‘China sympathisers’: a new Red Scare stalks Australian businesses
- As anti-China rhetoric heats up down under, expressing support for one of the region’s most important trade relationships has become a risky business
- Right-wing manipulation of social media is fanning deeply ingrained racial prejudices and anti-communist sentiment, experts say
What Helen Sawczak doesn’t know about doing business with China isn’t worth knowing.
Having run the Australia China Business Council (ACBC) for more than four years, the formidable yet approachable Sawczak has an encyclopedic knowledge of a relationship now worth A$235 billion (US$169 billion) in two-way trade. In short, she is the perfect person to act as a bridge between two of the Asia-Pacific’s most important trading partners.
Unfortunately, she has resigned.
Sawczak doesn’t deny the job has been challenging of late. It wasn’t just having to deal with members worried over the trade spats, she said, but also the constant attacks by anti-China hawks labelling anyone who supported a relationship with Beijing as a “China sympathiser” or “apologist”.
Right-wing MP Andrew Hastie – a former Special Air Service officer who served in Afghanistan – accused her of having a low regard for Australia and prioritising economic benefits over national security.
But such rhetoric has alarmed many Australians, among them the former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Dennis Richardson.
“For one group to continually wrap themselves in the flag and want to imply that those who disagree with them are not loyal Australians is simply crossing a line,” Richardson said of Hastie’s remarks.
Sawczak said it was typical for someone in her role to take these “hits” but she remained steadfast in her support for the China-Australia trade relationship. She said ties were essential, given China and Asia’s role in driving economic growth.
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“We need to better understand that we can balance our strategic relationships with our economic interests.”
Fortunately, she said, Chinese and Australian business partners were working behind the scenes to keep relations warm, although she was unsure if the relationship could ever return to its previous heights.
“Now there are a lot of underlying suspicions. There is this ridiculous idea that we have to choose between nations [the US and China]. A confident sovereign country doesn’t have to choose and should balance its best interests and maintain good relations with both.”
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A NEED TO CHOOSE?
Sawczak isn’t the only high-profile business person warning against this sense of having to choose. In April, Sydney businessman Warwick Smith resigned as chairman of the government-run Australia-China Council after it was restructured and rebranded as the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations last year.
Before he quit, he sent Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison a letter outlining concerns over the structure, independence and effectiveness of the foundation, which is supposed to boost engagement between the two countries.
Another businessman who “copped” it was mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest who was accused by several politicians of ambushing the Australian government into mending relations with China, when he invited China’s consul-general for Victoria to a press conference on Covid-19 tests he had secured from China in late April.
Uncowed, he said he would “crack on with helping my country, unapologetic to those who think racism or isolationism is a viable path for Australia.”
At the same time, some observers say they detect an increasingly defensive tone in the language emanating from Canberra over its relationship with Beijing.
“Australian values” and “national security threats” are phrases that keep popping up. Some suggest this shows Canberra’s approach has drifted from the globalised vision set out by former prime minister Gough Whitlam, who first established diplomatic relations with China in the 1970s, to a US-centric vision that emphasises military prowess.
They point to the A$250 billion (US179 billion) defence budget that Australia announced recently as evidence.
Such undercurrents have spooked businesses and Smith has called on Canberra to drop its rhetoric about “values” in favour of a more civil and pragmatic approach to China.
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TOXIC CLIMATE
Michael Clifton, chief executive of the Australian think tank China Matters, said there now existed a toxic climate in which business leaders were unwilling to make the case for balancing security interests with commercial interests for fear of being labelled pro-Beijing.
“Critics are quick to conflate calls for engagement [with China] with acts of appeasement. It is not in Australia’s national interest for this toxic climate to continue,” he said.
Clifton, who spent 20 years with the Australian Trade and Investment Commission and also has a role in the ACBC, can speak from personal experience. In June, his think tank – which was set up to encourage discussion of China among businesses, government and security agencies – came under fire from the Australian press.
A story run by Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited newspapers, headlined “Pushing Back On China’s Grip”, claimed the think tank had lost government funding because it lobbied against Australia’s “interests”. China Matters released a statement denouncing the falsehoods and saying the article was defamatory.
Writing in the public policy journal, Pearls & Irritation, Australian historian Henry Reynolds said the attack on China Matters was “symptomatic of a dramatic and sudden sea-change in Australian defence and foreign policies”. “We have decided China is an enemy,” wrote Reynolds. “We court the country’s enmity and do so proudly.”
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But with Australia in its first recession in nearly 30 years, now may not be a good time to be courting such enmity. Indeed, preserving economic interests could be seen as integral to Australia’s national interests.
“Commercial self-interest and the national interest are not mutually exclusive,” Clifton said. “While our exports of iron ore are most notable, we should not forget the thousands of otherwise-unremarkable small and medium-sized enterprises whose livelihoods depend on China – citrus growers, winemakers, lobster fishermen, beef and dairy farmers, tourism operators, and many more.”
WHERE DID IT GO WRONG?
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“Anti-communist sentiments have been there for decades and again it has been fanned by Breitbart, Fox News and the Falun Gong media, spreading to Australia and other English-language parts of the world.”
Chey said Beijing’s restrictions on Australian barley and beef had been exaggerated by the local press, which prompted China to use the issue to play Australia off against the US for its own advantage.
The spat over barley began with an anti-dumping investigation; the disagreement over beef began with complaints over food mislabelling.
Making matters worse, according to former Australian defence secretary Paul Barratt, was the fact that Morrison appeared to be borrowing from Trump’s playbook. “He saw how Trump won and remained popular, so he has unconsciously emulated Trump.”
Barratt said the first evidence of this was when Morrison took the lead in calling for an international probe into the origins of the coronavirus after a phone call with Trump in April.
He also took the view that the messy politics around supporting trade with China had a lot to do with the conflation of the departments of trade and foreign affairs in Australia.
Before the merger of the two departments in 1986, during much of the Cold War, which ran between 1947 and 1991, Australia managed to maintain a trade relationship with Russia, Barratt said.
Others, perhaps pessimistically, wonder if even more primal motives may be in play.
“Crude anti-Asian sentiment” was “part of the convict-era DNA of most Australians”, said former Australian diplomat Gregory Clark, who resigned from public service to protest against Australia’s participation in the Vietnam war.
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Clark said the general inability of Australians to learn languages (particularly Mandarin) or understand Asians “except in the most superficial manner” as well as the history of white Australia and contempt for Chinese people going back more than 100 years were also part of the problem.
“Being based in Japan I have to admit to being completely stunned by this seemingly sudden rise in anti-China feeling in Australia,” he said.
“But having memories of how the China threat was invoked to justify Australian intervention in the Vietnam war I should not be too surprised.”
Responsibility for countering the vitriol did not lie with businesses, he said, but the government in offering an “unclannish” way of understanding China. ■
