Review: Australian relations with China

Diplomacy should, at its best, be a fluid and pragmatic approach to resolving issues, forming alliances and settling disputes between nation states.

This is all fine and well if you’re, say, America or the UK. You have reasonable amount of history and heft to throw around, your military firepower is significant (even if dated, in Britain’s case), and your standing in the world is established.

But what happens when you’re a comparatively young, tiny nation in, as Jerry Seinfeld so kindly put it, “the arsehole of the world”, surrounded by countries that (excepting New Zealand) can only vaguely be referred to as “democracies”.

What happens if the world’s most populous nation, with a several million strong army, governed by a multi-headed bat-shit crazy dictatorship, fond of jumping to conclusions about “security” breaches and prone to declaring any dissent or even criticism as “terrorist” in nature, is your biggest trading partner?

Teddy Roosevelt’s “walk quietly, but carry a big stick” only applies if your big stick is proportional to the size of the person you are attempting to negotiate with. Australia’s stick is about 32 times smaller than China’s, and it’s not like it’s telescopic, or electrified, or it has some kind of gun mounted on the end of it; it’s just a goddamn stick.

So, Australia’s attitude with regard to diplomatic relations with China is to take the words “walk quietly” from Roosevelt’s advice, and ignore the big stick bit, because the closest thing we have to a large enough stick is an aging superpower on the other side of the world - MacArthur’s feeling on the proposed Australian/US WW2 in this paper is reasonably scary, given the possible modern day parallels.

It shouldn’t be a shit fight to put on the film about Rebiya Khadeer’s life, “The Ten Conditions of Love”, within the bounds of an international film festival on Australian soil. It also shouldn’t be a bureaucratic nightmare to prove the innocence of foreign businessman, or at least plead their case, when it turns out that at least part of the evidence against them is apparently the personal opinion of an intelligence officer speaking outside of their job role.

It would seem that Sino-Australian relations are at a significant low. The fact that it’s come to this over a documentary and the apparently personal opinion of an intelligence officer who likes to blog about international trade in his spare time does not bode well for Australia.

2/5