Australia sends signal to China as it rejoins US, Japan and India for Malabar naval exercise

Name: China-Australia trade: Beijing set to ban nearly US$400 million worth of Australian wheat imports
Uploaded: 2020-11-03T13:30:11.000Z
Duration: 1 min 15 s
Description: China-Australia trade: Beijing set to ban nearly US$400 million worth of Australian wheat imports

The Australian navy joins counterparts from the US, Japan and India in the military exercise for the first time in 13 years

Show of strength follows a deterioration in ties between the four nations and Beijing and comes as China announces new bans on Australian imports

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Japanese, Indian and US ships take part in Malabar in 2015, when Australia was not involved. Photo: AFP

Kunal Purohit

Published: 9:30pm, 3 Nov 2020Updated: 6:29pm, 12 Nov 2020

After a gap of 13 years, Australian forces joined their counterparts from the United States , Japan and India on Tuesday for an annual naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal in a move widely seen as sending a message to China.

The three-day Malabar exercise off India’s southernmost coast comes amid increasing strain in the relationships between each of the four countries and China, and has been interpreted by many experts as a demonstration of resolve in the face of Beijing’s increasingly muscular foreign policy.

Indian troops have been locked in a stand-off with their Chinese counterparts along the two countries’ disputed Himalayan border for the past six months, while in recent days China has announced bans on a string of Australian imports, from barley to lobster, in what is widely seen as retribution for Canberra joining US calls for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.

Against this background – along with a US-China relationship that has been rocked by both a trade war and a blame game over the coronavirus – the resurrection of Malabar as an exercise involving all four members of the so-called “Quad” is likely to raise hackles in Beijing.

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China-Australia trade: Beijing set to ban nearly US$400 million worth of Australian wheat imports

The Malabar exercise began as a joint India-US exercise in 1992 before expanding to include all four countries. However, Australia and Japan pulled out after the 2007 exercise following a diplomatic protest by Beijing, which had accused the grouping of being an “anti-China coalition”. Japan rejoined in 2015.