China doesn’t want a war – it has better ways to achieve its goals

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Building the case for Australia to significantly upgrade its defence capability, including the expensive acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, is a challenge for the government.

At present, it has fairly strong support. The Lowy Institute’s 2022 poll reveals concern in Australia about our security environment with majority support for increased military spending. A significant majority sees China becoming a military threat to Australia in the next 20 years.

Australia has a complex relationship with China.Credit: Dionne Gain

But the poll shows only half favour Australia using military force if China invaded Taiwan and the US intervened. This suggests some ambivalence on issues of national security. Maintaining support for Australia’s national security policies will not be easy.

Defence Minister Richard Marles recently spoke of the inconvenient truth that China’s growth story, and the economic benefits it has bestowed on Australia, has unfolded alongside China becoming a significant source of national security anxiety.

Marles has pointed to the “shrill and fundamentalist” debate over China before last year’s Australian election. To its credit, the Albanese government has mostly avoided inflammatory rhetoric towards China as it moves to stabilise the bilateral relationship.

And yet, there remain inconvenient truths that the government struggles to explain, which hinder the formulation of a coherent China policy.

Marles has repeatedly highlighted that China has undergone a massive military build-up – the largest by any country since 1945 – and has done so with lack of transparency as to its motive and without providing reassurances to the region.

There is, however, a contradiction in portraying China as major security threat to Australia and the region while simultaneously talking about stabilising the relationship and reaping the concomitant economic benefits.

Many Australians find this hard to process. Marles addresses these contradictions by pointing to the immense complexity in a relationship unsuited to “simplistic platitudes”.

He is dead right. It is tough to defend efforts to stabilise a relationship with a country many Australians have been conditioned in recent years to view as an existential threat.

The difficulty of the strategic circumstances facing Australia is undeniable. No one should doubt the necessity to develop a powerful Australian Defence Force (ADF). Any sensible country would do this.

But how this goal is articulated and explained is important to our own people and to our neighbours from whom we seek support for our diplomatic efforts in the region.

Australia’s portrayal of China in hawkish terms goes beyond the language used by other regional countries, whose proximity and history of maritime and other disputes with China would, one assumes, lead them to feel more threatened than us.

Marles is correct on the size of China’s military build-up. But the other side of the equation is that China’s economic growth has been the greatest of any country in modern history (its GDP is now 50 times greater than 30 years ago).

Shanghai is a commercial and retail hub. China’s economy has boomed in the last few decades.Credit: Bloomberg

During this time, the annual growth in its defence spending has been steady at around 1.7 per cent, and China still spends far less than the US. Given China’s rapidly expanding global economic interests, and its dependence on maritime transport (90 per cent of its merchandise trade goes by sea), it is unsurprising that it has built a formidable navy.

As an island continent, Australia (and for that matter, the US) will see its security environment very differently from that of China, which has some 20 land and maritime neighbours.

It would be surprising in these circumstances, indeed ahistorical, if China did not develop a formidable military. This is an inconvenient truth Australia must face.

The claims, reinforced by ADF chief Angus Campbell in Senate estimates on Tuesday, that China has lacked transparency in building its military and has failed to provide assurances to the region about its motives are strange. China has often proclaimed its peaceful intentions. Xi Jinping’s own speeches over the past decade have emphasised this.

Xi Jinping is the first Chinese leader to have cemented a third term in power since Mao Zedong’s rule ended in 1976.Credit:

In 2015, Xi told the Bo’ao Forum that no country that has tried to achieve its goals through force has succeeded. While it would be reassuring if Xi said this about Taiwan and Ukraine, nonetheless he said it.

Xi has repeatedly declared China won’t engage in aggression or expansion but is confident it can defeat any aggressor. China’s military build-up is thus cast as defensive not aggressive (“build the PLA into a wall of steel”).

It is wise to question when Xi speaks like this but no more so than when other leaders say similar things. China’s own experience with wars in the past 70 years has been limited: Korea in 1952, the inept strike against Vietnam in 1979, and border battles with India and Russia in the 1960s.

None of this is a reliable guide to whether China will undertake military actions against other countries in the future, but it does suggest China prefers other means to achieve its goals, such as utilising economic influence. China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative is a case in point. Nothing would do more to destroy this program than military adventures.

Marles is correct; China doesn’t lend itself to simplistic platitudes. A good way forward would be for the government to present the security environment being shaped by China in realistic rather than hawkish terms.

In the current atmosphere of extreme mistrust between the US and China language matters.

The government wouldn’t undermine its case for strengthening ADF capabilities, if it ensured a rational and calm discourse rather than in the overwrought and fearful one we often hear.

The mooted visit to China by the prime minister this year would provide an opportunity to calibrate the narrative.

Colin Heseltine is senior adviser to Asialink, the University of Melbourne. He was deputy head of mission in the Australian embassy in Beijing (1982-85 and 1988-92), head of Australia’s representative office in Taiwan (1992-97), and Australian ambassador to the Republic of Korea (2001-05). This article is published in collaboration with Asialink.

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