I've just made this comment in a discussion at The Conversation, in reply to someone noting the presence of many Christian in the demonstrations in Hong Kong.
It seems the Christian issue has become interwoven, though not the sole or initiating issue... and I'm not aware of Christians from Hong Kong getting into trouble in China just for being Christian.
It's interesting that this democracy movement has emerged in Hong Kong given that Hong Kong has no prior history of such, for a long time a British colony acquired from China through thuggery.
There is a lot of focus on the chief executive, described as appointed by China. The electoral college for the appointment is very complex.
I think it's been a major contributor that Carrie Lam took office with purely administrative background, out of the class of Hong Kong people who presume to rule, and has been shown to lack political skill. And yes, clearly acceptable to Beijing and of course, formally appointed by Beijing as chief executive of a region. I note, without wishing to stretch the comparison, that Australian prime ministers are appointed by the representative of a British monarch.
The reaction in Singapore is interesting. This commentary from a former editor of the [Singapore] Straits Times.
There is anger in Hong Kong at inequality, the disparity between rich and poor increases. I was aware from Hong Kong friends a decade ago that anyone over forty losing a job was unlikely to find another. This is a recent report.
even the worst case Shenzhen, next to Hong Kong, negligible market town before 1980, now population of 12 million.
So I think much of the uproar is about Hong Kong, and neglect of Hong Kong by a Hong Kong government running a huge budget surplus, responsible to a Chinese government claiming it will eliminate poverty by 2020.
There are some remarkable dissident voices in China
Shirvan, of Caspian Report, an independent writer in Baku, has just produced this credible projection of how war between the US and Iran might unfold and widen in the video essay below. It has certainly been my expectation, as written recently, that attacking Iran would simply not work. But Shirvan’s video essay puts flesh on how war would likely spread. It is difficult to understand how planners could contemplate opening the door to this deliberately or by inadvertance.
The essay draws attention to the 2002 American war game "Millennium Challenge" in which US forces wished (cost of war game $250m) to demonstrate latest technology. Unfortunately the Blue Force (US) was effectively destroyed in two days by Red Force (unspecified middle eastern) whose commander used old technology and surprise to avoid detection and achieve the sinking of an aircraft carrier and more. The games were stopped after those two days and the rules changed to ensure Blue victory. Real life isn't like that. Information at Wikipedia.
It is unfortunate that the Australian Government is silent on this when should be alert and outspoken. We simply need to make clear to the US and the Australian public that we will not join a war with Iran; indeed we should firmly discourage such a thing. It is clear from this forecast that the destabilisation begun with the Iraq war would be multiplied many times, oil supplies disrupted, the global economy set back... to name some of many costs. I note that the UK seems mumblingly supportive of the US, a classic path to war.
I received advance notice of this posting to YouTube because I am a 'patreon' of Shirvan's Caspian Report. An inexpensive way to encourage independent thinking. Please consider also doing so.
This is mainly about China, but more. We have excluded ourselves in many ways from the engines of modernity in Asia and more widely by our recalcitrance on so many issues and our unwillingness to engage with the new. We are not of such weight for others to care. We demonstrate an incapacity to maintain a progressive society in Australia. That fact and its consequences for our standing are the greatest threats to our national security. We need to be aware of and sensitive to large issues affecting China.
Recent events in Hong Kong may have serious impact in China. The news will not fail to arrive throughout China. It is difficult to know what the consequences will be.
A break-up of the Chinese state would be dangerous for the world, destructive of peace, the environment and climate, destructive of the world economy. Many of those who speak ill of China these days seem to have attachment to fissiparous causes that would eat China from the edges or in social fabric. Some are caught in the disease of military competition. Some seem driven simply by psychological impulses, apprehensive of Yellow Peril.
A lot of interpretation of China and future China is projection by people from inside their heads, imagining China in their own form or that of other great powers, such as the US or Russia. This is naive and dangerous. It is also odd to consider the future in terms of a zero-sum game, a world in which there is no gain, just a win-loss between competitors.
There are lots of accessible facts which could illuminate the perspectives of the willing.
To begin, a simple comparison of Chinese life in the winter of 1978-9 with the winter of 2018-9— see these two videos.
—Xi Jinping’s New Year Address, 2018-9. To whatever extent one discounts such a presentation as government propaganda (like the Queen’s Speech) it’s impressive and reflective of what is officially labelled Xi Jinping Thought. I am not and have never been an apologist for China; I am an advocate of looking and thinking, starting from facts.
Xi Jinping comes from a family notably progressive in perspective, his father Xi Zhongxun known for seeking political rather than military outcomes in the stabilisation of China’s west seventy years ago, purged first by Mao when Vice Premier in the early 1960s, important to the world for having pioneered China’s opening to the world in Guangdong and its Special Economic Zones in the early 1980s, and for having supported Hu Yaobang’s liberalism that led to Hu being purged by Deng in 1987 and the Tiananmen situation of 1989, Xi Senior purged then again. The family home invaded and smashed and a daughter murdered by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution in1966, Xi Junior sent to the countryside and thereafter held back for a time as a ‘princeling’, a child of a former leader.
It is useful to look back at President Xi’s 2014 visit to Australia. After addressing the Australian Parliament, Xi went to Tasmania, to complete having visited all Australian states. The Hobart Mercury’s banner headline read “Welcome Mr President” and at Constitution Dock a Chinese icebreaker, decked out in red bunting, was docked near a visiting Australian submarine. Mostly the hysterical shift reflects US perspectives and shoves and the internal momentum of Australian Defence Force integration into US operations and perhaps the Yellow Peril mind state, which has been with us throughout Australian history. I note that the countries of Southeast Asia have adopted more subtle approaches to the issues in the South China Sea which directly concern them.
Nothing comparable in recent Chinese history stands between the events of 1989 and those recently in Hong Kong. Beijing has created ill-will and fear in Hong Kong by kidnapping writers and publishers from Hong Kong. That overshadows the relevance of an extradition arrangement to deal with major crime and corruption. (I suggest the changes at Sydney’s Barangaroo development, caused by decline in the big Chinese gamblers, can also be sheeted home to Xi’s anti-corruption machine.)
That there are at least some young people in China of kindred spirit to the young people in Hong Kong is evident in Geremie Barmé’s translation of a speech by a Chinese high school student, published recently:
Look in that text for the ‘Three New Dreams’. The ideas exist, now as in the 1980s. They will not be allowed to well up in China. I note recent surveys indicating that an increasing number of Australians are fed up with politics and just want to get on with their lives. So also a high proportion of people in China.
The peril in contestations, in Hong Kong, the UK Conservative Party and too many other current turbulences is that the headline focus is on the swirl, rather than outcome. Whether the ruckus is generated by the leaders, the media, social media, or popular restlessness is not clear, they intertwine. But because of this state of affairs we are surrounded by great inefficiencies in the way of achieving economic decency, social equity and environmental survival.
From 1980, as mentioned in the essay to which I linked above, we sought to assist China create systems of government and regulation to enable transition to modernity. Those efforts in retrospect were modest pieces of string compared with the extraordinary tapestry of infrastructures being built under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). See this statement from the April 2019 leaders meeting:
And yet media and public discussion focuses simply on the assertion that China is seeking to push countries into a debt trap—without dignifying such discussion with comparison with US or European colonial entrapment of poorer countries, even though perhaps subconsciously, expectations of China are driven by those more familiar bastardries.
We have excluded ourselves in many ways from the engines of modernity in Asia and more widely by our recalcitrance on so many issues and our unwillingness to engage with the new. We are not of such weight for others to care. We demonstrate an incapacity to maintain a progressive society in Australia. That fact and its consequences for our standing are the greatest threats to our national security.
on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s speech at Peking University in 2008 is a more extensive and eloquent discussion of my concern expressed previously that we should as friends be able to speak about things that are of concern; discordant notes in relations. But we have now taken ourselves away into a corner from which we yell: from friendship to a place without influence or basis for good engagement.
I am indebted to Gavan McCormack for pointing me to Barmé’s website. I am indebted to Doug Townsend, former Australian Ambassador to Kazakhstan for information on BRITACOM etc, with which he is involved.
Dennis Argall is a former Australian Ambassador to China who also worked in other areas of government and for the Australian parliament.
There has been feverish interest in the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen incident, in Australia with some focus on repression in China, fuelling antagonism towards China. In this essay I want to provide context that is lacking: in the evolution of economic reform and liberalism in China, in the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations and regional strategy and China’s united front with the US (and Australia) against Vietnam and the Soviet Union.
On the morning of Sunday 4 June 1989 I was woken early in Canberra by a request from the Sydney Morning Herald to write their editorial page background article on why this event was happening right then in Beijing, focused in Tiananmen Square. So I did, for the 5 June issue, setting out background of the enormous transformation under way in China, indebted for perspective to a comment made to me some days earlier by a middle level Chinese official, a friend from Beijing, trailing behind a senior visitor, buttonholing me to press upon me not to be complacent as in his view (which in the SMH I adopted as my own view) the leadership in Beijing did not have the capacity to comprehend or manage the situation.
On 5 June, in my Parliament House office as head of the research service, I received a call from Stephen FitzGerald, first Australian ambassador to the Peoples Republic of China, to discuss holding a memorial service. I said it must be in Parliament House and presided over by the Prime Minister and that it would be best if the approach came from him, not from me working in the building. And so we found ourselves seated behind Prime Minister Hawke at that extraordinary memorial event.
I offer that personal story to affirm my deep awareness of it all, on the day. But nothing happens just in a day, ever.
Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party
and Bob Hawke, Australian Prime Minister
in Western Australia, 1985, at the Channar site,
where China's first overseas resources joint venture would be. Source, The Age.
The upwelling of protest and demand for freedom in Beijing in the months leading to 4 June followed the death of Hu Yaobang, purged by Deng Xiaoping in 1987 from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party because of his projects to advance political and creative liberalism. Hu Yaobang visited Australia in 1985, accompanied by the head of the party secretariat Hu Qili. It was my great privilege to spend quite a lot of time with the two Hus before during and after that visit.
Years before, the two Hus became known to some senior party members in Beijing as the erhu literally meaning ‘two hus’ but also the name of that two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument that can dominate any concert performance.
Before the crackdown, there was a meeting of heavyweight leaders on 25 May.
Hu Qili attended that meeting and was alone or only one of two to vote against martial law, He was pushed into obscure work. Zhao Ziyang, who like Hu had made his first western country visit as Premier to Australia in 1983, had succeeded Hu as general secretary. Zhao had met with the protestors and pleaded for patience; he did not attend the 25 May meeting. He spent the rest of his days under house arrest. His memoirs Prisoner of the State are important reading for understanding the times. See also the Wikipedia entries for these three leaders to get a sense of the scale of history and struggle.
This from YouTube is Zhao Ziyang at 4.51am on 19 May,
in Tiananmen Square, surrounded by and addressing students.
A Chinese vice minister said to me one night in 1984 as we endured a cultural performance together in Beijing that despite the battering days of the Cultural Revolution the very worst time was not then but after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976, when leadership was uncertain and at risk of falling into the hands of the so called Gang of Four, drivers of the Cultural Revolution. We had come out of hell, he said, just for a few years…and here in front of us was very real prospect of falling back into it again. When Mao died in September 1976, the Gang of four were arrested and later tried.
Zhou had held the country together during and despite the Cultural Revolution. The death of this beloved leader, China’s ‘first son’, had been followed by an upsurge of popular feeling, quickly suppressed. A precursor to events in 1989.
It was Deng Xiaoping who, secured from prison after the death of Mao, led the often-ruthless push for reform that followed and continues. I had in an annex to a 1980 cabinet submission that shaped the modern relationship with China expressed the view that Deng was the second most divisive figure in modern Chinese history, after Mao.
My time as ambassador in Beijing was cut short by illness not to be diagnosed properly for decades. Lots of visitors got sick in China in those days. On my last day in Beijing, August 1985, I had lunch with Hu Qili. Sitting beside him among a few others I said it seemed that he was making progress with organising his special party conference that I knew was to deal with difficult issues. In his impeccable English and with his wry humour he asked: “why would you think that?” Lamely, I said I thought I had read something in the paper, whereupon he said with a grin, for all the table to hear: “Oh well, I suppose you could say I’m making as much progress as would be possible under the leadership of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.”
Emboldened, I ventured to compare him with Gorbachev, with this observation: “A year ago with the USSR stuck and China proceeding with reform, the question for any ambassador here was what would Sino-Soviet relations be like in ten years. But now China has its young leader and the Soviet Union also has its young leader and new questions arise as both pursue reform policies.” I had expected a gentle push-off at my comparison but no, he said this. “Your question is important. It is very important for the world that Gorbachev succeed. But I am concerned that whereas I have support from senior leaders, I am not sure whether Gorbachev has such support”.
Not quite as events would unfold.
That gives you a sense of the times. We were one evening Hu Yaobang’s guests at dinner in Mao’s sumptuous former rooms, a thank you for hospitality in Australia. The Hus were endeavouring to process and work out what to do, in the wake of an unprecedented outburst of English-style soccer hooliganism at the Beijing stadium the night before. Their only thoughts were in the direction of trying to understand and manage, none of the style of the Australian state premier riding with President Johnson in motorcade in Sydney, confronted by demonstrators, allegedly shouted “run over the bastards!” in 1966. Every day and evening in Beijing, dealing with senior people discussing very complex issues positively; to wake in the morning to the Radio Australia news which I described as mostly bottom-pimple comparing, feuding and unconstructive.
Gorbachev had launched two programs, glasnost meaning political and cultural liberalism and perestroika, economic reform. Deng was in charge of economic reform in China, as supreme leader above party and state structures, with Zhao as premier, he who pioneered the ‘responsibility system’ in agriculture in Sichuan in 1978, a shift from every brick, chook and egg belonging to the state and the peasant world of 900 million eating from the iron rice bowl, to a system where the farmer met a quota for the state and everything else he produced was private property. Hu Yaobang as party general secretary sought to command a program of liberalisation, or as the Hus were to style it in 1986, sankuan, the party’s three [san] principles for ideological-cultural affairs, development of “generosity, tolerance and relaxation.” [see an explanation of how this evolved in a document I have pasted here: http://cephalophoria.blogspot.com/2019/06/political-thought-in-china.html ]
As Hu had experienced in 1984 at a conference of writers and artists, and as Zhao Ziyang was to experience at Tiananmen, the lively response from the proponents of liberty to this sankuan was a chorus of don’t be absurd, you are not speaking of liberty, you are speaking of lengthening our chains. You have no right to define and limit liberty. As encountered in other societies, idealists grasping defeat from the jaws of victory by fervent adherence to rigid principle. On the other side of the situation, in 1986 as in 1989, dinosaurs in the party did not want to be disadvantaged by any favours to the liberal crowd and brought their venerable and disgruntled case against Hu to Deng, who removed Hu from office in 1987.
In the land of the hardnosed, especially in Washington, Hu was just Deng’s puppet anyway and Deng was the one to open the economy and deliver business opportunity. This perspective, while commonplace in uglier dynamics of international relations ignored the real volatilities in China, the rising urban ambitions as the economy rose but rose more slowly than in the countryside. Historical family aspiration for the “two things that go round and the one that stands up” (sewing machine, bicycle, transistor radio) were no longer enough. From around 1984, children had been swung higher, walking with parents. The sea of uniform blue and green Mao jackets were modified by coloured socks. Couples cuddled on the Bund, by the river in Shanghai, in the evening. Young people asked to practice English they had learned on the radio. The China Daily, first English language paper, whose editors had trained and whose first dummy issue had been printed at The Age in Melbourne, with scepticism printed material to support Radio Australia language programs; sold instantly. Radio Australia conducted calligraphy contests, one for China, one for Japan. 200 entries arrived in Melbourne from Japan. Ten thousand from China, posted airmail. An artist in residence at the ACTU knew that modern art would unfold much more vigorously in China than Japan. He dreamed of murals on the Beijing subway, but we never got to that. A society coming alive. I said to a senior person, a friend that I would believe China safe, the people unbruised, when the apples in the Friendship Store were not bruised, which they always seemed to be. Care, respect, safety, society, culture, warmth, confidence.
Deng had form as ruthless with force against party ructions in the mid-1970s. In 1978-79 he first encouraging the Democracy Wall movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Wall to achieve leverage among his party opponents: to get to Washington, get relations with the US normalised (the US embassy from Taipei to Beijing), get a united front with the US (and Australia) against Vietnam and the USSR… then to smash the Democracy Wall movement and launch a small invasion of Vietnam.
In early 1989, Deng and others in the leadership were confronted by unmanageable pressures created by the frustration of social demand, gagged with the purge of Hu Yaobang—old leaders, with their fibres and fears shaped by other great upheavals, times of war and destruction, including the struggle with the Gang of Four mentioned above.
Deng had been working to normalise relations with Moscow but that was now running in difficult directions. They were aghast at what Gorbachev had done. Gorbachev was coming to Beijing in mid-May 1989. Gorbachev, whose country was obviously about to fall apart. Gorbachev: whose empire in Eastern Europe was about to evaporate. Gorbachev: who was about to lose his job. Gorbachev who thus represented everything that China historically and now fears most, disintegration of a giant and diverse nation… and everything dinosaur party leaders fear: disemployment, disentitlement and retribution.
But above all else, the states of affairs in other big places (the US, USSR, India, Japan, etc.) provided no leads, no pointers; no models for running a giant country through dramatic change. China was on its own and at grave risk.
Gorbachev could not be given the normal welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square, occupied by demonstrators. But he did go out to meet the demonstrators. Then he went home, to lose job and country in half a year. Then three US warships made a friendly visit to Shanghai and departed. Then the bunch of most powerful in the party met on 25 May, declared martial law and set in train what was to happen on 4 June.
Our Cabinet-approved policy framework for relations with China from 1980, when China’s reforms had begun, was to assist China to build institutions to establish civil society and responsible government. Lots of practical things were done. But…it is in the nature of Australian political leaders that they do not like difficult issues on the table in discussions with the mighty. The elephant in the room was that warm public opinion in Australia would, as relations became more complex, depend upon people-to-people relations and evaluations and especially how Australians saw the rights of people in China. My suggestions that this be gently flagged were not entertained.
At that time Australians were per capita the most numerous visitors to China. There was warmth of substance.
Our desire was to build a relationship valued by whatever prospective government in China. But then, just as Chinese leaders could not cope with the 1989 rebellion, so we could not, government-to-government, cope with the aftermath. Except that when Howard became prime minister all the broad scope of relations launched by Fraser in 1980 disappeared from view in preoccupation with the money, the waterfall of income from resources sales to China, thrown largely into tax breaks whereas it could have modernised infrastructure. From which time the absurd mantra: we have a great ally over there, a great trading partner over here. How inadequate and disrespectful.
In the absence of Australian leaders building wider understanding of China and the importance of our relationship with China, and in the absence of leaders articulating an independent Australian view of the world, we arrive now at a point where public opinion seems driven by ancient hostilities and shallow current affairs reports.
Before appointment as Australia’s ambassador to China in 1984, Dennis Argall was from 1970 variously, among other jobs, China desk officer, head of the China and Korea Section, head of the North Asia Branch and acting head of the North and South Asia Division of Foreign Affairs.
In taking the liberty of reproducing this entry I hope some readers will be encouraged to buy the book.
I am currently writing an essay in which describing the events here as the most important pivot point in the history of the Peoples Republic of China. This blog entry thus a footnote.
The public discussion of trade war and security issues is too simplistic. Trump’s bilateral adventures in liking and bullying will mean discussion of structural changes in regional affairs to which Australia will not be party. Trump is not a passing phenomenon. We cannot say as some are saying “our alliance is with the US, not Trump”.
I am sitting at a computer attached to the internet via two things. A modem of ordinary quality, provided by my ISP, a Chinese brand, with 5G connectivity to the computer. Beyond the modem is the National Broadband Network, large parts of which are made in China. I suspect that those Chinese bits are not the elements of the NBN that fail us often here. I can’t see the strategic case against Huawei without mention of such inconvenient details.
I read the tabloid-stirring news of the US-China trade war. The Deal Artist, among changes and shocks in terms on offer, seeks to hit China by killing the world’s leading communications technology company, Huawei. Equally involved is Apple, whose products dreamt up in California are manufactured in China. There are other companies in similar situation, with Google now forced to cut off use of its software use in Chinese products.
But it’s not a simple bilateral matter.
According to a report released last year by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) titled, “A New Smartphone for Every Fifth Person on Earth: Quantifying the New Tech Cycle,” which analyzed the global smartphone supply chain, “the supply chain has evolved over the last few years and become more complex,” consisting of “large shipments [of intermediate goods] from several Asian countries to China, where final manufacturing and assembly of most smartphones takes place. [. . .] The main contributors to this complex supply chain were Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan Province of China.”
This network of mutual reliance is a major element in the rise of East Asia. With the movement of components goes language. Businesses communicate with each other. Governments nod and bind together. The ways to deal with the simple-minded US bash of China will be discussed and resolved by very smart people in this region. What languages they use, what they resolve to do, will reshape the world. Australia is not part of that evolving world.
Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, China, rank ahead of Australia. We delude ourselves in sense of superiority.
President Trump has been in Japan recently and, cloaked slightly in macho entertainments, has given Prime Minister Abe a roughing up. Gavan McCormack has written recently about the curious instabilities in Japan, and Abe’s circumstance.
In my view Abe’s obsequious approach to the US reflects his awareness that Japan’s economy has not recovered from its last trade war with the United States in the 1980s. The next trade war with the US will likely take down Abe and more. Trump gracelessly disagrees with Abe on North Korea as they stand together and patronisingly says he will talk to Kim Jong-un about allowing an Abe-Kim meeting. He gives this Prime Minister his approval to talk to Iran, a task, in representing the US, likely to be as successful as Menzies’ excited desire to talk to Egyptian President Nasser and tell him not to take the Suez Canal in 1956. Though Japan has been assiduous in its pursuit of good relations with the oil producers since the 1973 oil shock, that represents how Japan could be wedged away from the US, not an asset in speaking somehow for the US.
To fend off the next US economic shocks for Japan for a bit, Abe ordered another 105 F35 aircraft. An aircraft of which Wikipedia at today’s date says:
As the largest and most expensive military program ever, the F-35 became the subject of much scrutiny and criticism in the U.S. and in other countries. In 2013 and 2014, critics argued that the plane was “plagued with design flaws”, with many blaming the procurement process in which Lockheed was allowed “to design, test, and produce the F-35 all at the same time,” instead of identifying and fixing “defects before firing up its production line”.By 2014, the program was “$163 billion over budget [and] seven years behind schedule.” Critics also contend that the program’s high sunk costs and political momentum make it “too big to kill”.
Aircraft of this type are enthusiastically sought by air forces because others might have similar and because of the general enthusiasms that infect air forces. Of course a Japanese purchase like this needs to be seen in the context of Japan’s large foreign reserves and negligible cost of money in Japan.
Big tech items, military and civil, are central to the approach of the US to stem the tide of declining competitiveness. The Boeing 737MAX built in haste with accountant imperatives
has (yet to be measured) negative consequences for the US, political and financial. There are 96 MAX aircraft grounded in China and Chinese airlines will seek compensation for this loss. As will others.
We have recently been witness to an alleged security alert in the Persian Gulf. With suggestions that Iran must be responsible for non-critical damage to several oil ships not shown to journalists and drone attacks from places unknown on pumping stations in Saudi Arabia causing slight damage. In response to this US naval forces in the Gulf have been expanded, to a total strength there much greater than the rest of NATO could assemble anywhere. There is ambiguity in threats by the US towards Iran. It seems to me that the major achievement of this American deployment against a declared threat has been Presidential approval of arms sales that would probably not be approved by Congress. I find my suspicion has been articulated already by The Intercept.
There continues to be discussion as to whether we should take sides with either China or the US. I wrote recently about how the choice is about how to see the world.
But war commitment too often arises from inadvertence and unexpected foci of irritation inflaming public opinion and policy: from Sarajevo 1914, to the Gulf of Tonkin 1964, excuse for widening US commitment in Vietnam, to the minor event near the Gulf of Tonkin in 2019 involving the Australian navy.
Menzies said in 1939 that as Britain was at war with Germany, so was Australia. We live still on such a slope of easy commitment. At what level are alternatives discussed and by what strategic judgement are we engaged in Indo-Pacific exercises aimed at China, far from Australia, far from the US? Where is the debate?
Dennis Argall’s career included work in Foreign Affairs and Defence departments and overseas postings including Washington and as Ambassador to China.
