Greg Sheridan
is the foreign editor of
The Australian
, Australia’s most widely circulated newspaper. Today’s featured quote is from his just-published article on the protests in Hong Kong. We found it an excellent summary of what is happening and what is at stake. It is not, however, a completely stand-alone piece because much of it is a reaction to another recent article. That earlier piece was written by
Andrew Hastie
, a Liberal, a Member of the Australian Parliament, and, perhaps more to the point, the chairman of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. We’ll first take note of some things in Andrew Hastie’s article and then come back to Greg Sheridan’s.
Mr. Hastie opens with the observation that he was wrong about something. 9/11 wasn’t the defining moment for geopolitics in the 21st Century. No, that was the much less dramatic event 5 months earlier, when a Chinese jet fighter collided with a U.S. intelligence plane some 43 miles from Hainan island. As a former Australian Army captain with service in Afghanistan, Mr. Hastie could have been forgiven for sticking with the focus on 9/11, but, especially for Australia, that early clash between the U.S. and China was the truly seminal event.
“Australia must now, somehow, hold on to our sovereignty and prosperity,” Mr. Hastie wrote. He continued:
“It is impossible [for Australia] to forsake the US, our closest security and investment partner. It is impossible to disengage from China, our largest trading partner. This is the central point: almost every strategic and economic question facing Australia in the coming decade will be refracted through the geopolitical competition of the US and the PRC.”
Mr. Sheridan isn’t the only one to have reacted to Andrew Hastie’s article. There seems to have been a lot of reaction, some favorable (as Mr. Sheridan’s was) and some not. And this appears to have been one of the more controversial paragraphs:
“The West once believed that economic liberalization would naturally lead to democratization in China. This was our Maginot Line. It would keep us safe, just as the French believed their series of steel and concrete forts would guard them against the German advance in 1940. But their thinking failed catastrophically. The French had failed to appreciate the evolution of mobile warfare. Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbor has become.”
As for what is to be done, Mr. Hastie’s piece is relatively short on explicit recommendations. Implicitly, the starting point for him is understanding. “
Right now,”
he writes,
“our greatest vulnerability lies not in our infrastructure but in our thinking.”
And the first thing to understand is that China today is a state driven by ideology, specifically “Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.
***
Let’s turn now to the follow-on article by Greg Sheridan, which deals both with the issue of China’s ideology and direction as well as with the urgent issue of Hong Kong. In his view, President Xi
“fundamentally changed the direction of mainland Chinese political and cultural development.
“He took it away from being an authoritarian regime with a good economic record, a good deal of civic space and on a modest and limited path of partial liberalization. He headed it instead towards a new, hi-tech totalitarianism.”
As for the developments in Hong Kong, Mr Sheridan describes the origin of the current confrontations – Hong Kong’s infamous extradition bill, which has still not been wholly withdrawn – the challenges that the demonstrations pose for mainland China, and the massing of troops. He also notes more than once that
“Beijing is reluctant to intervene in a heavy-handed way because of the enormous, permanent, reputational damage it would suffer.”