opened China to the world, Australian governments of both sides have striven to cultivate the best possible relations with China. The Howard government's approach to foreign policy, including relations with China, was to avoid giving other countries gratuitous public advice in favour of trying to work together on matters of mutual interest."
That was the tone of Abbott's whole speech.
He emphasised that a Liberal government would mostly make representations to China on human rights through the official human rights dialogue. This of course does not preclude from time to time making public statements, especially on specific cases. Similarly Abbott did call within this speech for greater democracy within China. This is brave and true and good, and need not cause any trouble in the bilateral relationship.
It is indeed the right balance. Mostly you go through official channels to avoid needless public dispute with Beijing but from time to time you do make public statements.
Most of the reaction to Abbott saying it would rarely be in Australia's interests for a foreign, state-owned entity to acquire control of an Australian business was wildly overblown and nearly hysterical. Abbott is foreshadowing at most the tiniest finetuning of our foreign investment process.
Similarly, his remarks on the South China Sea -- that Australia has no position on the merits of rival claims but hopes disputes will be settled in accordance with international law -- are almost exactly the formulation the Gillard government itself uses.
The storm in a teacup over this stuff is reminiscent of the last days of the Keating government when ministers argued that Asia would not deal with Howard -- utter nonsense.
In fact Abbott's geo-strategic outlook is almost identical to Kevin Rudd's. Both men were formed intellectually in the Cold War.
The world has definitively moved on from the Cold War -- as both Abbott and Rudd understand profoundly -- and China is in no sense an equivalent of the old Soviet Union.
But the Cold War provided excellent intellectual, political and moral formation, if you were on the right side. 
It taught, among other things, the importance of political values in international affairs, of democracy and human rights, of US leadership, of alliance solidarity, of the complexities of the US alliance system within Asia.
If you were right about the Cold War you are more likely to be right about the post-Cold War. Abbott has often acknowledged the formative experience of his friendship with B. A. Santamaria, the most important and impressive Australian Cold War analyst. Santamaria got a lot of things wrong, but on the central issues of the Cold War he was right.
At university Abbott's political activism was in part Cold War anti-communist activism. As a Rhodes scholar in Oxford he travelled to the Soviet Union and returned to tell friends that it had "not a single redeeming feature". In the Howard cabinet he was the single strongest voice in favour of granting political asylum to Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin, who defected.
Rudd was equally a Cold War warrior. His honours thesis at the Australian National University was on Wei Jingsheng, the legendary Chinese human rights activist. Rudd was greatly influenced by the writings of Pierre Ryckmans, the great Belgian sinologist. It would be wrong to reduce Ryckmans's magnificent work to Cold War politics, but his bitter, withering analysis of the savage Maoist iconoclasm was a central artefact of the Cold War. As a diplomat in Beijing in the mid-1980s, one of Rudd's tasks was dealing with North Korea. Within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Bill Hayden once got Rudd to write a comprehensive review of the outlook for the Soviet Union. It was a sober and hawkish document.
Rudd had his problems with Beijing in 2008 and 2009. A wholly mistaken orthodoxy has grown up that this was because of Rudd's inconsistency towards China. In fact China was having troubles with almost everyone in Asia at the time.
Beijing gets a vote in how the relationship goes, and it caused the problems, not Rudd, nor any general defect in Australian policy.
Malcolm Turnbull, who has a much less secure strategic map in his head than Abbott or Rudd, and who tends to reflect zeitgeist prejudice, exemplified the mistaken orthodoxy in a piece in
The Australian on July 21. Turnbull wrote sneeringly of "Rudd's own provocative speech about human rights abuses in Tibet, delivered in Mandarin to the Peking University".
Turnbull has his facts wrong. Rudd's speech was not about human rights. In nearly eight pages of speech there are 1 1/2, extremely mild, sentences on human rights. It is a very wide-ranging and positive speech about China's emergence into the world and Rudd's own love of Chinese culture.
Having praised China's advances, Rudd said: "There are significant human rights problems in Tibet." Only someone indifferent to the facts could label that provocative.
Abbott's reaction to Rudd's speech was altogether different and in every way much better. In a book of essays edited by my colleague Peter van Onselen, Abbott wrote: "There's no doubt that Rudd handled himself well" and he praised Rudd for "stating the obvious" about Tibet.
Australian leaders need to handle China with care. But problems often arise because Beijing chooses to act like a bully.
It is a dysfunctional feature of our political culture that whenever
the Chinese Communist Party has a disagreement with
a democratic Australian leader, so many commentators automatically choose the side of the Communist Party.
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, if it will get happen, which looks like going to happen within 5 to 10 years from now. as, if US will have lost production lines of High Tech Products to China and if China will then introduce these products in world at much cheaper prices, then how US/EU will maintain earning? it will bring US to stone age, if it will ever happen, and China is determined to have all the techs of US, with higher than US also, and US wants to resist these efforts. only Indian High Qualified professionals US have, which may help US have high techs in future, in competition with China....
. US wants to put missiles in space and when China also wants to do the same, West has a problem. US want to form a 'World Government', which would govern the whole world including China, and China doesn't want this to happen when a White/Christian/Western government start governing China and other developing nations.
but when you people go there, confirm to them that little loss of mental balance on any of my statement and ........ even if half million refugees will be dropped on australia, it will take only one week, and then australia as a nation will finally be finished, get the point? 
