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.

Tiananmen in Context

As published in John Menadue's blog on 12 June 2019. Photos and videos added here.

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.

Deng Xiaoping
Source Britannica

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.”

Source, China Today

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 and Deng, Beijing May 1989
Source, Foreign Policy

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.