Review: Peter Hartcher - "Red Flag: Waking Up to China’s Challenge"

Well, I've come across a publication that has a position of caution and working constructively with China that is similar to my views: Peter Hartcher's Quarterly Essay 76 - "Red Flag: Waking Up to China’s Challenge" (from here, or Amazon). 

I recommend getting a copy and having a read - but remember to make your own mind up. 

Here's a few points:

• In an appalling and hypocritical breach of sovereignty, China is using its economic power to condition other nations into behaving the way they want - but they don't say what the problem or issue is: they expect other nations to use the self criticism (brain-washing) techniques of the "Cultural Revolution" - also well described in the anti-authoritarian/dictatorship books "Animal Farm" and "1984" written by George Orwell.
  
  A couple of quotes from the essay (I can't do better than these quotes, but all the rest of it well worth reading as well):
  
  "It’s part of their strategy. They leave it to you to guess. They let you go through the process of thinking, ‘What could we have possibly done to upset the Chinese?’ They leave us to use our imaginations to think of what we might have done. This is the same principle – the self-criticism – that the party used to pressure suspects during the Cultural Revolution."
  
  "It is, in other words, a process of conditioning. Beijing uses uncertainty over the reason for punishment to train countries into anticipating its wishes and fearing its wrath. Better than telling other countries how to serve China, Beijing trains them into doing it themselves. Unbidden."
   
  
• China has adapted more quickly than other nations (more than a decade and a half earlier than the USA) to the significance of the Internet in terms of how it has radically changed the nature of war - and in a way that suits the teachings of Sun Tzu on warfare. Based on how well the local Chinese engineers were set up in terms of computers when I was working there in the 90s, that doesn't surprise me - their engineers were first class, and just needed a little practical experience (which, at that water treatment plant, it was my job to provide). There were issues around China expecting IP even back then, and I'm not entirely surprised they followed the post-revolutionary USA (see here, here, and here) into IP theft (here, here, and here - by the way, those two sets of links are worth a look: there's some interesting twists and turns and examples in them).
  
  From the essay:
  
  "It was so profound that it “eclipses the introduction of nuclear weapons, the introduction of the air domain and the airplane, and the transition from battleship to aircraft carrier.” This 2012 pronouncement is similar to another one by two officers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. “We can say with certainty that this,” referring to information technology, “is the most important revolution in the history of technology. Its revolutionary significance is not merely in that it is a brand-new technology itself, but more in that it is a kind of bonding agent which can lightly penetrate the layers of barriers between technologies and link various technologies which appear to be totally unrelated.” This thought led them on to an idea that seems to prefigure using 5G, or fifth-generation, cellular network technology as a weapon of war:"
   
  
• Australia needs to calmly assert our values, stand up to China, recognise the situation is not as one sided as it seems (e.g., China has chosen not to extend its economic attack to our iron ore supplies, which it desperately needs), understand that the apparent Chinese economic juggernaut does has vulnerabilities - and that key people inside China are concerned about those, diversify our economy (their vulnerabilities are as much an argument for that as is wanting to be more resilient to economic attacks from China - although common sense has also dictated this for decades), and, as expressed in the book, remember the difference between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party:
  
  "Australia today must confront through legislation and other measures the harms exported by the Chinese Communist Party while embracing the remarkable qualities of the Chinese people."

This post of mine has links to earlier articles on China, and you can find a few other articles that are related here, here, here, here, and here. 

Looking beyond China, Australia has needed to be more mature and realistically independent as a nation since 1901 (and 1931) - it was appalling that we didn't have our own passports until after the Second World War, and only got rid of our attachment to the UK's Privy Council in 1986, and it is still appalling that we are subject to a monarch in another nation - one who has form on apparently undermining our democracy, to boot. 

Learning to stand up to China would be good practice for us to move out of our subservience to the USA to a healthy and mature relationship - something else we can learn from New  Zealand. 

On China, I consider the push for investigation of the outbreak in Wuhan was idiotic, so the problems are not only on one side. However, much as Indonesia (a nation with greater  potential for Australia than China) needs to learn more about Australia, so too does the CCP need to gain a better understanding of Australia, Australians, and how we react to bullies, threats and bluster (although that may tale a little time).