Some months back one side of the Australia-China spat got personal when the Morrison government called for an independent review into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic infuriated President Xi Jinping and his entourage. State media People’s Daily issued a fierce editorial.
This week the Australian side grew personal when Prime Minister Scott Morrison called a press conference to shame China for what he called a “repugnant post” published on a Chinese government Twitter account. Morrison was clearly offended.
A long-running bilateral dispute over diplomacy and trade now involves two men who feel personally aggrieved. It’s not a good sign.
Looking back, a dispute that had been simmering for four or five years came to the boil in April when Foreign Minister Marise Payne called for an independent review into the origins and spread of COVID-19.
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Beijing responded emphatically. Xi had placed himself head and centre of China’s pandemic response and any questioning of its role in the matter struck at his credibility. So that call elicited a higher-order response than any that had come before.
In years past public reprimands from Beijing tended to be random and inconsistent. Australian government comments on the South China Sea and East China Sea, and decisions on foreign interference and Huawei, made for some awkward moments in the relationship but they were generally isolated and contained.
Payne’s call for an inquiry prompted a far more coordinated response from Beijing. First came a warning from China’s ambassador Cheng Jingye that education and tourism and trade in general would suffer if Australia persisted — not just one commodity or service industry but pretty well the whole trade portfolio. He was not far wrong.
Next, Communist Party leaders developed a comprehensive communications strategy that branded Australia an irredeemably racist country in thrall to US hegemony. They disseminated this simple two-pronged message methodically through different arms of government and its propaganda system, home of People’s Daily. The recent Foreign Ministry tweet hewed close to this script.
Beijing notified the world of its consolidated approach to Australia in a strongly worded editorial in People’s Daily on April 28, published under the byline Zhong Sheng or “Voice of the Centre”.
This byline is reserved for editorials signalling central party views on important matters of foreign affairs — it could be read as the voice of Xi one or two steps removed. The editorial charged Australian media with racist behaviour for associating the COVID-19 pandemic with China.
Travel warnings soon followed. On June 5 China’s National Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued a travel alert to visitors to Australia warning of “a significant increase” in racial abuse and violence. Four days later the Education Ministry issued a similar warning to students planning to study in Australia.
A Foreign Ministry official said: “Some Australian politicians and media called the coronavirus a ‘Chinese virus’ and maliciously tampered with the Chinese national flag and national emblem.”
China’s Global Times added the American connection for good measure, with a claim Australian political leaders were not to be trusted because they were “too easily swayed by US political attitude and too eager to win US favours”.
The Zhong Sheng editorial signalled a game-changing decision on China’s relations with Australia at the highest levels of the party, reaching down to every government ministry, agency and state-owned enterprises.
The decision did not require evidence to support it. No amount of reasoned argument is likely to reverse it. It involves name-calling, shrill demands, and calls for apologies and retribution. Plainly Xi has been offended.
Significantly, a second Zhong Sheng editorial appeared in People’s Daily on December 1 defending the Foreign Ministry official’s doctored image.
In an apparent swipe at Morrison’s press conference, the high-level editorial alleged that “some” Australian politicians and officials were in denial over reports into unlawful killings in Afghanistan, apparently in the belief that “those who killed innocent Afghan civilians and prisoners are guiltless, while it is wrong to condemn the crime” as the Foreign Ministry official had done with his tweet.
Beijing’s charge that Australian politicians are in denial over their own report into war crimes in Afghanistan does not stand up to scrutiny. It does not need to. Xi’s entourage has spoken. Australia’s problem is not the behaviour of its troops in Afghanistan, or xenophobia or racism, or timber weevil or tainted barley or the dumping of wine. Our problem is that we rubbed the Great Man the wrong way.
The question for Australia is why do we need to get angry too. The best way to deal with angry men is to ignore their provocations. We don’t need two of them.
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I would suggest the Chinese people as a whole have had a legitimate grievance for a long time in relation to the west’s predilection over many decades for hypocritical grandstanding on human rights and meddling in affairs of other countries. Stones in glass houses and all that….
Our politicians (particularly Morrison) appear embarrassingly out of their depth in responding to this so-called wolf-warrior mentality – where is Julie Bishop when you need her!!??
Do the Tibetans (now unfortunately a part China) have a grievance with the wests hypocritical grandstanding on human rights, and meddling? Perhaps if Australian Army Tanks arrive to quell the next anti government protest you might have a decent comparison between Aus and China on human rights etc.
On Scomos response you might be right. I dont think he should have responded at all.
Memo to Morrison: Silence is golden.
And, while he’s about it he should chuck his far right-wing China haters, Eric Abetz, James Patterson and Andrew Hastie into a deep, deep hole. They achieve nothing but stirring up hatred.
“If a dog barks, you don’t bark back”. A Chinese saying very appropriate to how we should be conducting our affairs with dignity.
Highly appropriate saying in this case.
Our suggestion that the Covid investigators have the powers of weapon inspectors would have gone down really well in Beijing.
Morrison is having a melty over some ‘nou!’ burns, it would be an absurd joke if I suggested the PM would get so easily owned in an internet fight with a Chinese official, but here we are.
Is he now going to demand some written apology over a low effort burn as a condition of normalising relations? This is so petty.