To now, the government and opposition have agreed on how Australia should deal with China. That agreement fell apart this week.
It fell apart after the leader of Japan,
China's arch-rival, came to town.
The end of the national consensus means that relations with
the world's great rising power are now open to domestic politics as Labor and
the Liberals each seek partisan points.
At the most dangerous moment yet in China's return to the
centre of global affairs, Australia's main parties have chosen to shift the
relationship from the uncontested zone of politics to the boxing ring. But,
oddly enough, the partisan divide didn't open up over anything in the
visit itself.
The moment of conflict came as Australia braced
pre-emptively for harsh words from China.
Over decades, Australia has conditioned itself to expect
and to fear criticism from Beijing. Australian elites anticipate Chinese anger,
and usually grant it an automatic righteousness.
A sympathetic US observer of Australia, Mike Green, an Asia
expert with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington
and formerly an adviser in the Bush White House, says: "It seems to me
that within the Australian national character it's a source of intense
sensitivity to try to be good Asian neighbours, in a way that you don't see
among the countries of East Asia."
It was after concluding important new deals with Japan, but
before China had said a word in response, that Australia's main political
parties came to blows.
Bizarrely, it was the moment of anticipation, not the
reality of Chinese reaction that Liberal and Labor differed.
The visit by Shinzo Abe was warmly welcomed by both sides.
The new deals struck between the Abe and Abbott governments – one on trade and
one on defence – were embraced by both sides – even though the defence aspect
is extraordinarily sensitive.
It's a serious moment in Japan's history. Abe is in the
process of changing the strategic character of one of the world's great powers.
For decades, it had been thought that only an amendment to
Japan's postwar "peace constitution" could lift the ban on engaging
in "collective self-defence". The ban meant Japan could not come to
the aid of its allies in war.
But the week before arriving in Canberra, Abe ended the ban
by a decision of his government. Knowing he could not win enough public support
to change the constitution, he "reinterpreted" it instead.
Abe has decided to allow his country to go to war in the
defence of its allies. The polite cover story is that Japan needs to be able to
help the US in defending itself against the dangerous crazies of North Korea.
The reality is that Japan is bracing for the possibility of
war with China.
Beijing's state-owned media thundered against the Abe
decision as a militarists' "coup" against the Japanese constitution
and the act of a warmonger.
The change will affect Japan's relations with Australia in
peacetime, as well as, potentially, in war: "The relationship between
Japan and Australia will be different in many respects," an adviser to
Abe, Tomohiko Taniguchi, says.
"Previously there was hesitation in the Japanese
public and the government to use Japanese military assets, now the Self-Defence
Forces [Japan's military] can get into frequent military exercises and joint
operations with Australia," he told me.
"It's time for Japan to be confident about who it is –
a mature democracy. The situation has become so dire to threaten Japan's
national interests. Japan has decided to make sizeable steps forward from its
cocoon where it didn't pay any attention to reality."
Australia's main political parties didn't fall out over
this momentous decision. Nor did they demur when Abe stood before a joint
meeting of the houses of Parliament in Canberra to draw Australia into the
Japanese effort: "Japan and Australia have deepened our economic
ties," Abe said. "We will now join up in a scrum, just like in rugby,
to nurture a regional and world order and to safeguard peace."
He didn't specify who was in the opposing scrum. He didn't
need to.
Labor applauded when Abe signed a defence cooperation
agreement with the federal government. The deal would allow Australia and
Japan to share technology and equipment, an intensification that will enable
Australia to adopt Japan's advanced submarine know-how as it replaces its
ageing Collins class fleet.
Some in Labor were jarred by a line in Tony Abbott's speech
in reply to Abe, when he paid tribute to Japan's troops in World War II.
Abe had expressed sorrow and condolences over Australia's
war dead and pledged to learn from history; in response Abbott said Japanese
military personnel demonstrated "courage" and "patriotism of a
very high order."
Said Abbott: "We admired the skill and the sense of
honour that they brought to their task, although we disagreed with what they
did. Perhaps we grasped, even then, that with a change of heart the fiercest of
opponents could be the best of friends."
Still, no one in Labor publicly criticised the government.
Only when the Canberra visit was finished, only when the two prime ministers
left for a tour of the Pilbara, did the parties fall out.
Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop spoke in anticipation
of the potential reaction from Beijing in an interview with Fairfax Media's
John Garnaut.
The story in Thursday's paper began: "Australia
will stand up to China to defend peace, liberal values and the rule of law,
says Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.
"In the Coalition government's clearest statement yet
on how to handle China, Ms Bishop said it had been a mistake for previous
governments to avoid speaking about China for fear of causing offence.
"China doesn't respect weakness," the article
quoted Bishop as saying.
For Labor, this crossed the line.
Opposition spokeswoman for foreign affairs and Labor deputy
leader Tanya Plibersek called a doorstop: "I was a bit dismayed this
morning to wake up to a front-page newspaper story in the Sydney Morning
Herald from the Foreign Minister suggesting that we needed to move away
from one of our friends in the region to be closer to the other.
"This has been a continuing theme in the government's
foreign policy recently – this zero-sum game approach to our friendships in the
region. I think it's very important to understand that when talking about
Australia's foreign policy interests, it's very clear that our best interests
are served by having a close relationship with China and a close relationship
with Japan."
A more junior Labor member, senator Sam Dastyari, told
reporters: "There will certainly be economic and trade consequences if the
government stays on this path of picking sides in ongoing disputes involving
China and frankly it's not in our economic, it's not in our political, it's not
in our security, it's not in our geographic interest to be getting involved in
these things."
Dastyari, from Labor's Right faction, didn't coordinate his
remarks with Plibersek, from the Left, but both agreed that the government was
doing gratuitous harm to Australia's China interests.
In between Bishop speaking to Garnaut and the two Labor
politicians' response, a Chinese reaction emerged. The only strident Chinese
criticism came from the Canberra correspondent of the state-owned Xinhua new
service, Xu Haijing, in an English-language comment posted on her blog.
She took aim at Abbott's praise for Japanese troops in
World War II. The Australian leader's comments were appalling, she said:
"He probably wasn't aware that the Japanese troops possessed other
'skills', skills to loot, to rape, to torture and to kill."
She may well be right that Abbott had taken his paean to
Japan's wartime troops to excess. China's government and people hold on to
their wartime anger against Japan in a way that Australia has long ago
discarded as counterproductive.
The Chinese Communist Party uses history selectively and
strategically for political effect – it censors any reference to historical
events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for instance, yet is keen to nurse
resentment against Japan over events half a century earlier.
The point is that Chinese criticism of Australia's dealings
with Japan this week were from a minor source, on a subsidiary issue, chiefly
about the past and not the present. But they got a major play in the Australian
media, which was looking to China in keen anticipation of some disapproval.
The big developments – the intensification of Australia's
defence and trade ties with Japan – were not criticised. China's foreign
affairs ministry said only that "we hope that cooperation among relevant
countries can contribute positively to regional peace and stability, instead of
the opposite, let alone harming the third country."
Perfectly unexceptionable remarks, in other words.
Overall, says the director of the Australian Centre on
China in the World at the ANU, Geremie Barme, "the Chinese official
reaction was relatively mild, not as exaggerated as some people make out".
Indeed, China's president, Xi Jinping, met John Howard in
Beijing on Wednesday. He asked for co-operation to continue. He asked that
negotiations on the Australia-China free trade agreement be accelerated,
according to a report on the Xinhua news service.
This is the opposite of an adverse reaction from China.
From the quarter that matters most, the paramount leader, the message to
Australia was a request to accelerate co-operation in trade.
Peter Hartcher is
the international editor of Sydney Morning Herald
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