AUKUS is a belated response to the Chinese Communist Party’s mushrooming belligerence. By Aaron Sarin.
Australia’s location — the nearest of the Western powers — has long made it the subject of CCP interest, and a target for interference….
In 2019, a Chinese intelligence operative is reported to have offered Australian citizen Nick Zhao between $AU677,000 and $AU1 million in order to finance his election campaign for the Division of Chisholm, in Victoria. Zhao’s response is not known. He was shortly found dead in a hotel room from an overdose.
The CCP also wormed its way into the affections of gullible non-Chinese, funding travel and legal bills for senators such as Sam Dastyari. …
In Melbourne, journalist John Garnaut (one of the key figures involved in waking up the Australian political establishment) was stalked and intimidated by the Party’s people. He had been writing about CCP interference in Australian affairs. Four Chinese individuals followed him to a restaurant, where they sat at nearby tables, staring him down. Garnaut asked one woman a question in Mandarin and she immediately left. In a scene that typifies for me the dumbfounding amateurishness of the Communist Party, she returned a few minutes later, wearing a differently coloured shirt. Garnaut arranged to meet with the Organised Crime Unit at a café to report the incident, and upon arrival, it turned out that more Chinese were openly filming both Garnaut and the officers from the next table, apparently oblivious to this self-incrimination.
Australia has found itself in a difficult position. By the end of 2020, “more than one-third of every Australian export dollar was earned from the Chinese market.” … The education sector is especially compromised. Three Sydney universities in particular — the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Technology at Sydney — enrol more mainland Chinese students than any American university. …
Australian pushback:
The Australian authorities banned Huawei in 2018, having recognised the unique threat the corporation poses to any non-Chinese nation’s security and sovereignty, and they persuaded the US and UK to follow suit….
Prime Minister Scott Morrison introduced a national security test for foreign investments, and also greatly increased defence spending with a focus on the Indo-Pacific region. …
The Party was caught off-guard by this change in attitude. Since 2018, it has refused to accept cabinet-level meetings with Australian counterparts; since 2020, it has refused to accept phone calls. Furious state editorials deride Australia: “ungrateful,” an “upstart.” Now AUKUS may have damaged the relationship irreparably. …
When Australia’s government called for an inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic … an apoplectic Beijing cut imports of beef, barley, wine, coal, and lobster, demanded that Canberra immediately change its laws on countering CCP influence, ordered the Australian press to censor all criticism of the Party, … had a CCP official tweet a doctored photo of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of a child, and finally toyed with a genuinely serious threat: suggesting to China’s prospective students that they might want to reconsider applying for Australian universities. …
Conquer the world:
The stakes are enormous. PLA training manuals talk of “surpass[ing] the West’s thinking” and forging “an innovative way forward for global governance.” These textbooks are refreshingly blunt: “mankind needs a new order that surpasses and supplants the [Westphalian] balance of power.”
When visiting Beijing a few years ago, sinologist Kerry Brown (a man with access to the corridors of power) was told quite simply that Xi wants to rule the world. …
Your future ruler?
Conquering Taiwan would dramatically change the world:
If the PLA invades Taiwan, then the global balance shifts decisively and historically, and no one is safe. The island’s future matters to the whole world. …
The CCP would win for itself what has been called an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” from which it could project power across the western Pacific. It would gain the ability to choke off oil shipments to Japan and South Korea. Most states would immediately fall in line with Beijing’s various demands, fearful for their own safety.
Pax Americana would collapse. Chaos would reign. Further territorial expansion would be inevitable. The Party may want to take control of the region’s US territories and possessions: American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, the Northern Mariana Islands.
More certain would be the return of old-school imperialism. The CCP’s notion of “Chinese” land has always been rooted in the distant past: Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan all “belong” to China simply because they were controlled by Chinese emperors at various stages of the nation’s history. This logic could easily extend to Vietnam and Korea.
Japan would certainly not be safe, considering Beijing’s obsession with the two nations’ historical enmity. The terrible crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanking circa 1937–8 are drilled into the minds of every Chinese mainlander at school, along with the hatred they are expected to feel towards every single blameless descendant. And most of them feel it intensely. Chinese taxi drivers casually inform passengers that they long for the day when the CCP will kill every Japanese man, woman, and child. …
In the chaos of war, the PLA may struggle to seamlessly assume control of Xi’s coveted microchips. “Were production at TSMC [the producer of the world’s most advanced chips”] to stop,” reports the Economist, “so would the global electronics industry, at incalculable cost.” The US has a long way to go before it can catch up with TSMC’s level of sophistication — China longer still. …
Building mankind’s most complicated machines
A Taiwan War could transform the world’s most important shipping lane into Armageddon. Estimates suggest a war would reduce Chinese exports to America by $100 billion. Millions of people would plunge through the trapdoor into poverty. A worldwide depression is certain. …
And if the Communist Party wins full control, then the nightmare would really begin. “After re-unification,” said the Chinese ambassador to France last year, “we will do re-education.” Uyghurs and Tibetans know the visceral hell that lurks behind that bland euphemism. Any ethnic subcategories that prove to be “deviant” will experience the uplifting of their “bio-quality” — a notion all the more terrifying for its vagueness. …
Even a fast and decisive victory for the US, Japan, and Taiwan would involve the loss of dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of lives. America’s global position would be severely damaged. Taiwan would be left ravaged and gutted: a ruined economy without electricity or basic services.
Chinese governments have always had difficulty working with others. For thousands of years their attitude has been that China is the center of the world, the chosen ones, and everyone else were barbarians. Their arrogance and conceit has made them very unpopular as the world finds out more about them — especially recently in Africa.
