Hong Kong and Londonderry and the global crowding of everything.

This posted to John Menadue's blog on 15 August

DENNIS ARGALL Hong Kong and Londonderry and the global crowding of everything.

Posted on 15 August 2019

The uproar in Hong Kong has become very serious, with a situation as developed in 1989 before Tiananmen: of leaders unable to cope and an uprising implacable in resolve and unable to focus on achievable objectives. The comparison should not be overdrawn but Hong Kong now is threatening greater consequence than did Tiananmen. Tactically the police have made mistakes in dealing with trapped demonstrators as on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972, staining decades with misery.

This is written on the night of 12 August 2019, events are unfolding but I make observations that may endure.  

Looking at the live YouTube Hong Kong coverage of long days of peaceful protest, degenerating regularly as families have gone home into tough guys shifting to confrontation with police, there was generally a pattern of police restraint.  But things deteriorate.

Without doubt ordinary police are suffering from fatigue, as much as demonstrators. But this does not explain the way things have gone awry.

There has no doubt been a strategy of restraint on the part of the Hong Kong Government, also a strategy of not conceding to violence and not allowing public places to be occupied indefinitely. The government and police have not had answers to  the way attacks have evolved. Intelligence would seem to be lacking. Political and administrative leaders have been flat-footed and uninspiring, affronted not leading.

As of Monday 12 August protest anger has shifted up a notch following an incident in a rail station where a bean bag pellet fired at short range destroyed a woman’s eye. Notch by notch the distinction between the mass of demonstrators and the more militant may reduce. Demands increase. And with Hong Kong airport occupied and all departures cancelled, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4juPPrdZYM Chinese official media are now running film, with drum beats, of Chinese armed police units lining up in Shenzhen two days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKjTmJM5tdU  This official video refers to the Law of the People’s Republic of China on People’s Armed Police, text here: http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Law/2011-02/16/content_1620753.htm

It may seem odd to compare with events on Bloody Sunday in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 30 January 1972, given that Londonderry had a population as I recall, of about 26,000 at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)

But the great loss of life on one day in Derry, 28 wounded of whom 14 died promptly, another person weeks later, was caused by tactical error much as evident in individual skirmishes in Hong Kong. The paratroopers sent into Derry were untrained for the circumstance and they cut off paths of retreat for demonstrators. A complex of descent into horror occurred then in Derry as develops now in Hong Kong. Although a British army officer attending the Australian Chief of General Staff’s annual exercises later in 1972 was able to provide already an account of tactical error in Londonderry in such terms, such official awareness did not prevent the consequences of that day rolling on through long decades of nastiness.

Tactical mishandling of conflict in Hong Kong in recent and coming weeks will cast long shadows. In both Londonderry and Hong Kong, bitternesses have run deep. Everything is magnified, intensified. The scale of distraught in Hong Kong is now off the chart and climbing.
—-
In 1982 an American ethologist coined the term “behavioural sink” to describe the collapse of behaviour resulting from overcrowding, shown in experiments with rats. As is commonplace in the social sciences, this hypothesis vanished down its own behavioural sink, a rabbit hole of debate about the relevance of rat experiments to understanding human behaviour. But it seems to me at a minimum relevant to examination of the state of the world approaching 2020; a useful metaphor.

I think of ‘crowding’ now not just physical or geographical but also the volume, velocity and excitement of what floods most people most days, through the internet, elevating awareness of global bad spots, local political, economic and social atrocities, through diverse megaphones. This is a new neurological and psychological experience for individuals. The internet has of course been an engine of insurrectionist uprising for some time but things get more disruptive.

Hong Kong offers a dramatic example of a ‘behavioural sink’, with

• High population density,
• Entrapment of ordinary people in a society dominated by an extraordinarily rich elite,
• The role of ordinary people being to serve the local and visiting rich from other countries and the Chinese mainland, the role of the very rich to buy and sell anyone and anything (not entirely unusual)
• For twenty years or more any ordinary person falling out of work after age 40 in Hong Kong has had great difficulty finding new employment,
• Whereas forty years ago Hong Kong was unique as a doorway to China, now Hong Kong is a relative backwater as many other places in China have grown from nothing to greater than Hong Kong as doors to the world,
• The current political system with mildly democratic elements is shaped by a deathbed conversion to participatory democracy by a departing British tenant,
• Historically riddled with spy organisations and movements for foreign religions and political agendas,
• Pervasive awareness of news and worse via the internet leading now to organising of rebellion via the internet
• Governed by the upper crust of all the foregoing, led by a chief minister with history and reputation as a tough administrator… but politically naïve,
• Policed by police not of the elite but for half a century of high standard of integrity with a union speaking out now about their misery and resentment at being put in the middle of the current street situation… and remaining mainly restrained … but lacking tactics to deal with the way situations have developed
• Living with the time bomb of end of special status within China in 2047, as agreed with Britain in 1997. But 2047 is as far ahead as the Tiananmen events are in the past. China’s GDP per capita passed $300 in 1989, passed $8000 in 2015. But who thinks, in troubled circumstances, how things may be thirty years ahead?

Hong Kong is only one of many places on the globe in torment, driven partly by impacts of economic management and by imperial attitudes of political leaders, diverse chiefs going wilful as the world is whacked by the singular and monstrous contributions of the rule-breaking unruly Trump, kneecapping cherished beliefs and institutions at home and abroad, enabling the utterance of untruth in all directions daily with scarce rebuttal…  bringing news everywhere that uprising against authority can succeed.

In 1989, in days leading to the Tiananmen Incident, there was comparable circumstance in the incapacity of leadership to cope and the implacable unwillingness of the besiegers of the state to compromise and adopt realisable objectives.

What follows now in Hong Kong will have consequences beyond China.

Dennis Argall is a former Australian ambassador to China. His undergraduate studies were in social anthropology, his masters degree from the Australian Defence Force Academy.

History and the statuses of Hong Kong and Taiwan in China

I wrote the following paper two days ago, it became too long and unwieldy for John Menadue's blog. Difficult to cover multiple dimensions and several centuries in a short note. I will be trying to convert it into shorter notes, but I am concerned that making it brief tends too often to lead to that standard current era genre of "I'm just so smart, take my word for it" adopted now by everyone and dog, as truth and awareness of wider context and history vanish. 

So here below is my disorderly draft, as is for now.

...but first, see this Caspian Report video essay released since my writing below. Caspian Report becomes more professional, I wonder who sits in the back room. This video essay raises questions. I might question some of the argument, or inflection, but it's a valuable start point. I marvel at the geostrategic circumstance of writing from Azerbaijan... where you have the geostrategic at the breakfast table and on the bus, not just in mental speculation.

Also valuable in this moment is the series of essays produced twenty four hours ago by the South China Morning Post. The SCMP, in Hong Kong for a very long time, is owned these days by Jack Ma, who created Alibaba, something of a parallel with Jeff Bezos, creator of Amazon, owning the Washington Post. See this video from the World Economic Forum to understand the Jack Ma perspective, as counter to China as monolithic boogeyman role cast by many commentators.

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Here then is my draft paper of 29 August, on the status of Taiwan and Hong Kong.
It is written with Australian readers in mind, but of wider value.

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The situation in Hong Kong becomes more difficult. And reporters covering Hong Kong increasingly bring Taiwan into the story. It is useful to have an understanding of the history underlying the status of Hong Kong and Taiwan in China and the attitudes that come from turbulent history.

If you depend on the news from the Australian Broadcasting Commission (let alone the less responsible) you will understand our neighbourhood in East Asia not with balance but mainly in violent terms, with a rush to cover demos more familiar in tabloid rabblerousing. And with curious fear of change in the balance of power, promoting the security and strategy industries in their militaristic focus in international affairs. It is easy to see how government ministers could be perplexed.

https://search-beta.abc.net.au/#/?query=hong%20kong

https://search-beta.abc.net.au/#/?query=china

https://search-beta.abc.net.au/#/?query=taiwan

More level heads can be found regarding Hong Kong.

“I can understand the disquiet of Hong Kong people subject to a China that under Xi Jinping has increasingly stressed the control of the Chinese Communist Party, over every sphere of life in China and not just in Hong Kong. But Hong Kong lost that battle before it even began.

“Ever since the end of the Qing Dynasty in the late 19^th century, the legitimacy of Chinese governments – Imperial, Republican or Communist – has rested on the ability to defend China’s sovereignty and its borders.  I don’t think Beijing is eager to exercise direct control over Hong Kong. But the unity of China is not a matter on which any Chinese government will ever compromise.”

“Harsh Truths for Hong Kong” Bilahari Kausikan. former head of the Singapore  Foreign Ministry, July 9, 2019.  https://globalbrief.ca/2019/07/harsh-truths-for-hong-kong/

“A Hong Kong ruined by instability, anger and perpetual protest works for no one — not for the government, nor for the protesters, nor for Beijing. It would be a tragedy for the world to see this wonderful and vibrant city avoided by visitors, its population divided and demoralised. A resolution in which the grievances of the protesters are addressed, the administration is restored in credibility, and the Beijing government is recognised for having acted responsibly and respectfully might seem like a distant prospect at the moment, but it is precisely this outcome that all parties, and the world, should support.”

“On the Brink” Inside Story 16 August 2019, Kerry Brown, former Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. https://insidestory.org.au/on-the-brink-2/

On 19 August the South China Morning Post published four essays, which are invaluable to understanding the evolution of the situation. Start here, links at end of each to the others.

As regards Taiwan, there is much focus on the current Taipei administration’s approaches. toying lightly with independence, playing with support in the US, especially among Republicans. But with the 24-hour news cycle and perhaps twenty-four-days-awareness of history, there is no mention that while the KMT (Kuomintang) lost the Taiwan presidency in elections in 2012, it won local government elections in a landslide in November 2018... and perhaps could win the 2020 presidential elections. The KMT sees Taiwan as part of China, has been central to China's political history from the 1911 revolution. The KMT is a member of the International Democratic Union, as is the Liberal Party of Australia; John Howard was chair of the IDU 2002-2014. 

Decades ago my advice to defence staff colleges and other audiences in seeking to understand China and other issues was to avoid focusing on some point on the rim of a wheel of the bouncing vehicle and try to understand the vehicle and its movement as a whole. 

With concern to broaden perspectives, my purpose here is to provide historical background to the status of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

China sees two hundred years of history leading up to 2049 as in two parts. First, a century of invasion and ‘unequal treaties’ in which China was wrecked by western imperial powers and Japan. The second century, from the 1949 revolution, a century (not without ruckus) of reordering and recovery of status… as the ‘Middle Kingdom’, literal translation of the Chinese word for China. 

China in the 1700s had been an economic power comparable to Europe. But was closed to the enlightenment ripping through Europe and to the Industrial Revolution.

When Portuguese ships had entered the Indian Ocean from 1497, those ships were technologically comparable to the great number of Chinese, Malay, Javanese, Indian, Arab and African vessels they encountered.  Later, larger Dutch ships with more advanced firepower defeated all, including for example Portuguese in the Moluccas in what is now Indonesia; on the island of Banda murdering the local population, custodians of all nutmeg trees, and replacing the locals with slaves.

The Portuguese had been raping and pillaging and trading at Canton (Guangzhou) in China from 1516, but more stable relations led to a 1554 treaty which eventually allowed Portuguese settlement and warehouses at Macau, but not fortifications. The uproar in Hong Kong won’t be followed in Macau. A story about Macau in the days of the end of Portuguese empire here; more history here.

The Qing dynasty 1644-1912 opened more readily to trade, after taking Taiwan from the Koxinga in 1683. The Koxinga were supporters of the Ming dynasty, which was defeated by the Qing in 1644, wise in the ensuing violence for the Koxinga to duck off to Taiwan, as Chiang Kai-shek would do in 1949. …Speaking of political violence in the mid-1600s I’m reminded of English history.

The Koxinga drove the Dutch out of Formosa (Taiwan) in 1662. The Dutch had taken Taiwan from the Spanish in 1642, an outcome of the Eighty Years War. Taiwan’s colonial history began with a Portuguese settlement in 1544, a settlement that became Spanish after 1580 when the Hapsburg kings of Spain became kings of Portugal. But New Spain, headquartered in Mexico City, was too busy coping with Dutch and British warships at Manila to defend Formosa. 

Trading through Canton, the British had found themselves in the early 1800s in that very modern situation of having an adverse trade balance with China because Chinese products were very popular back in Britain. The remedy? — Grow opium in India and demand its use in China. When Chinese authorities said the British could not bring opium into China the British insisted and there followed the First Opium War [1839-1842] which set a pattern of European powers bringing pressure for concessions by Chinese rulers local and national, going to war when resisted… and then demanding concessions as reparation. The British dominated the opium business and thus had a particularly nasty role in China’s degradation, on a huge scale and more devastating than what the Dutch did to monopolise the nutmeg trade. The great trading houses of Hong Kong and Hong Kong's upper crust of wealth, arose from that. Current uproar reflects not just issues with Beijing but class struggle in Hong Kong and the tin ears of the mighty.

Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty, end of the 1800s, there was an uprising against the foreign– the Boxer Rebellion– a wild rejection of foreign things and beliefs, of foreign dominance and the presence of foreigners in China. Imperial powers came to the rescue, again with demands for reparation and predilection to pillage and loot. Portrayed in our world in such movies as these. The Australian War Memorial, an institution that does not have the courage to recognise punitive expeditions against indigenous people in Australia, says this about Australia’s role in the Boxer Rebellion.

The territory we know as Hong Kong had two parts in origin. Hong Kong Island was seized by Britain during the First Opium War in 1841, ceded to Britain in 1842, became a Crown Colony and expanded to include in the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 in the Second Opium War. Context here. The New Territories, beyond Kowloon, were a 99-year lease from 1898. It was in the years before that lease expired in 1997 that London and Beijing negotiated return of the whole to Beijing. 

Lost from general sight is the role of China in World War I. The Qing had been overthrown in a revolution in 1911, led by Sun Yatsen, founder of the KMT. But the centre did not hold, warlords took power in various places. With Japan entering World War I on the side of the Triple Alliance against Germany, Japan took the Chinese province of Shandong from Germany, much as Australia seized New Guinea from Germany. China sent 100,000 workers to Europe, to support the military effort against Germany, offers of troops rejected.  China hoped to get Shandong back in the peace settlement. But Japan kept Shandong. The curious role of Australian Prime Minister Hughes in this, revealed recently, reminds us of deep racist roots in Australia and of how statesmen may regard lesser places and peoples as toys, or proxies and fail to understand how things they do can have extensive and unintended, unacknowledged consequences.

Loss of Shandong thus to Japan in 1919 by the Versailles Treaty precipitated the ‘May Fourth Movement’. Whereas the 10 October 1911 nationalist uprising (still marked as National Day in Taipei) faltered, the May Fourth movement profoundly changed China and saw the founding of the Communist Party, which then worked with the Nationalist Party (KMT) in a United Front for some years. Central figure in the May Fourth Movement was the Dean of the Arts Faculty at Peking University Chen Duxiu, who was one of the founders of the Communist Party in 2021 and its first General Secretary. Whereas the Boxer Rebellion had rejected the foreign, the 2011 revolution and May Fourth Movement were led by modernisers looking abroad for ways to overturn the feudalism of the Qing. Gregor Benton has just published a book on Poets of the Chinese Revolution including Chen Duxiu and Mao. Deep historical traditions are embedded in Chinese political life. 

May Fourth is a key date marked in the official calendar… and by dissidents. Like this dissident statement this year. 

Within mainland China dissident statements have not been post-it sized as we see in Hong Kong now, in the founding of the communist party by poets and artists, the feuding among leaders or at the Democracy Wall in 1978-79. Hong Kong, long insulated from the intellectual as well as political turmoil of the mainland, is catching up in recent decades. Dissidents who based themselves in Hong Kong after Democracy Wall and Tiananmen are not marginal now. Meanwhile the Asia Times reports that leaders in Beijing, at their summer confab at the beach in Beidaihe have reportedly retreated to belief that what is happening in Hong Kong is a ‘colour revolution’ involving many foreign countries; the SCMP reports on the interdepartmental muddle of China’s efforts to understand and deal with Hong Kong contributing to incomprehension.

…

Taiwan and other territory had been taken by Japan by the Treaty of Shimonoseki ending the first Sino-Japanese war 1894-5. During World War II, at the 1943 Cairo Conference, the UK, US and China (President Chiang Kai-shek leader of the KMT) issued a press release saying that at war’s end "all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, including Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." The more formal Potsdam Declaration in 1945, the USSR now present, affirmed the intentions regarding those territories as expressed at Cairo.

During the period of Japanese invasion and occupation of China in that Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-45 the Nationalists (KMT) retreated their capital to Chongqing in Sichuan Province as Japan seized Beijing, Shanghai and more. Han Suyin’s memoirs provide a vivid account. The Communist Party was headquartered in Yan’an, mountainous country north of Xian. After 1945 the KMT came back down to Nanjing and in 1949, losing the civil war, fled with numbers and treasures to Taiwan, locating the capital of the Republic of China in Taipei, while the government of the People’s Republic of China took office in Peking (Beijing).

Australia pursued a Commonwealth initiative to seek a solution to the ‘China problem’ until the Offshore Islands Crisis of 1958 when Prime Minister Menzies announced that henceforward our China policy would be that of the US.

Nonetheless, while the Republic of China retained an embassy in Canberra we did not open an embassy in Taipei until 1966 (a one sentence cabinet decision without submission, after the very popular Chinese Ambassador buttonholed Prime Minister Holt at a party). The ROC had territorial claims larger than the PRC, including to the territory of the Mongolian People’s Republic. It has never sought recognition as ‘Taiwan’.

In 1971 the UN General Assembly by Resolution 2758 restored the seat of China in the UN to Beijing, including China’s permanent seat on the Security Council along with the Britain, France, the US and USSR (now Russia). In that period a number of governments shifted recognition of Government of China from Taipei to Beijing. Australia did so in December 1972, among the first actions of the Whitlam Government in a process of relating foreign policy to realities in Asia. Claimant to the title of Government of China, Taipei immediately withdrew recognition from governments shifting recognition to Beijing and expelled their embassies. Britain had never withdrawn its embassy from Beijing, recognising the People’s Republic of China. The shift of recognition to Beijing by France in 1964 disrupted NATO. Pakistan had recognised Beijing in 1951, nonetheless participating in SEATO and CENTO, elements of US ‘containment’ of China for many years, reminders of times past when Australia was participant in plans for war with China.

With a background of vicious fighting on the Korean peninsula (some of it currently being reviewed by the Moon administration in Seoul) North Korean forces invaded the south in June 1950. The Korean War 1950-53 is another subject but the US Seventh Fleet was promptly sent to the Taiwan Strait to inhibit conflict between the PRC and ROC. 

In the period of China’s revolutionary war, with Nationalist and Communist headquarters far apart and at war after the United Front of the 1920s broke down, the United States maintained a mission in Yan’an, to the Communists, as well as an embassy to the ROC in Chongqing. The “loss of China” saw the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, Senator McCarthy’s first target being those State Department officers whose careers had directed them into contact with the Communists, rather than those assigned to Chongqing, to the Nationalists. The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chongqing government built its American connections from which to sustain conservative support in the US, through associates from that time such as General Chennault, who like other military leaders on other wars since, told the Congress that they would not have lost China is civilian government had given the military enough means to win. Without understanding broader contexts. 

In Taiwan, in 1947, the Nationalists had violently suppressed a popular uprising. Chiang and his son as successive presidents of the Republic of China from 1949 did not permit political opposition in Taiwan until the ending of martial law in 1991. Wikipedia provides background to that period. A recent Brookings Institution paper sets out dilemmas now faced by Taiwan, of which China is just one. And notes that

Civil society activism reflects a growing disenchantment in some quarters with the performance of representative institutions. Even though the Taiwan public generally favors democracy as a political system, it does not necessarily approve the policy performance of their own democratic system.

There is some of that evident in public opinion polls in Australia. We advocate for democracy everywhere while democracy in too many places is in difficulty, unpopular, a weak instrument for addressing fast moving issues. We should be careful with our evangelisms, aware of shortcomings in our institutions and beliefs. 

Dennis Argall is a former Australian ambassador to China. 

Regarding Hong Kong

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.

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Yes, you make a good point Cxxx.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-20/the-christians-behind-the-hong-kong-protests/11224766

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hong_Kong_Chief_Executive_election

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.

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3015595/hong-kong-extradition-bill-no-singapore-living-fear-city-ripping

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.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/2165872/why-wealth-gap-hong-kongs-disparity-between-rich-and-poor

By and large there is less inequality in mainland China

https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-017-0640-9

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

http://chinaheritage.net/journal/imminent-fears-immediate-hopes-a-beijing-jeremiad/

The biggest mistake we can make is to think of China as one great authoritarian blob.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rule-of-the-rigid-compromiser/

Australia absents itself from the world

This essay of mine first published in John Menadue's blog 21 June 2019.
Also see these [1] [2], same day.

Photos and videos added here.

DENNIS ARGALL. Absenting Ourselves From the World.

Posted on 21 June 2019

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.

from wikipedia

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.

—Democracy Wall 1978, also a glimpse of life in the streets in Beijing very much as we saw it back then, discussed in my previous essay at http://cephalophoria.blogspot.com/2019/06/tiananmen-in-context.html

and

—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.

An interesting caption from the national broadcaster!

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:

http://chinaheritage.net/journal/mother-china-a-fatherland-for-two-millennia/

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:

https://www.beltandroad.news/2019/04/28/joint-communique-of-the-leaders/

and the list of deliverables from that meeting:

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1658767.shtml

source Manila Times

The particulars extend to achieving sensible tax systems through a very large number of countries, of relevance nationally and in the facilitation of trade. Here is a commentary on that from the Philippines:
https://www.manilatimes.net/chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-and-tax-administration/555292/

and as primary source, here is the action plan agreed at a conference in Wuzhen, China, in May 2019.

http://www.chinatax.gov.cn/download/pdf/wuzhenactionplan.pdf

This next is the conference statement… get used to the acronyms: BRITACOF, BRITACOM, BRITACEG.

http://www.chinatax.gov.cn/download/pdf/wuzhenstatement.pdf

There were Australian officials there.

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. 

I wrote this essay the day
the CSIRO published this sobering outlook paper

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.

This commentary by Geremie Barmé

https://chinachannel.org/2018/04/27/zhengyou/

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.

Political thought in China

Right in the middle of this astonishing book

...is this entry, at pages 366-7.

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.

Thinking through the choppy issues in trade and strategic threat.

As published today in John Menadue's blog.

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.”

http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/894160.html

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.

On this ranking of international competitiveness

https://www.imd.org/contentassets/6b85960f0d1b42a0a07ba59c49e828fb/one-year-change-vertical.pdf

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.

https://transnationalasia.rice.edu/journal/Volume-2/Issue-1/Number-4

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html

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.

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/24/us-saudi-arabia-arms-sales/

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.

http://johnmenadue.com/dennis-argall-australian-strategic-posture-from-here-forward/

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.

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/australian-pilots-hit-with-lasers-during-indo-pacific-exercise/

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.

on the need for more thought about Australian strategic policy

This was published on John Menadue's blog on 28 May 2019

DENNIS ARGALL: Australian strategic posture from here forward

Posted on 28 May 2019

There is no sign of political enthusiasm to grasp the need for coherent national strategy, but basic principles need to be put in place and three particulars need urgent attention.

Australia’s international strategy has somehow slipped to mean, in political and public minds, military strategy. This is wrong and needs to be corrected. It should be central to Australian strategy that we seek war avoidance and pursuit of Australian interests by non-military means. This should be obvious but it’s not how things stand. Resort to the use of force needs to be put back in its place as an instrument of policy, bearing in mind Clausewitz’s admonition that statesmen need to be aware that this instrument of policy, having been embarked upon, tends to drive out policy and pursue its own ends. The question must remain “what are we trying to do here, what do we need?” rather than “what will we do with these submarines that will be irrelevant to security before they slide into the water?”  (substitute aircraft, other weapon systems and the overall comprehensive integration of Australian defence forces into interoperability with US forces.) Which is the brain, which is the tail of this dog?

I should perhaps stop there.  If focus goes towards that kind of thinking all else should fall into place.

But there are three urgent needs.

1: The United States Government needs to be told clearly that Australia will not go to war with Iran. One needs to say such things while they are hypothetical.  Leaving aside arguing this way and that on issues, such a war would not work. Some basics:

Iran area 1.6 million square kilometers.  Just a bit less than the combined land area of the UK 240,000, France 640,000, Germany 357,000 and Spain 506,000.

Iran culturally complex. They already had very complex societies and governance, agriculture, industry and defence capacity long before the brave English King Richard the Lionheart paid to use the flag of St George of Genoa to sail safely along the scary Mediterranean to whack Muslims. To go to war now with Iran, leaving out of the equation the use of nuclear weapons, would be like the old joke about Russia attacking China: “on day 1 the Russians advanced and took a million prisoners; on days two and three they did the same again… and on day four they surrendered.” Ludicrous, foolish to contemplate…but inasmuch as Bolton dreams about it, we need to say “no, not us, not this time” even before thinking through the Iran issues which do not compel to violence. It is a curious situation to have Trump as best hope against madness.

2: US and China. Interesting that while Jeff Bezos who made Amazon owns the Washington Post, Jack Ma, his China equivalent, who established Alibaba, now owns the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.  A better paper since Murdoch gave it up.

On 21 May 2019 the SCMP gave substantial coverage to President Xi Jinping’s speech commemorating the Long March, in which for a year, in 1934-35,  the Chinese Communist Party walked away from conflict to survival and a future.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3011186/xi-jinping-calls-new-long-march-dramatic-sign-china-preparing

A Long March in which Bob Hawke’s great friend. General Secretary Hu Yaobang, was once left on the battlefield triaged to die, and on another occasion was sentenced to death — Hu, whose purging and later death in 1989 precipitated the popular push for freedom in Tiananmen Square, after the crushing of which Hawke wept at a service in Parliament House in Canberra and granted residence to a host of Chinese in Australia at that time, the second wave of Chinese to shape Australia. I am old enough to have seen the anti-Chinese yellow peril advertising by conservatives in the 1950s, wise enough to recognise the old-as-Australia hysterical nonsense in the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment being whipped up now in Australia. We have to get back to the values in the Australia-China relationship as they were before they vanished under money and thoughtlessness in the Howard years. We don’t have to agree with China on everything, just as we should not have to agree with the US on everything.  The mark of a valuable country, a valuable friend, is possession of clear mind, with confidence and ability to express views that are fair, clear and directed at positive outcomes. Views that add, not just mimic. A vice foreign minister in Beijing, one night as we politely endured a long cultural event together in 1985, said: “we have always appreciated the way you have dealt with difficult issues. You have made Australia’s interests clear and Australia’s views are seen by us in that light and unlike the United States Australia has dealt with issues calmly, unlike our situation with the United States, where issues too often are inflamed and insoluble.

We tell, or we should tell, our children such principles. Easy.  Can we get back to that sort of practical decency.  Back from in the immaturity of social media and the general rubbish of much mainstream news in Australia about the region, our attention dragged to saucy margins. Can we focus on the fact that China’s population is 56 times greater than Australia’s population; that China has land borders with fourteen other countries; that the fifty five ethnic minority populations in China number around 120 million, about five Australias. Imagine our border security chiefs dealing with all that!

China is positioning itself for likely failure of sensible negotiation with the Trump Administration. Xi Jinping has called on China to undertake another Long March. We do not know to what extent China may need to discard its western financial assets. China holds over a trillion dollars in US Treasury Notes. The prospect is not of flamboyant shedding of such assets, but we should expect China to continue as now to pick apart dependence on the dollar in international finance. There is a measure of hysteria about the BRI, China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As noted above China is a continental state, with borders with fourteen other countries and long traditions and modern practical advantages in rail and other ground connection with the world. White globalism has a history of talking down to China. China now expects others to understand its five principles of peaceful coexistence. This is a useful little paper from Columbia University on that.

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1950_forpol_principles.htm

Contrast with the dominant meme in US strategic thinking, as first articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan, first commandant of the US Naval War College. Thousands of metres of writing and doctrine-building about that but at its core, the idea that there can only be one dominant navy, one dominant power. As articulated not least by former president Clinton to the 2012 Democratic Party nominating convention: “We can and we will be great again.” That’s a dream, a problem-building dream, not a basis for strategy that works unless for example you really just want to be National Security Advisor to the President and have a big horse.

There is a big clash between how China and the US see the world.  We need to be focused on defining Australian interests and the weight we give to negotiation and dispute resolution on the one hand and violence on the other.  In a letter to then Foreign Minister Downer in 2003, I wrote:

I have become increasingly of the view… that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else – certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ – to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading.

I also said then that

I am … of the view that since September 2001 we have been watching events and strategic responses unfolding as at the outbreak of war in 1914:

• Delusions of moral rectitude.

• Defence of imperial status quo.

• Nothing but narrow military options.

• Resort to alliances, hostility to thought.

• Vilification of the enemy, climate of fear and promotion of paranoia.

• Simplistic notions of victory, expectations of speedy end.

• Failure to address real wider issues.

• Enveloping sea of violence.

Alex didn’t reply. The problems still swell. We are so stuck that we have lost track of how permissible vocabulary and attitude have shrunk since 2001 as also we fail to see that the diverse horrors around the planet as they proliferate are directly comparable to the out-of-control mental frameworks and eruptions of WW1. As a nation we shut up fifteen years ago, as told to do. But the wrongs against which people spoke in 2003 are there still and are larger, smothered though they may be by downloadable pap projectable on finer and finer TV screens, far from reality.

3: Indonesia

Somehow we have to have a brain-reset about Indonesia. Away from cheap holidays to understanding that this country next door with ten times Australia’s population has a GINI coefficient (measure of inequality) not far from Australia’s. Its GDP will very soon pass Australia’s. Its affluent consumer class will soon be eight times Australia’s population. Had Indonesia at any time pursued adventurist power projection policies like Australia’s we would have fainted long ago and gone home to mamma. It is amazing that sensible nearby countries dealing with huge problems in development have continued to take seriously almost all Australian leaders, or at least receive them politely. If we cannot advance in prosperity with Indonesia then we will as a medical professional suggested to me some time ago, be the white trash of Asia. Many of us in the foreign service from the 1950s and 1960s, when national perspectives were too often disrespectful and harmful sought to advance Australian interests in the world positively, avoiding the manner and style of Apartheid era South Africa in arrogance and ignorance. We have to make up for lost time.

Dennis Argall’s career in public service was cut short by illness.  For a time he was head of the parliament’s research service, before that in domestic, defence and foreign affairs departments and overseas postings including as Counselor and Acting Minister in Washington and as Ambassador to China.