eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742241388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Australia and China At 40
By James Reilly, Jingdong Yuan
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 University of New South Wales Press LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-591-1
CHAPTER 1
'THE WORLD CHANGES': AUSTRALIA'S CHINA POLICY IN THE WAKE OF EMPIRE
James Curran
Australia is moving in a new direction, in its relationships with the world and specifically with the region in which it inevitably belongs ... Our concern is no longer exclusively with nations in far removed areas of the globe ... In Peking today we give expression to our new international outlook. With no nation is our new aspiration symbolised more than it is with China, a power not only in our region but in the world. We look forward to a future in which over-emphasis on particular associations will no longer distort the proper relationships which should exist between Australia and its neighbours.
This was the emphatic declaration of Gough Whitlam during his visit to China as Prime Minister in October–November 1973. Addressing Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai at a welcoming banquet in Beijing, Whitlam depicted Australia's relationship with China as part of a wholesale renovation in Australian foreign policy, a recasting of its policies and priorities in the region and the world. Here China became the means by which Australia weened itself from the protective bosom of its allies in Britain and America and moved its gaze irrevocably to the Asia-Pacific. 'In these four days in Peking', he noted towards the end of that visit, 'we have removed completely the misunderstandings of the past generation'.
In the history of Australia's relations with the world, the transformation of its China policy in the 1970s remains one of the more remarkable events. At the forefront of this change were two leaders – Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser – who while different in style and emphasis nevertheless agreed on the central purpose of the new policy, namely to accept China on its own terms. During this new era both the Whitlam and Fraser governments were agreed that Australia should give first priority to developing relations with the Asia-Pacific region. Labor and Liberal leaders and their parties were united in this endeavour, and the relationship with China became something of a flagship for Australia's new regional embrace at a time when the links with Britain and the United States were being recast.
That this change occurred almost overnight is all the more note-worthy given the partisan passions and pressures that the China question had provoked in Australian political culture since the 1950s. Such fears and animosities were difficult to shift. Indeed at the beginning of the 1970s a conservative government in Canberra remained wedded to Cold War orthodoxies and desperate to keep in lock-step with the United States on all matters of regional policy, including the question of recognising the People's Republic of China. But it was caught dangerously off guard not only by the audacity of Labor Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam's visit to Peking in July 1971, but more tellingly by the stunning shift in America's China policy engineered by President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. By the middle of the decade, however, what had once been a dramatic fault line in the nation's politics had taken on the status of a bipartisan faith. Malcolm Fraser, once a hardline cold warrior prone to foaming at the mouth about the evils of Chinese communism, chose to make Peking and Tokyo – not Washington and London – his first ports of call during his inaugural prime ministerial visit abroad in 1976.
The recognition of Communist China has long been associated with Australia's coming of age in the 1970s. For many it has become the ultimate symbol of national deliverance from a Menziean dark age and decades of dependence on 'great and powerful friends'. Thus historian Russel Ward welcomed the beginning of formal diplomatic relations with China in 1972 as one of many Whitlam initiatives showing that the new government was 'making up for wasted time', bringing the country out of its 'long hibernation' and ending an 'age of fear'. Similarly Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking claims that by 1972 China was 'a symbol, a marker for the disconnection between the ageing Coalition government from such dynamic change, for the relevance of Labor's policies and for Whitlam's growing stature in world affairs'.
Others linked Whitlam's China move to a more pervasive mood of Australian self-discovery. Stephen FitzGerald, who travelled with Whitlam on the 1971 visit and later became Australia's first Ambassador in Beijing, could announce not only that 'China was part of our 1970s' but further that 'Australians' discovery of China was part of the joyful discovery of themselves throughout most of the decade'. In Australian foreign policy, he added, 'there was nothing quite as exciting', and for the tens of thousands of Australians who visited China during that period one of the most important perceptions gained was 'that there are more things in heaven and earth than Britain and America'. The recognition of China was not only part of a 'great national release' but the standard bearer for the 'Australianising' of the country. In this view, China came to epitomise not only a new era of Asian belonging, but the means whereby Australia escaped the profound disorientation that attended its ambivalent exit from the British world. And as Mads Clausen has shown, the Whitlam visits continue to form part of an ongoing Labor attempt to 'stake claims on the Australian-Asian nexus', in which the party casts itself as the harbinger of 'new found maturity and independence'.
The excitement, though, was not without its trepidation and uncertainty. Australia's opening to China took place in an era in which Australian politicians and policymakers were compelled to adapt to a post-imperial strategic and cultural inheritance. All their assumptions about the world and the capacity of great power protectors to provide for their security were proving to be unsound. Taken together, the seismic external shocks of the 1960s – Britain's application for membership of the EEC, its decision to withdraw its military presence from east of Suez and the Nixon administration's Guam doctrine – rendered Australia's Cold War policy – the desire to keep the Americans and the British engaged in Southeast Asia – obsolete. As European empires receded into the past and the ideological bipolarity of the Cold War came under strain, a new multi-polar world was emerging. The Soviet Union and China clashed publicly over long-standing border disputes, and both grew ever more suspicious of the other's growing military might. The European Community entered a more dynamic phase, in which it consolidated its economic power and expanded its membership to include Britain. In Japan, the economic 'miracle' was in full swing. Between 1966 and 1969 it overtook Italy, Britain, France and Germany in gross GDP, and thus had established itself as an economic powerhouse in its own right. Third World Asian, African and Caribbean nations refused to identify with the East or West and instead asserted their interests as a bloc at the United Nations. America and Russia, though still suspicious of each other and capable of plunging the globe into nuclear conflict, were moving towards détente. Thus the international system that had held sway since the end of World War II had undergone rapid and substantial change.
In the midst of these changes Australia found itself engaged in an unprecedented period of national introspection, as leaders and cultural commentators sought to find a new foundation for a more assertive and independently minded Australia. But the quest for a new way of defining the nation did not seem to lead in any clear direction. The shorthand among Australian journalists for this phenomenon was the 'new nationalism', and while it resonated primarily in the realm of civic culture and the formal trappings of nationhood – national days, flags and anthems – it also related to the need for a new self-sufficiency in the conduct of Australia's foreign relations. Long-cherished assumptions about the nation's common cause with Britain and the United States were subjected to critical scrutiny. Indeed by 1971 the Australian government's Defence Committee had concluded that Australia's two 'traditional political and military associations', with the United Kingdom and the United States, had 'overshadowed to some extent full regional appreciation of Australian capacity to maintain an independent stand'.
Perhaps the most lasting effect then of these changing attitudes towards Britain and the United States was the adoption – on both sides of politics – of a policy of comprehensive engagement with Asia. From the 1970s the new push to establish closer diplomatic relations with China, Japan and Southeast Asia was aimed at securing a new post-imperial footing for Australia's regional security. Countries which had once haunted the nation's psychology were now brought to the forefront of Australian diplomacy. This is not to suggest that Australian politicians and policymakers only discovered Asia when the 'great and powerful' friends departed the region. The 1957 Commerce Agreement with Japan was an acknowledgment that imperial trade preferences could no longer secure Australia's economic viability. More importantly, the demise of the White Australia policy through a series of modifications from the late 1950s removed one of the major obstacles to Australian acceptance in the region. The ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the passing of the Racial Discrimination Act struck further blows against the old exclusivist policy, and the granting of independence to Papua New Guinea relieved Australia of the colonialist taint.
But the dramatic change in Australia's China policy can only be fully understood against the backdrop of the Cold War. Although in the immediate post-war period Australian policymakers feared a rearmed Japan, protection against an expansive and communist China was one of the major factors driving the government to seek a pact with the Americans in the early 1950s. Equally, however, the Australians did not share the same absolute ideological worldview that shaped US China policy. The administration in Washington resented deeply the communist victory in China, regarding the People's Republic, in contemporary parlance, as a rogue state. The United States encouraged all its allies to deny it international recognition. Britain had recognised the regime very shortly after it assumed power. It seems clear that Australia, under both the Chifley and Menzies governments, was intending to follow Britain's lead but since the Americans placed so much store on isolating China, Australia deferred to America. Menzies had told the British government in December 1949 when he became Prime Minister that the question of recognition of China could not be postponed indefinitely, adding that 'it is the question of timing that is important ... when we are convinced that the time is appropriate we shall act, although not in advance of the US'. Thus throughout the Cold War the only major concession which Australia felt obliged to make to the US to keep the alliance in good shape was to refuse to give diplomatic recognition to Communist China. Nevertheless, from the Korean War the perception of China as the embodiment of militant and subversive communism became the strongest strategic bond binding Australia and America. It underwrote the two treaties – ANZUS and SEATO – for mutual defence relations, and provided a rationale for resisting what Menzies called the 'southwards thrust'.
The United States would also not allow its citizens to travel or trade with the country, and as a result of its trade boycott it denied itself access to the great China market. This sacrifice was all the more marked in that most of its Western allies continued to trade profitably with China. Australia was among this group. Indeed the Country Party, which used the most anti-communist language for domestic political purposes, was also adamant that politics and trade should not be connected. During the Vietnam War BHP continued to export steel to China – that is, the very country which, according to the government's justification for entering the war, lay behind that war. When the government announced the commitment of an Australian battalion to Vietnam in April 1965, the Labor leader Arthur Calwell pointed to this contradiction at the heart of the government's policy:
The Government justifies its action on the ground of Chinese expansionist aggression. And yet this same Government is willing to continue and expand trade in strategic materials with China. We are selling wheat, wool and steel to China. The wheat is used to feed the armies of China. The wool is used to clothe the armies of China. The steel is used to equip the armies of China. Yet the Government which is willing to encourage this trade is the same Government which now sends Australian troops, in the words of the Prime Minister, 'to prevent the downward thrust of China'. The Government may be able to square its conscience on this matter, but this is logically and morally impossible.
It was a charge that the Opposition continued to level at the government in succeeding years, causing the Cabinet to issue guidelines for ministers on how to handle such questions. As Peter Edwards has shown, the guidance emphasised that trade with China was in non-strategic goods only, that Australian exports were of only marginal significance to the Chinese economy and that 'Australia, while resisting aggression, looked forward to the establishment of normal relations between China and the West'. Prime Minister Harold Holt only intensified the problem, however, when in 1966 he decided to establish an Australian diplomatic mission in the province of Taiwan.
The overwhelming policy ambition to keep the Americans engaged in Southeast Asia meant that Australians largely missed – or were reluctant to acknowledge – the signs coming from the US that its own China policy was undergoing a gradual transformation. In a landmark Foreign Affairs article of October 1967 the presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, argued that the US had to come 'urgently to grips with the reality of China'. The American shift continued once Nixon came to power, with the President ordering a comprehensive review of China policy to be undertaken by the National Security Council and a relaxation of trade and travel restrictions. Nixon's own report to Congress in February of 1970 proclaimed the Chinese to be a 'great and vital people who should not remain isolated from the international community ... it is certainly in our interest ... that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking'. The government in Canberra had been warned the previous year by Frank Cooper, Australia's returning Ambassador from Taipei, that it needed to do its own thinking on China and further that 'in any event, one of the lessons of Vietnam is surely that we cannot assume that the Americans will always consult us if and when they decide that the time has come to attempt to settle the China problem'. But the policy in Washington was being changed so quickly that Australia was struggling to keep pace. The conservative government in Canberra had not had the same time or opportunity to think anew about China and to reassess its old fears about the 'red peril'. Even Canada's recognition of China in mid-October 1970 left Australian leaders unmoved. The leader of the Country Party, Doug Anthony, dismissed any concerns that Australia's wheat trade might suffer if the Chinese preferred to take Canadian wheat instead. Speaking to the press he was adamant that since the 'United States saw difficulties in relation to Taiwan if mainland China were recognised immediately', he could not 'sell his soul just to benefit trade'.
The metamorphosis in American policy caught the Australian government hopelessly flatfooted. Not only was Prime Minister William McMahon enraged at not being given advance notice of Nixon's announcement by the White House, but matters were made worse by the fact that the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Gough Whitlam, had been in Peking at the very same time that Henry Kissinger was on his secret mission to lay the foundations for Nixon's visit the following year. Whitlam's visit, initially ridiculed by McMahon, had been a bold statement, defying the accepted terms on which Australia and America had based their China policy – he had asked Premier Zhou Enlai to meet a Labor Party delegation to talk about 'the terms on which your country is interested in having diplomatic and trade negotiations with Australia'. It cast a long shadow over McMahon's own low-key efforts for détente in Australian relations with Peking.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Australia and China At 40 by James Reilly, Jingdong Yuan. Copyright © 2012 University of New South Wales Press Ltd. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword vii
Contributors ix
Introduction: Australia's relations with China in a new era James Reilly Jingdong Yuan 2
Historical legacies
1 "The world changes': Australia's China policy in the wake of empire James Curran 22
2 From Kapyong to Kapyong: A cycle in Australia-China relations James Cotton 44
Hard or false choices?
3 Never having to choose: China's rise and Australian security Nick Bisley 66
4 Managing off-balance tripartite relations: How to avoid unnecessary confrontation You Ji 85
Economic interdependence
5 Sino-Australian economic relations: A general review Yu Chang Sen 104
6 Chinas resources trade and investment with Australia Ding Dou 121
Australia-China relations in bilateral and regional contexts
7 Divergence in Australia's economic and security interests? John Lee 142
8 East Asian regional co-operation and Sino-Australian relations Han Feng 162
9 How your attitudes help shape relations with China Fergus Hanson 178
Conclusion: Australia and the China boom Michael Wesley 196
Notes 211
List of abbreviations 226
Bibliography 227
Index 234