Former foreign minister Hayden said, “As Labor came to office in 1972 ‘China’ had become a symbol of a broad judgment of the need for change in many areas”. Stephen FitzGerald recalled of the atmosphere when Whitlam chose him as the first ambassador for Beijing: “I felt part of a movement for social change”. China is often erected as a symbol of a progressive golden age. And occasionally, by Americans, also as a symbol of adverse forces. Such abstraction is a perilous approach to the reality of China.

Japan helped pioneer China as a symbol in the 18th century, portraying it as giving non-Western meaning to Japan’s own existence. Russian thinkers in the same century took China as a symbol of virtue on the grounds that the Western Enlightenment esteemed Confucian China and therefore Russian intellectuals should too.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s and even today, the left in the west has erected China as a symbol for western guilt over imperialism (a stance useful to Beijing). In Japan, the left’s massive (unsuccessful) struggle against the US alliance in 1960 elevated China as the ‘anti-US’, and thus as brother to a Japan smothered by the American embrace. Today, China is popular among American intellectuals as a symbol of the west’s decline. Such declinists embrace the absurd Martin Jacques’ notion (in ‘When China rules the world’) that ‘China’s past is a symbol of the world’s future’. Read more

The Defence White Paper gives an excellent description of the Asia Pacific but is calm about its dangers. It is heartening on the ADF’s capacity to defend the nation and its near neighbourhood and rightly reaffirms ANZUS and the US role: ‘It is unambiguously in Australia’s national interest for the US to be active in our region as economic, political and military influence shifts towards it’. It’s also correct not to name China as an adversary. Saying what we stand for in the Asia Pacific, and how we plan to protect it, is more pertinent than saying who we fear.

But we can’t hide the fact that China is probing on multiple fronts for more space and clout, sustaining quarrels with numerous neighbours who are Australia’s friends. The only reason Australia is not among those nibbled, along with Japan, Vietnam, Philippines, India and others is that’s so far away. This partially justifies the White Paper’s silence, but is short-sighted.

There is no integration of the Alliance with the overall regional picture to manage what is a marked new challenge to the status quo. The White Paper seems reluctant to state the values that bind Australia and its friends together. Stating our values is not provocative. If that’s a message to China, it’s in the eye of the beholder.

The White Paper speaks eloquently of the need to protect prosperity and stability. But where do these two desiderata come from? Long-term stability comes from democracy and freedom of the individual. Prosperity comes through free markets and free trade. Happily, China has embraced the values of economic liberalism to a considerable extent, but they are not Chinese values. Rather they are long-time Western values, and if the US and its allies don’t defend them they might not endure.

Confusion over Japan is related to this point. You can’t talk of the US and China as the two ‘global powers’ and relegate Japan to ‘regional power’. It is not just that in a decade or two the labels might have to be changed, but right now the White Paper’s assessment of power undervalues democracy and free markets in the making of stability.

True, the entire White Paper assumes the centrality of a US-led equilibrium to Australia’s security and prosperity. But it’s content with a vague hope to ‘develop the security structures on our region to help ensure cooperation…’. Lame references to ‘rules of conduct’ and a ‘rules-based global order’ (which doesn’t exist) send no message to Beijing that Australia opposes the weakening of the existing equilibrium in the Asia Pacific. Beijing respects strength more than Western-derived rules of conduct.

Ross Terrill of Harvard’s Centre for Chinese Studies is a visiting international senior fellow at ASPI. Image courtesy of Flickr user Julia Gillard.

What lies ahead for US policies affecting Australia? Paradoxically, the greatest doubt about America’s strength in the world comes from within the US itself. Obama’s second term foreign policy will probably resemble his 2008 campaign and the early part of his first term. In other words, Obama will mainly focus on domestic policy. His vision as a student, law scholar and politician in Chicago was about transforming America, not about the world. He believes the American people favour that priority. His first term frustrations in foreign policy will hardly change his view. In four years, Obama soothed international perceptions of the US in some international quarters and entered no major wars. Give him credit for that. But he transformed no world hotspots. A handicap is his worldview that sidesteps the notion of clashes of interest among nations, and encourages a multipolar world in which Washington talks with everybody about whatever, hoping that if big powers disarm, rogue states will be inspired to follow. This view is decidedly not shared by Beijing, the major world capital of most concern to many Australians and most Americans. Moreover, Sudan, Iran, North Korea and others have been slow to heed Obama’s call to rectitude. Yet he’s extremely unlikely to return to Bush’s big stick approach and pro-democracy sermons. Read more

Based on what they read in the national press or hear the talking heads on TV say, Australians could be forgiven for thinking that the Americans and Chinese are totally at loggerheads. We keep getting told at Australia has to choose between the two. And, to be fair, there are China Hawks in Washington who seem to regard the Chinese with the deepest suspicion, and China’s state controlled press frequently invokes American efforts to thwart Chinese interests. In fact, the situation is far more nuanced than those views would tend to suggest. Seen over a very long period, there is an American view of China that is much more sympathetic, and there is no shortage of American thinkers rooting for a Chinese success story in the twenty-first century.

Americans have a resilient hope in China, and they feel a special rapport with the Chinese. The origins of this trait lie in Christian missionaries being the first Americans to live in China, reinforced in the period of the Open Door Notes, when Americans had superior motives, they believed, in upholding Chinese sovereignty in the face of European colonialism. Canberra’s first-ever diplomat based in China, Keith Waller saw the syndrome in Chongqing during World War II: ‘There was a romantic side to Roosevelt’s attitude to the Chinese stemming, I suppose, from the renunciation of the Boxer indemnity.’ Waller’s skeptical Australian eye watched the missionaries in Chongqing: ‘They used to send [to mission headquarters in New York] regular and pretty glowing reports suggesting that with a little more effort the great nation of China would become Christian… this was undoubtedly a major factor in the American tenderness towards China.’

The persistent hope is indeed remarkable. The 1898–1901 Boxer Rebellion shot down US hopes for a cosmopolitan China; a realisation dawned that China, after all, was different from the US Tiananmen 1989 was even worse than the Boxers, this time the villain was not Chinese culture, but Leninist dictatorship. Yet neither upheaval nor others in between cancelled American’s hope toward the Chinese. Read more