A neutral world would be nice like something you would hear about at the Nimbin Mardi Grass days in the 90's.
Australia given our rich natural resources/mineral's can/should thank China for keeping our economy above water so to speak as our largest trading partner over these past several decades.
Wish this rhetoric around China being our perceived enemy/theat in the Asia Pacific region would stop - what makes it worse is our further strengthening of our alliance with Britain & the US as of course China sees this as a security threat within the Asia Pacific region. No wonder our recent relationship with China has derailed as a result.
If Australia was neutral in such matters we would be able to trade with everyone & not be impacted by silly sanctions (as imposed by China in recent times).
We don't need to be spending billions of $$ on national security as it ain't going to achieve anything/no benefit whatsoever as in fact makes us more of an imminent target imo
“Beijing should know, and this US fleet will remind them, that while they are a great military power, the strongest, the premier military power in the Western Pacific is the United States”.
Back then the USA was like that one kid on the under 14’s footy team that had hit puberty and was stronger than everyone else so he could afford to be a bit of a bully.The last Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996 (Clinton):
Following Beijing’s launching of missiles across the strait that year, Washington sent a battle fleet, including two aircraft carriers, to the area. US Defence Secretary William Perry declared that
On the same theme:The last Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996 (Clinton):
Following Beijing’s launching of missiles across the strait that year, Washington sent a battle fleet, including two aircraft carriers, to the area. US Defence Secretary William Perry declared that
Has anyone figured out what Pelosi was there for and what she achieved. Did she visit any chip manufacturers to get some inside info??
Has anyone seen the transcript of Biden's phone call with Xi??
The media used to lobe publishing presidential transcripts with foreign leaders...what's changed?
Logic lost on Xi as world walks Taiwan tightrope
The causes and courses of serious conflict are rarely rationally driven. The tensions over Taiwan are no different.
Yes, Beijing may complain that Foreign Minister Penny Wong has been “finger-pointing” by firing off calls for restraint. But when you’re firing off ballistic missiles yourself, the logic gets lost somehow.
And by now, the debate over US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s true motives for visiting Taiwan is already pointless except to historians. Hyped-up patriotic Chinese netizens may brand her a version of the Wicked Witch of the West, supportive Taiwanese an incarnation of Buddhist goddess Guan Yin.
But it matters little. She has flown away. The determination of Beijing to seize Taiwan, and of Taiwan’s citizens to live as they choose, has not changed.
For a few brief years, the prospect was held open – albeit with only very modest chance of success – that those two goals could be aligned, or at least be entertained in parallel, if the People’s Republic of China were to somehow persuade most Taiwanese people that while becoming part of the PRC they could retain some of their sovereign institutions under a “one country, two systems” arrangement as intended for Hong Kong.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong looks towards her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi at the East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh on Friday. Picture: DFAT / Michael Godfrey
The subjugation of Hong Kong, chiefly via the introduction of the National Security Law in mid-2020, and the eager rediscovery of the old colonial sedition offence ended any thoughts of such an arrangement for Taiwan – either in Taiwan or in Beijing.
It remains important that people learn the story of Taiwan – and that may be one positive outcome of the current troubling confrontation, including Chinese live-fire exercises around, and military flights crisscrossing, Taiwan’s territory.
Taiwan has never been a part of the PRC, which was established in 1949. Before that, the Chinese Communist Party during the 1940s supported Taiwan’s separate liberation. The island was occupied by Japan from 1895, and then from 1945 by the Nationalist government whose army finally fled there in 1949 after defeat by the communists.
Taiwan expert Gerrit van der Wees has cited a Mao Zedong interview with Edgar Snow in 1937 in which Mao promises to help the Koreans in their struggle for independence, adding “the same thing applies for Taiwan”.
But such rational reviews of history are readily sidestepped by Mao’s 21st century successor, Xi Jinping, who views “historical nihilism” – anything that defies the party’s agreed contemporary position – as almost akin to treason.
Most people alive in China today have ever and only heard, from childhood, that the “reunification” of the country as its boundaries are detailed by the party – incorporating especially Taiwan but not Mongolia, which was more patently a part of the previous empire that ruled China – is now a sacred task.
China has constantly changed, but tends to claim constancy, especially under the PRC.
Meanwhile, nothing significant has actually changed in Taiwan, in the lead-up to the current confrontation. The progressive but also pragmatic, and economically successful, government under President Tsai Ing-wen has stuck by the status quo even as the PRC strips it of its diplomatic partners, leaving Beijing as the unchallenged ruler of “One China”, over which Taipei covets no say.
Leaving aside the warring histories, three elements of the imbroglio do require urgent rational consideration, however.
One is obviously the military threat, and options. The invasion of Ukraine by China’s “no limits” comrade, Russia, highlights areas where Taiwan must raise its game – including raising military service from the now-residual four months to a year, acquiring vastly more drones, mines and flexibly sited missiles, and upgrading reservists’ training.
It’s too early to conclude that Russia’s failure to win swiftly might deter Beijing from attacking Taiwan. Beijing might instead be considering how the lessons offered by its own rapid take-down of democratic politicians, media and students in Hong Kong may provide a template for controlling Taiwan and occupying all discourse channels, if it can seize a strategic foothold.
Taiwan underlining its determination to maximise every effort for its own defence is vital.
Historian Niall Ferguson believes that as Korea was the hot war that triggered the first Cold War, Ukraine has done likewise for the second Cold War. If he’s right, that’s not good, but it’s better than helping trigger an incomparably worse new global hot war, which conflict across the Taiwan Strait would generate.
A second issue is the threat of gigantic disruption to the global economy, which would take a huge hit if Beijing did decide to attack – whether by blockade or by direct assault, and maybe brought forward by the awareness of China’s having already peaked economically and in global influence.
For Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company alone supplies more than half the world’s chip market, vital for so many products we all use daily. This should act as a huge deterrent, but Xi may surprisingly soon, however wrongly, start to believe China can become self-sufficient in tech as he extends central economic controls.
A third important consideration is the need for Australia and other concerned countries to develop Taiwan strategies promoting broadbased relationships including trade arrangements, research and cultural links that will prove more meaningful than mere rhetoric.
For China, two crucial constraints remain in place.
In the short term, don’t add to the many disruptions ahead of the important party congress in November. Longer-term, the hardheads are well aware that while hero-status awaits the victor over Taiwan, failure to succeed swiftly in a military dice-throw would place the Communist Party in existential jeopardy like no other event.
Rowan Callick is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.
ROWAN CALLICK
CONTRIBUTOR
Do not worry, we will boycott trade with china and we the glorious democratic west will win within months...like with Ukraine.I'm not sure if I've heard right but I read on the grape vine, watching ABC this morning, that Taiwan has now started it's own military exercises as a show of force, I guess. Good luck Taiwan...But what troubles me is that if Taiwan and China start butting heads, there's bound to be conflict. Interesting to see how this all plays out...I'll be sitting in my bunker watching closely...
China certainly being a bit of a trouble maker. Should anything exculate into a war, I would hate to see Taiwan left out to dry, like what had happened to the Ukrainians...
China ready to meet Australia ‘halfway’, Xi’s envoy tells Penny Wong
Xi Jinping’s top envoy has said China is ready to meet Australia “halfway” in the most promising change in Beijing’s diplomacy since its relationship with Canberra imploded in 2020.
The emphatically positive language — which for the first time in almost three years was delivered without any chiding of Australia — suggests it is increasingly likely that President Xi and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will meet before the end of the year.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Foreign Minister Penny Wong that Beijing was now ready to “properly resolve differences”, according to China’s official transcript of their New York meeting.
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Australia,” State Councillor Wang said.
“The Chinese side is willing to … properly resolve differences and promote the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations,” Mr Wang said, adding that “the two sides should meet each other halfway”.
The official Chinese language transcript of the meeting released by State Councillor Wang’s department over the weekend was significantly more positive than that released after his first meeting with Senator Wong in July in Bali.
The official Chinese account of the recent New York meeting did not include a numbered list of actions Australia needed to take to repair the relationship, a welcome change for Canberra.
“In the Bali statement, Wang was obviously lecturing Australia on what to do,” said Han Yang, a former junior Chinese diplomat who now lives in Sydney.
“But the New York statement is more humble and conciliatory,” Mr Han told The Australian.
Beijing also used its propaganda machine over the weekend to send clear signals that Mr Xi has ordered an adjustment in China’s handling of Australia.
The party state’s combative Global Times said the meeting was “constructive”, an unusually positive note for the masthead.
Even one of Canberra’s most trenchant critics Chen Hong, an influential member of China’s Australian studies community and a professor at Shanghai’s East China Normal University, said the meeting was a “pleasant one”.
Most unusually, on the day of the Wang-Wong meeting the Xi family’s love of Australia was promoted by the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s most authoritative paper.
“Like his father Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping has also devoted a lot of energy to promoting exchanges and co-operation between Chinese and Australian cities, territories and states,” said the People’s Daily.
Beijing’s change of tone comes after months of careful diplomacy by the Albanese government.
Prime Minister Albanese has managed expectations about the scope of improvement in the relationship.
“What I want to see is that we will cooperate with China where we can, but we will stand up for Australian values where we must, and that is something China needs to come to terms with,” Mr Albanese said last week.
The Prime Minister has made it clear that as long as Beijing’s trade bans continue, Australia could not support China’s entry into the CPTPP trade pact.
After the New York meeting, Foreign Minister Wong said once again that Australia’s goal was a “stabilisation” of the troubled relationship — avoiding the word “reset”, which many in Canberra worry sets up unrealistic expectations about what is possible.
China’s statement on the meeting noted that Senator Wong had told her Chinese counterpart that Australia would take a “constructive” approach while continuing its “forthright communication” with Beijing.
“That’s Canberra’s way of saying: while Australia is happy to see some positive signals in the relationship, Australia will continue to talk about topics inconvenient to China’s ears,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a China specialist at the ANU.
Despite its change in tone, China has maintained the trade bans it has on Australian exports, which previously were worth more than $20 billion a year. Australians Cheng Lei and Dr Yang Hengjun both remain in prison in Beijing on vague charges.
Australian government officials believe any change from the Chinese on these issues would require a decision by Mr Xi personally.
The Chinese President and Australian Prime Minister are both scheduled to attend the G20 leaders’ meeting in November in Bali, where they could end the nearly three year break in leader-level meetings.
WILL GLASGOWNORTH ASIA CORRESPONDENT
New Zealand can mine bitumen directly if they need to, but Bitumen is also highly recycled so a lot of the bitumen supply comes from old roads that are resurfaced, you can also add plastics into bitumen during the recycling process.
Here is a 35 page document from the New Zealand government looking into alternative supplies of bitumen, so I think it’s something they have been looking at for a while.
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/Hig...itumen-alternatives-report-31-august-2021.PDF
New Zealand can mine bitumen directly if they need to, but Bitumen is also highly recycled so a lot of the bitumen supply comes from old roads that are resurfaced, you can also add plastics into bitumen during the recycling process.
Here is a 35 page document from the New Zealand government looking into alternative supplies of bitumen, so I think it’s something they have been looking at for a while.
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/Hig...itumen-alternatives-report-31-august-2021.PDF
Xi Jinping doubtless expected to celebrate the New Year by touting the superiority of his authoritarian economic and governance model. Instead, he is trying to manage a healthcare crisis, a weakening economy, and political protests. These vulnerabilities – each attributable to the Chinese Communist Party under Mr Xi’s leadership – allow the US to combat the party’s mercantilist policies and debunk its narrative that China’s rise to global dominance is inevitable.
In Shanghai, a crowd chanted calls for Xi Jinping to step down, a rare act of political defiance that reflected public frustration with his ‘zero Covid’ demands. Picture: Twitter
Mr Xi’s climb-down from his signature zero-Covid policy, and the broad and poorly controlled spread of the virus, has exposed the weaknesses of China’s social safety net. The public demonstrations since November are signs of underlying discontent. The participation of the well-off and normally passive urban populations affirms that Mr Xi can’t expect to maintain political control if he continues to impose such authoritarian restrictions.
Mr Xi’s climb-down from his signature zero-Covid policy, and the broad and poorly controlled spread of the virus, has exposed the weaknesses of China’s social safety net. The public demonstrations since November are signs of underlying discontent. The participation of the well-off and normally passive urban populations affirms that Mr Xi can’t expect to maintain political control if he continues to impose such authoritarian restrictions.
As Simone Gao recently wrote in these pages, the end of zero Covid was in large part an admission of the government’s unsustainable financial situation. In early December, Beijing said local governments would be responsible for the cost of daily Covid testing. These already distressed institutions were put in charge of the healthcare emergency in addition to their responsibilities for education, unemployment insurance and retirement. They are also still expected to stimulate economic growth through building infrastructure and subsidising local industries.
A senior doctor at Shanghai's Ruijin Hospital has said 70 per cent of the megacity's population may have been infected with Covid-19, state media reported on January 3. Picture: Hector Retamal / AFP
Achieving those goals would be difficult in the best of times. But China’s local authorities have been operating with one hand tied behind their backs, thanks to Mr Xi’s economic policies. More than 40 per cent of local government revenue in recent years has come from land sales to real-estate and industrial developers. That led to one of the global economy’s largest bubbles, which Mr Xi attempted to deflate by forcing developers to deleverage their balance sheets and limiting any government bailout of private real-estate firms. The crisis has devastated the government’s balance sheet and contributed to the economy’s slowing. Unemployment crept up to 6.7 per cent in the 31 largest cities in November and is in the high teens for the young.
Few of China’s development needs can be met by the overmatched leadership and faltering finances of local governments. The urban-rural gap remains enormous in poverty, nutrition, education and economic opportunity. Healthcare coverage is weak and forces massive precautionary saving – typically more than one-third of disposable household income, compared with high single digits in the US. Water shortages and environmental damage can’t be rectified by overburdened local governments.
Local governments in China often aren’t able to directly raise enough money to cover the funding needs of infrastructure projects. Picture: Lin zejun/Sipa Asia/Zuma Press
As it usually does, Beijing is trying to reinvigorate growth through infrastructure development, permitting local governments to lend more to real-estate developers and increasing exports. The first two likely won’t achieve much. Such capital investment can’t sufficiently drive the economy, in large part because of the country’s ageing population and overbuilt housing and transportation networks. The government must turn to exports because consumer demand is repressed by the need to save for medical care and retirement. This explains why Mr Xi has been so eager to lower the temperature with Western importers.
The Biden administration has signalled its willingness to work with China to manage the current crisis, from facilitating solar-product imports to applauding Beijing’s promises at the COP27 climate conference. The White House is slow-walking sanctions on TikTok and establishing only limited controls on US investment in China.
A better approach would be to remain on the offensive against Mr Xi’s mercantilism and find ways to undermine the Communist Party’s narrative of competence and inevitable global dominance. This would include the Trump administration’s $US300 billion in tariffs on Chinese exports and limiting Chinese acquisition of Western technology. It would also limit US investors’ ability to finance research and production of sensitive technologies in China – as proposed by Sens. Bob Casey and John Cornyn – and delist Chinese companies on US stock exchanges if they don’t comply with Securities and Exchange Commission auditing requirements.
Beijing’s failures give the US and its partners an opening to persuade potential allies, especially in South and Southeast Asia, to dismiss what Mr Xi calls the gravitational attraction of the Chinese model. The US has been the leading investor in Southeast Asia in recent years and could further boost ties by reopening negotiations to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The Biden team should also call out China’s human-rights abuses, exploitation of local resources, and the corrupting influence of the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa, South America and South Asia. Instead of lauding China for dodgy commitments on climate change, the US could talk about the environmental harm from China’s economic model. China’s CO2 emissions are well above those of all members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. It mines more coal than the US, the European Union and India combined. And it plans to build, or is already constructing, more new coal-fired electric plants than the rest of the world combined.
Mr Xi’s narrative of economic and political competence continues to be exposed as myth, allowing the US to work with allies to remind unaligned nations of the value of the Western model. It also should help convince our often recalcitrant allies, in the EU and elsewhere, not to relent on combating Chinese mercantilism.
Mr Duesterberg is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Economic Cracks in the Great Wall of China.
The Wall Street Journal
China’s extraordinary world view
EDITORIAL
Amid a thawing of tensions between Canberra and Beijing, Tuesday’s shindig at the Chinese embassy in Canberra to mark the new year, to say “thanks” to “our friends” in the media and to heap praise on the Labor government was warm, verging on syrupy – until it turned worrying. In his prepared speech, China’s articulate, urbane ambassador, Xiao Qian, emphasised that the bilateral relationship was “at a critical stage of turnaround”. The bonhomie dried up, however, when he was asked about Japanese ambassador Shingo Yamagami’s warning, revealed in The Australian on Tuesday, that Australia and Japan should be “vigilant” towards China and that Beijing’s more constructive tone was yet to be matched by a shift in behaviour. “I’m afraid our colleague from Japan is not doing his job,” Mr Xiao complained. Or was he doing it too well?
Harking back to Japan’s bombing of Darwin in 1942 for which “they do not apologise”, Mr Xiao made the extraordinary claim “they might repeat the history … once somebody threatens you, he might threaten you again”. In 1957 Japanese prime minister Kishi Nobusuke expressed “heartfelt sorrow for what occurred in the war” to the people of Australia. In 2012, Japan’s consul-general from Sydney officially apologised for the raid on Darwin 70 years earlier that killed at least 243 people. In 2018, Shinzo Abe laid a wreath at Darwin’s war memorial.
While hostile to Mr Yamagami giving advice to Australia, Mr Xiao doled out plenty of his own. AUKUS, he said, was neither constructive nor helpful, “especially when you’re targeting China as a potential threat or adversary”. Australia purchasing nuclear-powered submarines was “an even worse idea”, especially for taxpayers. It “set a bad example” of a nuclear-weapon state transmitting nuclear-weapon material to a non-nuclear state. He conveniently ignored China’s military build-up, the largest since 1945, its militarisation of the South China Sea and the surge in incursions into Taiwan’s air defence zone. Nor did he mention China’s six nuclear-powered ballistic-missile subs, six nuclear-powered attack subs and 46 diesel-powered attack subs, which the US Defence Department says are part of the world’s largest navy.
Australia and its allies need each other, and AUKUS. We welcome the reassurance of US Democrat congressman Joe Courtney, a member of the House of Representatives seapower committee, that claims that building submarines for Australia could stress the US industrial base “to breaking point” were inaccurate.
After tensions over Covid-19 and China’s coercive trade war against Australia, which need to be resolved, the Australia-China relationship needed improving for the sake of both nations. The Albanese government has done well to build on China’s desire for a fresh start and reopen communication. Like Mr Xiao, we welcome progress in 2023. We appreciate his choice of a good Australian shiraz at the reception and look forward to his compatriots regaining access to it. But his myopic view of the region’s strategic tensions is far removed from reality.
Xiao Qian’s glass half-full and threats half-empty
China’s ambassador in Australia caught the national mood well – albeit inadvertently.
“Once somebody threatens you, he might threaten you again,” said Xiao Qian at a press conference on Tuesday to begin the new year.
Australians overwhelmingly agree.
It is why some were braced for trouble when Beijing last week threatened countries, including Australia, that had put Covid testing requirements on travellers coming from China, the current centre of the pandemic.
I thought those threats were routine Communist Party bluster, but I can understand the concern. China followed through with its threats in 2020 over market access for Australian businesses, black-listing exports previously worth $20bn a year.
Ambassador Xiao wasn’t without reason to toast the new year – even if using a glass of Australian red wine, still subject to a tariff of more than 200 per cent, seemed a questionable way to do it.
In recent days, the first load of Australian coal in more than two years has been ordered by a buyer from China.
Reliable sources in Beijing tell me our ambassador in China, Graham Fletcher, has been invited to speak at a Chinese coal industry conference in coming days – another good signal for Canberra, and a further sign of how eager the Chinese steel industry is to be able to again import Australian coking coal.
And there is reason to think Beijing will unwind more of its counter-productive bans after Trade Minister Don Farrell’s visit to China, perhaps as early as February.
It was good to learn overnight that China’s most infamous diplomat, Zhao Lijian, has been sidelined to a desk job. The change in tone from Beijing in recent months should be welcomed, as Japan’s ambassador to Australia told this masthead.
But ambassador Shingo Yamagami’s further advice was also on point: “We have to be vigilant because when it comes to policy and strategy, nothing fundamental seems to have changed on their part.”
On Tuesday, Xi Jinping’s envoy to Australia went out of his way to confirm that assessment.
Attacks on AUKUS continued. So did Beijing’s total refusal to entertain a moment’s self-reflection about why Australia and countries across the Indo-Pacific region are building up their defence forces.
The stunning increase in the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army, combined with Beijing’s opacity about its future intentions, mean Canberra’s defence policy has to be fixated on China, as it was even in the Keating era.
It was good to see Ambassador Xiao begin the year speaking to the media. It’s also good he has continued to meet with Australian interlocutors over the summer, although it would be useful if he broadened his circles of contacts in 2023.
Too many of his meetings in his first year were with the clutch of Australians who agree with him that his host country is unfairly “targeting China as a threat”. That’s a boutique opinion in Australia, as documented in the Lowy Institute’s 2022 Poll.
That Lowy poll shows just how tough the ambassador’s assignment is, finding only one in 10 Australians trusts Xi’s China to act responsibly in the world.
It also suggests he might want to go easy on bashing Japan, a country nine in 10 Australians told Lowy they trust.
WILL GLASGOW NORTH ASIA CORRESPONDENT
“Once somebody threatens you, he might threaten you again,” said Xiao Qian at a press conference on Tuesday to begin the new year..
Peter Zeihan's prognosis for China is insightful and thought provoking. Video is 4.34 mins and Australia gets a mention.
China reports major population decline amid falling birth rates and aging society
China's population fell last year for the first time in six decades, a historic turn that is expected to mark the start of a long period of population decline with profound implications for its economy and the world.
Interested to note that India may have already overtaken China as the most populous country."China's demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defence and foreign policies," demographer Yi Fuxian said.
He added that the country's shrinking labour force and downturn in manufacturing heft would further exacerbate high prices and high inflation in the United States and Europe.
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