It seems unlikely to us that there will be any change in the status of the lease in the near term. That said, we expect the lease of the Port of Darwin will remain a high-profile bone of contention for the foreseeable future. Alas, it is both a symbolic and a tangible expression of the U.S.-China tensions that touch almost every corner of the globe. But that statement needs two qualifiers (at least). The first is our strong view that Australia would find itself in a vigorous debate over its relationship with China even if the United States were not part of the picture.
The second qualifier is that the reference to Australia and U.S.-China tensions isn’t based just on conjecture and the difficulties that have arisen in Australia’s trade with China in a range of products from coal, to beef, to barley. No the Chinese have framed the issue more starkly. This passage from a recent article in Advance Australia makes the point:
Journalist Miranda Devine writes that it was just last September that CCP official
Professor Wang Yiwei
was sent to Australia to give us a blunt message: “If there is a war between the United States and China you are the frontier, you are the first to be sacrificed”.
To return to less incendiary but still controversial issues, there is the whole question of Australia’s relationship to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Our understanding is that Australia as a country has not signed on. The state of Victoria, however, has and that is another bubbling issue. (More on that in some later entry.) From our distant vantage point, it is not clear whether
Adam Giles,
the chief minister of the Northern Territory in 2015, thought of the lease of the Port of Darwin as a piece of the great Belt and Road puzzle.
Ye Cheng
, however, the owner of the Landbridge Group, did see it in those terms. In 2015, he told Xinhua:
Landbridge has a port in Rizhao [eastern China] and now we have a port in Darwin.
This is our involvement in One Belt, One Road.
***
When we started browsing the web for articles on Darwin, New Territory, earlier today, one of the first we came across included a picture of a handsome young U.S. Marine, having his nose swabbed by fully gowned nurse. He and his unit had just arrived in Darwin for an annual exercise they conduct there with Australian forces, but first they have to undergo COVID-19 testing and 14 days of quarantine.
No doubt the Chinese interest in the Port of Darwin was and is wholly commercial. Still, this annual U.S.-Australian military exercise probably did not escape their notice.
