Good afternoon, one and all. We live in a time of considerable turbulence and uncertainty. I feel sure that almost all of you last weekend were astonished by the five AFL games that were decided by less than a goal and the huge victories by the Giants and the Demons that propelled them, as well as Hawthorn, up the ladder and seemed to rewrite the script for the way the finals will play out in September. I don’t doubt that many of you are Eagles fans who revelled in their victory over the Dockers in the Western derby and are hoping for a premiership this year, but the current hegemon, Richmond, still sits on top of the table and looks hard to beat.
You didn’t think I’d open a speech about China and Australia like that, now did you? I did so, however, for two reasons. Australian Rules is a vastly popular game in this country and millions of us find it a great conversation starter, as well as a great metaphor when it comes to life’s challenges and the character traits it takes to succeed; sometimes with a fair bit of luck as well. And it could be useful to use it as a metaphor in trying to get perspective in 2018 on where the international geopolitical scene is heading and what is happening to the rules in Australia. We’re dealing with a complex matter of expectations and apprehensions, odds and efforts.
Make no mistake, the Chinese Communist Party, which runs a dictatorship of the most comprehensive kind in what it pleases to call the People’s Republic of China, has been systematically seeking to penetrate, influence and undermine our institutions and to interfere with the way the game is played here with regard to strategic policy, domestic politics, business, education and mass media. It has done so for some time now and the fruits of its efforts are in plain sight. Yet there are those who insist that nothing untoward has happened or is likely to happen. Ominously, there are many voices in both politics and business calling for criticism of China, which they call ‘China bashing’, to cease; on the grounds that it is unwarranted, racist and likely to damage our precious relationship with the powers that be in Beijing. Perish the thought.
In the Preface to his book on this subject, Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia, Clive Hamilton remarked early this year that he had been challenged to answer the question, ‘What about the Yanks?’ Clive is no-one’s idea of a right wing or even conservative voice; so his response to that challenge is all the more significant. There is a world of difference, he wrote:
Through the decades of the close relationship our big ally has never threatened to take away our freedoms. The United States never had the kind of economic leverage over Australia that China has, nor made threats to damage us if we did not toe its line. It hasn’t endangered our democratic system of elected governments and its government has never attempted to erode the rule of law. Nor has it attempted to mobilise a diaspora to oppose Australian policy. The United States government has never shut down dissenting views in Australia, even ones harshly critical of the USA. Can we imagine the United States government using our laws to frighten publishers into dropping a book criticising it?
There has been a great deal of brouhaha over the election and behaviour of Donald Trump and before that of surveillance operations conducted under the Obama administration, but altogether too many pundits seem to overlook the fact that China is ruled in a thoroughly and ruthlessly dictatorial manner and that the Party has suppressed and continues to suppress any and every organization that might pose the least challenge to its arbitrary rule. That Party has been seeking deliberately and systematically to extend its sway here. If we value our sovereignty, our liberties, our distinctive and very ingenuous Australian Rules, we must push back firmly and unyieldingly.
Having been born and raised not just an Australian, but a Melbournian, a Catholic and an NCC one at that and also a Collingwood fan, I have had to deal with a lot of changes in my time. You could say I grew up with the ideas of a universal religious community, anti-communism and the loss of Grand Finals in my bloodstream. In the course of my life, I’ve seen the Catholic Church go through its greatest challenges since the Reformation, I’ve witnessed the debacle of the Vietnam War, written a PhD on the Cold War and counterinsurgency strategy and then seen the Communist bloc collapse. Wonder of wonders, I’ve also actually seen Collingwood win two Grand Finals, in 1990 and 2010, as well as losing a lot more than that – eleven of them since I was born, to be precise[1]; not to mention numerous Preliminary Finals.[2]
I’ve had to inquire, learn and adjust my views along the way, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a development as astonishing as the rise not only of China – from the ashes of Maoism to economic ascendancy – but of Chinese influence in this country. Now, I’ve long been accustomed to supporters of other clubs rubbishing my adherence to the black and white and to non-Catholics and non-Christians expressing wonderment that anyone could have adhered to what they describe as the antediluvian tenets of Catholic doctrine. All this I’ve taken in my stride and my temperament and education have equipped me to carry on the conversation. But what we are now seeing, in terms of Chinese influence in Australia’s public life and national institutions, is really new and, frankly, the conversation is becoming quite disturbing. That’s why I agreed, early this year, to review Clive Hamilton’s book, when Hardie Grant defied Beijing and published it.
Let all those who still entertain any doubt on this subject understand that we are now seeing foreign influence in Australia from outside the Anglosphere as we have never seen it before. I say from outside the Anglosphere because influence from Great Britain or North America is not something that has disturbed our institutions. Rather, it has given us who we are from the time the British colonies here were created. What’s happening now is very different. It is a bid by a major power to reshape who we are.
For many years we have been urged from within to rethink our place in Asia and even our alliance relationship with the United States. We have also been urged to regret the way this island continent was colonized. We have been lectured about adhering to UN exhortations on one thing or another. But we have never before now faced the kind of intrusion and strategic manipulation that China is practising on us.
Having grown up during the Cold War and having done a PhD that was all about the Cold War, I say with some astonishment that at no point in the Cold War did we face a reality nearly as disturbing as that which now confronts us. Having been head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organization in the years after the big crackdown on democratic dissent in China, centred on Tiananmen Square, I have been an informed observer and analyst of China for many years.
My 2005 book Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China was an attempt to grapple with the overall implications of China’s rapidly growing wealth and power. As some of you will be aware, I have also written often over the years on the subject of Soviet espionage in this country during the Cold War. We now know that there were Soviet spy rings inside the Australian government in the 1940s and again in the 1970s and 1980s. This was all denied for years, but is now beyond dispute, though the moles have simply been pensioned off not prosecuted.
But there was never a time when pro-Soviet sentiment was widespread across much of the political spectrum, in many of the country’s top boardrooms, in the offices of the vice chancellors of our leading universities and among many of our strategic thinkers and opinion makers. To see former prime ministers, former foreign ministers, former trade ministers, former state premiers, former ambassadors, to say nothing of current political office holders and senior figures in the corporate world taking large sums of money from the Chinese Communist Party and its instrumentalities and speaking out against criticism of or concern about Chinese power and influence is astonishing to me, as I imagine it is to many of you. To see criticism of China shut down in our universities even as criticism of the United States or of Israel is unchecked and at times plain feral simply takes my breath away.
At the level of our folksy Australian Rules metaphor, you might say that it feels as if a whole series of past champions of the code and even officials within the AFL Commission suddenly started publicly praising soccer or rugby and urging that those who remain passionate AFL fans should shut up, because they are poisoning relationships between the codes. It’s that astonishing – to me, at least.
I speak as one who, raised on Australian Rules, has never taken any interest in soccer or rugby, much to the disgust of some of my friends or former Federal government colleagues, who grew up on rugby and disdain Australian Rules, to which they would derisively refer as ‘cross country ballet’. In truth, in a way that neither soccer nor rugby ever can be, Australian Rules is our game and those of us raised on it cherish it as a something distinctive and wonderful in our way of life. It’s as Australian as the kangaroo or the platypus.
Some months ago, I was lunching with a close relation, who has had a stellar career in banking and consulting. I politely raised with him the question as to what he thought of Andrew Robb taking an $880,000 p.a. part time job with a Chinese billionaire as soon as he left Federal parliament, having just been involved at the highest level in trade negotiations with China as the responsible minister. Without blinking, he responded, ‘There’s nothing wrong with what Andrew Robb has done. I know him well and he is a very ethical person. The man’s got a right to make a living.’ It isn’t my style, as a rule, to arc up in conversation and I saw no point in making an issue of this. But I’d have thought one’s right to make a living did not extend quite this far, or in this particular direction, from a starting point as trade minister.
Bob Carr – who generously described me as this country’s best public intellectual in his Diary of a Foreign Minister a few years ago - has been a target of criticism for the work he does at the Chinese funded Australia China Relations Institute (ACRI), in Sydney. I remarked in the draft of my review of Silent Invasion, some months ago, that he is dedicated to preventing acrimony in the relationship and for that reason is paid very good ACRI-money. The literary editor thought better of printing that barbed remark, but I must say I thought it both apposite and rather clever. I don’t know exactly how much Bob is receiving to run ACRI, but given the source I’m frankly concerned that he’s taking it at all.
And it seems that a long list of prominent Australians have been lining up to get such money. Our former prime minister and foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, is now being paid, I’m reliably informed, $1.2 million a year to run a think tank in New York. His salary comes through a body clearly linked to the Chinese government. Is it any wonder, then, that he denounced the foreign influence bill recently tabled in parliament by the Turnbull government as ‘McCarthyism’? Heaven forbid we should describe Mr Rudd as the Manchurian Candidate, but the source of his generation remuneration does raise questions.
When I joined the Defence Intelligence Organisation in 1990, one of the first and most interesting East Asia analysts I met was Geoff Raby. He was a protégé of Ross Garnaut and had been appointed to head the East Asia Analytical Unit in DFAT in the wake of Ross’s landmark report Australia and the North East Asian Ascendancy, published that year. I met Geoff and came to value his good sense and intelligence. His career prospered and he ended up as our Ambassador in China early this century; a plum job that I’d have loved to have myself. Shortly before he went to Beijing to take up that post, his EA called me and said Geoff would be visiting Melbourne and would like to take me out to dinner. I cheerfully accepted.
Over the dinner, Geoff declared to me how very much he enjoyed and really looked forward to reading my then regular essays in the Australian Financial Review. Those essays included quite a few that ended up being published in my book Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, as well as the thirty that were published a few years later in The West in a Nutshell. It meant a lot to me that someone heading off to represent the country in Beijing thought so highly of my work as a public intellectual. I last met him there in 2011. It is, therefore, with some bemusement that I have noted his recent public statements denouncing criticism of China and the foreign interference legislation in strident terms and even calling for Julie Bishop to be sacked as Foreign Minister. One might ask what team does Geoff now barrack for? Perhaps he now sees himself as cosmopolitan and above the fray? Perhaps he thinks that he doesn’t have a dog in the fight; though others might think he has one with rabies.
It is, I must say, as the former head of China analysis in the DIO, rather interesting to find so many senior government figures and so many senior business figures taking China’s side these days. I use the word ‘interesting’ in the best traditions of British understatement and irony. This is happening, let’s remind ourselves, as we shake our heads, even as the current analysts in the organizations I used to work for advise the present government that the foreign espionage and influence problem has reached, in the words of Duncan Lewis, Director General of ASIO ‘unprecedented levels’.
Duncan has warned that attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to exert influence in Australia pose “a direct threat to our nation’s liberties and its sovereignty.” Dennis Richardson has seconded these warnings. Are we not to take their warnings seriously? Whose word would you sooner trust on this: that of Duncan and Dennis, or that of Luke Foley – or perhaps Sam Dastyari or Joel Fitzgibbon?
Why, I ask myself, would a former ambassador now living and working in Beijing, making good money as a consultant and partnered to a beautiful Chinese woman – I can vouch for this, because I’ve met her - differ so fundamentally with the Director General of ASIO, himself a very highly regarded former commander of the SAS and head of counter-terrorism at PM&C, and the outgoing Secretary of Defence, himself a former Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Director General of ASIO?
Perhaps he knows something they don’t? Perhaps, actually, he knows things he’d prefer they didn’t know? From where I sit, I find myself wondering, what has caused Geoff to move so far from the time when he regarded my essays on China as something to look forward to and to savour? What is it in the polluted air of Beijing that has so turned his head? He might argue that it is simply a clearer grasp of reality. I fear we view that reality very differently.
The report in which Lewis’s and Richardson’s remarks were cited was written for ABC News by three journalists with whom I am personally acquainted and for all of whom I have a high regard: Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker and Chris Uhlmann. It was published on 6 June 2017. Before that, I had been approached by both Nick and Richard who wanted to run past me the things they were learning and to have my feedback on them, in order to put them in both historical and analytical perspective.
Few have done more to expose all this and help the Turnbull government to come to grips with it that former Beijing Fairfax correspondent John Garnaut. His essay ‘The Reset’ in The Monthly, August 2018, hot off the press, is indispensable reading on this subject. His message is three fold:
The Chinese Communist Party operates a vast clandestine apparatus for conducting foreign influence and interference operations and has been ramping up such operations as its economic growth soared this century.
We have been a major target of such operations, but have belatedly begun to grapple with this and the Turnbull government has – as of December last year – framed four bills designed to deal with the matter in transparent, democratic but firm terms.
All over the world, from Germany to Singapore to Canada and the United States, other countries are waking up to the same challenge and they see what we have started to do here as a model for how to contain the problem and push back against it.
Garnaut has himself, since he began to pursue this murky subject, been the target of attempted influence operations. As he writes:
I was offered red envelopes, neatly packed with $US100 bills. And sounded out for a lucrative ‘consultancy’ arrangement with a Hong Kong bank. In one encounter, I was offered air tickets, hotel accommodation, a five star family holiday, a job and a gift bag containing bottles of Bordeaux wine valued at up to $2000 each. These were all reciprocity traps, to be avoided at all costs. Gradually, over time, the ratio of carrots to sticks was inverted.
Garnaut’s willingness and capacity to resist both carrots and sticks has been admirable. Alas, one cannot say as much for a long list of our countrymen, who make all manner oif excuses for accepting the carrots.
Another unsung hero in all this is Professor John Fitzgerald, until recently both President of the National Academy of the Humanities and holder of a chair in Philanthropy and Australian Society at Swinburne University. His background is as a scholar of modern Chinese history. I have now known John for some twenty years. I first became acquainted with him after reviewing his prize winning 1996 book Awakening China for Quadrant, at the request of its then editor Robert Manne.
The book is about how the Chinese revolution veered from liberal democratic to Leninist inclinations in the 1920s, not only because of the formation of the Communist Party in 1921, though that was crucial, but because Sun Yatsen himself came to the view that a successful nationalist revolution required a political movement run on basically Leninist lines. I remarked in opening my review that the book was brilliant and should be read by anyone with a serious interest in modern Chinese history and the prospects for political liberalization in China in the 21st century.
Those lines were quoted by the Levenson Prize committee in awarding the prize to John the next year. They were quoted again in the advertisement of the book in Foreign Affairs. They were quoted a third time as the leading blurb on the back of the paperback edition of the book. John and I have been friends since and I have come to esteem him as one of the finest of China scholars, one of the finest of Australian gentlemen and one of the most concerned and engaged of specialists on this vexed matter of Chinese influence operations in Australia.
In the late 2000s, he was appointed head of the Ford Foundation office in China, based in Beijing, and I visited him there in 2011. He was very concerned about the difficulties he was having trying to work constructively with the Communist Party within China. He is now very concerned about its systematic attempts to extend its influence here. He wrote for quotation on the front cover of Clive Hamilton’s controversial book Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia that it was ‘An important book for the future of Australia.’
Earlier this year, I was asked to review Clive’s book, when Hardie Grant agreed to publish it, after several publishers, starting with Allen and Unwin, had shied away from doing so, for fear of antagonizing the Chinese Communist Party. A month or so earlier, Twiggy Forrest became one of a series of prominent figures in this country to publicly deplore expressions of concern about Chinese influence here.
At a Lunar New Year dinner here in Perth, hosted by the Australia China Business Council, he denounced what he called ‘immature commentary’ about China. ‘This has to stop,’ he declared, as it fuels ‘distrust, paranoia and a loss of respect.’ Adam Handley of Minter Ellison, West Australian president of the ACBC, agreed. They spoke of China as being ‘an ally’, which we need more than it needs us and which has been ‘neglected in recent times, as Australia lost sight of its long term national interests.’
Now, of course, when they said that the debate has to stop, they were not objecting to Hugh White calling for Australia to distance itself from America and make large concessions to China. Nor were they calling for Bob Carr to pipe down in his unapologetic apologetics for Beijing. Nor were they calling on Paul Keating to cease and desist from his calls for us to jettison the ANZUS alliance and go our own way by going China’s way.
It was Clive Hamilton and his sources they wanted to shut up: some of this country’s finest investigative journalists, serious academics and security intelligence analysts, collated by his brilliant young research assistant, Alex Joske. It is the work of these people that Twiggy and Adam were stigmatizing and deploring: Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Chris Uhlmann and John Fitzgerald and others, to say nothing of the staff working for Dennis Richardson or Duncan Lewis.
If, however, Forrest, Handley, Carr and others seriously believe that all this investigation and commentary is ‘immature’ and ‘must stop’, they will need to make their case a lot better than they have so far, I wrote in March. Indeed, they have hoist themselves by their own petard in calling for it to stop. Either they are in the market for mature debate, or they aspire to do as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) routinely and ruthlessly does: suppress information and opinions at variance with its perceived interests and disdain open debate altogether.
Do they seriously believe that this would be in our country’s national interest, in either the short or the long term? Do they seriously believe that we should shut down our civil society, our free press and our counter-espionage institutions to avoid upsetting the precious commissars in Beijing?
In any case, both Forrest and Handley are confused. China is not an ‘ally’ of Australia; it is a trading partner. We have many trading partners: the United States, the EU, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia and others. Many of them have their differences with China and are engaged in trying to think through their security in the context of China’s rising power and its overweening ambitions.
Those ambitions have been made explicit by Xi Jinping, now unrivalled autocrat in China’s one party state: to replace the United States as the world’s greatest economic and military power by the middle of this century. Time was when the character and ideology of that state would have caused political and business figures here to recoil and treat it with the greatest circumspection. Now the merest suggestion that we debate its strategic ambitions and its growing influence here is denounced by many of them as paranoia and something that must stop.
Why? We all know the answer: fear and greed. Fear of Beijing’s growing reach and power; greed for what is to be had by serving that power and doing business with it. As John Garnaut incisively expressed it, in his path-breaking article in The Monthly this very month:
Beyond the foundational assumption of a single civilizational ‘China’, the specific demands of United Front Work are framed by permutations of three narratives: China is inherently peaceful and beneficent, the growth of Chinese power is inexorable, and China is vengeful and dangerous if provoked.
In other words, those fixated by the snake charmer rhetoric of the Party’s propaganda are beguiled into accepting that ‘the rewards are great, resistance is futile and outright opposition may be suicidal.’ Fear and greed, you see?
What is disturbing is the extent to which a generation of rapid growth in our trade with China – which, let it be said, nets us a massive trade surplus these days – has turned so many of our prominent figures into what we once politely called ‘panda huggers’. Now if countries were all alike and there was nothing meaningful to distinguish the countries of the Anglosphere from China, there might be no harm in any of this.
We might still be astonished at the tidal movement. We might still raise our eyebrows at the sums of money being accepted for what are plainly services to a foreign power, even if more or less camouflaged. But we might be a little more inclined to shrug and say ‘business is business’. Other things being equal, who among us wouldn’t rather like to be paid $880,000 a year as a part time consultant, on top of receiving a parliamentary pension? It’s a tidy sum and I confess ruefully that no-one has ever offered me that kind of money. As for $1.2 million a year to run a think tank in New York on lines agreed in Beijing; well, plainly, I’m in the wrong game!
But there are meaningful distinctions between countries and the China of Xi Jinping is very different indeed from our traditional Anglophone allies and from our own political culture. So much so, that a good friend of mine who made a career in banking and knows a thing or two about money, incentives and influence, freely, in private conversation, refers to those who are in Beijing’s corner now as ‘Quislings’, because she sees China, in Stein Ringen’s phrase, as ‘the perfect dictatorship’ and it’s growing influence here alarming in both scope and implications.
The day Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I wrote an opinion piece for The Australian, which ran the next day, declaring that this development showed that the American Republic is in serious trouble. We can see, however, that many sectors of the American political system and civil society are actively opposed to Trump and moving to head off possibly egregious errors, even treasonous steps, on his part. No such thing can be done in China in opposition to Xi Jinping’s assumption of power - or at least not openly, legally or safely.
What has possessed our elder statesmen and superannuated ambassadors that they would take sides with Beijing against their own country’s sovereignty and democratic institutions, rather than taking those things as an inviolable commitment that no inducement from the Chinese Communist Party or its minions would lead them to compromise or abandon? They will, of course, each and all, rationalize their actions in ways that enable them to present a respectable public face. But I say to you openly, those actions fill me with the gravest of misgivings.
A new biography of the classical Athenian figure Alcibiades was published this year. It’s called Nemesis. Who among you knows the story of Alcibiades? The basic story was written up long ago by Plutarch, but Nemesis is an attempt to delve a bit deeper and to ponder the story for our time. Alcibiades, you see, defected from Athens when he felt slighted by it and went over to the side of Sparta during the famous Peloponnesian War in the late fifth century BCE. Then, having run into trouble with that allegiance by seducing a woman he should have steered clear of, he deserted Greece altogether and went over to the side of the Great King and the Persian Empire. I have to say that when I listen to some of the statements these days by Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd, Bob Carr, Geoff Raby and others, I find myself thinking: ‘Alcibiades!’
Now I identify with Socrates rather than with Alcibiades, by both temperament and vocation and this presents me with an awkward problem on the face of it, because as some of you will be aware, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, Alcibiades among them, by teaching them to be sceptical and independent minded, rather than conservative. Indeed, there have always been reports that Socrates was excessively fond of Alcibiades.
I can assure you, I’ve never had such feelings for Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd or even my old mate Geoff Raby. I can imagine being arraigned before some tribunal or other for my politically incorrect views and, like the Socrates I admire, being condemned for them, if not perhaps condemned to death. But I am confident that I could never be convicted of corrupting the likes of Bob Carr or Geoff Raby and inducing them to toe the Party line as they have come to do. As for Kevin Rudd, I can’t imagine him paying my opinions any attention. He has always been a self-styled prima donna, certain that he was the smartest guy in the room.
What has possessed them, then? - to repeat my question. Two things, it would seem: they have been overawed by the vertiginous rise of China since the 1980s, especially relative to the United States since 2008; and they have found ways to profit personally from it in ways they never did from serving this country more or less faithfully. I say ‘more or less’, you understand, because the egos of many of them always did drive their aspirations to high office and because their achievements in office were, for the most part, rather modest.
Now, China’s rise, so far, has, indeed, been vertiginous. Who will argue with that proposition? Given its mystique as the Middle Kingdom and the line forever being trotted out these days that it is simply resuming its ‘natural’ and historical place as the greatest power in the world, it’s not altogether surprising that these provincial politicians are drawn to the court of the Chinese Communist Party like moths to the proverbial flame. Paul Keating, one seems to recall, notoriously informed Bob Hawke thirty years or so ago – according to Hawke’s memoir - that he wouldn’t remain here ‘at the arse end of the Earth’ if he wasn’t gifted the Lodge?
There was a priceless cartoon in the Canberra Times that captured this matter shortly after Hawke launched his memoir in Sydney and let this particular cat out of the bag. Hawke was depicted coming up to Keating waving a copy of his memoir and asking, ‘Do you want to buy a copy of my book?’ Keating snarls at, ‘You can shove it up your Australia!’ I love good political cartoons and have quite a collection of them. They are the hallmark of a free press and a politically vibrant country and that one was beauty. It’s funny how things can come back to bite you.
That to the dazzling vistas of the Party’s 21st century Xanadu was added substantial payment in real money to move into the service of the Celestial Kingdom makes it perhaps unremarkable that so many of our political Cagliostros have morphed, as they have, from masquerading as democratic politicians into trotting about as open apologists for one of the most relentless and ruthless of dictatorships. China, Keating recently declared, in an interview published in Australian Foreign Affairs, has been better governed that any other major state, bar none, in recent decades; and what does it matter if ‘a few detainees’ don’t get due process?
What we see here is not so different from what occurs when a bright and ingenuous young school boy, having worked hard and achieved first class honours in commerce or law, morphs over time into the blinkered and ambitious servant of a large corporation and its global operations. Not so different – at least superficially. But it is different and it is fraught with the gravest implications for our future. That so many of them, so quickly, and without a hint of shame or hesitation have done this disturbs me more than I can readily say.
A generation ago, I would have moved to Hong Kong to work for a merchant bank for very good money and would not have considered that to be compromising either my vocation or my commitment to this country. Indeed, I entered into negotiations to make just such a move. As the Chicago-based China analyst David Hale said to me the year before he died, if I’d made that move it would have transformed my life. For better or worse, it didn’t happen and I morphed into a consultant and public intellectual at ‘the arse end of the Earth’.
But I can stand here before you and say without hesitation that I would never work for the Chinese Communist Party, knowing its history and structures as I do; to say nothing of working for it against the interests of my own country. But of course, one and all, the individuals I have named and many I have not named would indignantly assert that they are in no way working against the interests of this country.
They would assert, as Twiggy Forrest asserted early this year – on the Lunar New Year, be it noted – that China is an ally of this country (or should be) and that our relationship with it is and ought to be close and strong and trusting. When I hear them say these things, however, I think to myself: ‘They haven’t just taken the coin. They’ve drunk the Kool Aid’.
Let me be clear in saying that the entry of China into the global marketplace has been a great and good thing. The increased prosperity of vast numbers of the Chinese people is surely to be welcomed. Our commerce with China has been and I hope will continue to be both immensely profitable to us and a cause of peace and amity between the Australian and Chinese peoples.
If China was now on the verge of a political mutation of the kind that Taiwan underwent in the 1980s and there was a reasonable prospect of it becoming more open, more transparent, more just, more equitable, as Taiwan has, I would be very much more at ease about the relationships that our public figures are forming with it. I am among those who for decades have held out the hope that such a mutation would occur.
We need to be very clear, however, that it is not occurring. On the contrary, since 1989 the Chinese Communist Party has steadfastly rejected such a path forward. Moreover, it is pressing hard to corral citizen movements for democratic principles in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. Since the early years of this century even the economic reform agenda has stagnated. The political agenda is now one of outright regression and systematic repression. No close observer whose integrity I trust is in doubt about this reality.
But there is a further aspect to this, which puts what we might call the ‘Alcibiadism’ of our senior statesmen in perspective. It is this: at just this point, with so many of them taking Chinese coin and becoming spokesmen for Chinese foreign policy, to the point of ridiculing our own government and the best journalists in our own press, Xi Jinping’s China is, in fact, teetering on the edge of what serious analysts see as an systemic crisis.
Among these serious analysts is my old friend William Henry Overholt, formerly head of Asia research at Bankers Trust in Hong Kong, who sought in 1994-96 to arrange for me to move there to work with him. Bill has a very clear head on his shoulders and has championed China’s model of authoritarian economic development for a generation. In a new book, which I am about to review, he argues lucidly and forcefully that it now faces massive structural challenges and that, unless the Party is prepared to address them, China’s heady growth will grind to a halt and its polity may even fragment. He is not sanguine about Xi Jinping being either willing or able to address them.
Other analysts have been making a similar case in the past few years, notably Charles Minzner in End of an Era. So, just when we had begun to get accustomed to the idea of the 21st century being the Asian Century or the Chinese Century, or, as Martin Jacques put it, to China getting set to ‘rule the world’, we could be facing a very different set of possibilities. We cannot with any confidence, Bill Overholt has written in his new book China’s Crisis of Success, predict a continuing upward trajectory for China. We now need to think in terms of various alternative scenarios, some of them very disconcerting.
I was all the more impressed to see Bill writing this because he had been the stalwart, hard-headed advocate of understanding China in terms of East Asian history and development, not the so-called Washington Consensus. And I had myself made just this point fourteen years ago, in Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, in a chapter called ‘Variations on the LAM: plotting China’s futures’.
I argued then that, its current rapid growth notwithstanding, we would be foolish to assume an uninterrupted linear ascent for authoritarian China. I proposed four scenarios to use as mental models in thinking about alternative possible futures for China beyond 2010 or 2020: Mutation, Maturation, Militarization and Metastasis.
The first was a process of political reform as the economy grew, leading to more and more stability and openness. The second was a levelling off of rapid growth with China hovering in a middle income bracket with a lot of social challenges to deal with. The third was the growth of military power and hubris, leading to an increasingly revisionist foreign policy. The fourth was the failure of the Party to hold things together and being overwhelmed by structural and substantive impediments to further growth, leading to a major regime crisis.
Here this afternoon I say to you that the weight of evidence is now strongly against Mutation – the most benign scenario - and that Maturation looks like the most favourable of the plausible outcomes in the decade ahead of us, but even it is looking less likely than it did some years ago. Militarization has been under way for twenty years and is plainly in evidence. Metastasis has become increasingly possible over the past decade and is now being considered distinctly possible by serious thinkers who would not have contemplated this a decade or more ago.
All of which is being overlooked, it would seem, by our home grown and foreign funded apologists for the Party, its domination of China and its global ambitions. There could hardly be a more interesting or troubling outlook, given what we have experienced for many years now; given the incumbency of Donald Trump in the White House, the unending turmoil in the Middle East and the attempts by Putin’s Russia to disrupt the Western democracies, the EU and NATO.
But I speak as someone whom the Federal government refused point blank to develop as a China specialist, security analyst or diplomat after I became head of the DIO China desk in 1994-95. I speak as a Socratic outsider. And I speak now as a man in his early sixties who has fought off a serious health challenge and is not going to be playing a major role in the challenges that lie ahead for us. I speak simply as a concerned citizen.
I began by invoking Australian Rules and the wonderfully competitive season we are seeing this year in the AFL. I suggested we use this as a metaphor to temper our thinking about probabilities and to look at our loyalties or passions from a different angle. Let me close by recapping on that metaphor. Think of China’s recent rapid growth by analogy with the recent exciting recovery and surges up the ladder of teams like the Giants, or Hawthorn or Essendon. Think of the resurgence this year of Collingwood and then its crippling spate of injuries and its very recent tumble down the league ladder.
Or think of the triumph of the Bulldogs two years ago, to the intoxication of the general public – in Melbourne, if not in Sydney, Adelaide or Perth! – and then their rapid fall back into mediocrity last season and even the lower rungs of the ladder this year. Think of how Richmond, a vaunted power for years between the late 1960s and 1980, then long in the doldrums, now sitting in first place and enjoy clear favouritism to go back to back. Then think, as fans of the Eagles or Dockers, how you view all this and where your hopes lie.
Sport is a wonderful source of heroic stories, tragic dramas and wild adventures in probability for those of us who follow it. World affairs are what, by comparison, we commonly refer to as ‘the real world’. George Megalogenis, a passionate Richmond fan, has just written a book called The Football Solution: How Richmond’s Premiership Can Save Australia. It sounds eccentric, doesn’t it? But it’s about leadership, integrity and good strategy. You might all like to read it, even if you think that it’s an Eagles premiership that might save Western Australia.
It is healthy, every now and again, to import insights like those of Megalogenis into our reading of national or world affairs and to take stock, seeing beyond our prejudices and our predictions to a deeper, more complex and less partisan view of reality. It isn’t easy, especially when tensions are on the rise. In one sense, China’s rise might be likened to the very recent recovery of Richmond. The possible pitfalls immediately ahead of it might be likened to the problems that have beset Nathan Buckley’s Collingwood, as injuries mounted.
But above all, we might think of our own system of government here on the model of Australian Rules or the AFL, as something we want run well and in the interests of the competition; not sold out to other codes or undermined by insidious and corrupting influences.
I haven’t offered you an expose this afternoon; only a reflection. The footwork in bringing to light what has been going on in this country over the past decade or two has been done by others. While our investigative journalists and intelligence sleuths have been piecing the story together, I have been preoccupied with overcoming metastatic melanoma and authoring a series of books, none of which was concerned other than marginally with China. It is a minor miracle, or at least a medical and Medicare wonder that I am still alive and able to address you here this afternoon. The specialists thought my number was up almost ten years ago.
In all the circumstances, it gave me great satisfaction, in January this year, to see into print my biography of a great teacher and mentor of mine, through the lens of whose life I examined the whole question of Catholicism and religion more generally in the modern world. The book is called The Secret Gospel According to Mark: The Extraordinary Life of a Catholic Existentialist.
I have another one due out this October. It will be my tenth. It’s called Dictators and Dangerous Ideas: Uncensored Reflections in an Age of Turmoil and I like to think of it as a tract for the times. It includes many pieces about China, including both Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping; but also about Islam, Erdogan, Putin, the Armenian genocide, earthquakes and probability, Syria, North Korea, Iran, Taiwan, Donald Trump and the American constitution, international economics, the condition of the EU and many other topics.
The unifying theme is freedom of speech: the freedom to speak frankly on controversial topics without fear or favour. That freedom is one I am exercising here today. It is a freedom singularly lacking in China, as in all too many other states in our time. It has been and remains the sine qua non of my life as a scholar and public intellectual. Sine qua non? Dear me, what a Dead White European Male expression to use! But behold, I have fought off metastasis just as Xi Jinping’s China teeters on the brink of it and I am not dead. And let me say, as plainly as possible, that as I live I will not hand my freedom of speech over to the authorities in Beijing or their minions. I will neither think, nor read nor speak nor write by Party rules. I will do these things to the end as I have always done them – by Australian Rules. Are you with me?
[1] 1960, 1964, 1966, 1970, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 2001, 2002, 2011.
[2] 1965, 1969, 1973, 1978, 2007, 2009, 2012.