The Solomons-China deal is ringing alarm bells but the west is China’s main game, and Australia ...

By Steve Grant

In 1993 then premier of China, Zhu Rongji, stood in front of a large map on his office wall, pointed to it and saw China’s destiny.
China was largely landlocked, he said, open to the sea only on one side. It was different to other great powers who looked out onto a world of ocean.
Zhu said China’s future lay to the west. That was where the country could develop a trade and tourism empire.
The story was relayed by Shah Javed Barki, when the Pakistani-American economist was vice president of the World Bank. He was in the room when Zhu set out his vision.
Australia is drawing red lines and talking of war after China’s security pact with Solomon Islands but, if we are concerned about China’s growing power, we are looking in the wrong place.
Yes, Pacific Island nations like Solomons are important but, to China, looking west is critical. Beijing has developed a powerful China-Pakistan economic corridor. It has built a port at Gwadar that opens up the Middle East and connects it all the way to Xinjiang in China’s west.
China is extending its economic clout across Central Asia into the Middle East and Africa. The massive Belt and Road investment and infrastructure project promises to be a 21st-century silk road.
Of the 146 countries which have signed up to Belt and Road, overwhelmingly the greatest number are to the west of China.
This is Xi Jinping’s big play for greatness.
China’s ‘long game’ is the west
China’s Westward Expansion strategy seeks to secure the supply of energy resources from the Middle East. To China, Westward Expansion seeks to gain a vital edge over the US.
China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization includes all the Central Asian states. As Diplomat Magazine has pointed out, “from Central Asia to the Middle East, no country falls within the sphere of direct US influence or poses a potential threat to China”.
Yes, Belt and Road reaches into the Pacific; Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand are among those who have signed up.
But the west is China’s main game — what Brookings Institution fellow Rush Doshi has called “the long game”.
This is rooted in history and China’s great shame after the fall of the Qing Empire in the 19th century. Doshi quotes the great Qing general, Li Hongzhang, who saw the future West overpowering a weak China and set his nation on a course of renewal.
China failed to modernize and lost war to Japan. Li was one of the authors of what has become known as the “hundred years of humiliation”.
Xi Jinping seeks to avenge China’s weakness. Already he is reshaping the world. At best China’s growing economy enriches the world and it strengthens a global rules-based order.
At worst China’s aggressive authoritarian capitalism tips the world into conflict. Right now, we are seeing more of the worst.
China’s economic power is bringing nations from Central Asia to the Middle East and Africa under its sway. Its rise has tilted the balance of global power. It is a super power rival to the United States. And Xi believes the West is waning and the East is rising.
Solomons-China deal ringing alarm bells
It is already triggering a violent realignment. It is reasonable to say that the war in Ukraine would not be happening if not for China’s rise and China’s increasing alliance with Russia.
Xi and Vladimir Putin are close; they signed a “no limits” pact during the Winter Olympics. Putin invaded the day after the Olympics closing ceremony.
Now Solomon Islands has signed a security agreement with China, sealing the island nation’s drift closer to Beijing. This has been happening since 2019, when it switched its diplomatic recognition away from Taiwan and towards mainland China.
In the midst of our federal election campaign the Solomons-China deal is ringing alarm bells. The Coalition and Labor are trying to prove they can be tougher on the China threat.
But both have been guilty of being inconsistent and ill-prepared, of looking the other way as China built its power and became ever more hard line.
While the Chinese Communist Party was locking up Uyghurs and Tibetans, crushing dissent and winding back political freedoms, Australian governments were seduced by China’s riches and wanting to believe that the Communist Party would become just like us.
Tony Abbott as prime minister invited Xi Jinping to address a joint sitting of federal parliament and saw in him a partner for democracy.
Before Abbott, Julia Gillard thought so little of China and Xi as a threat that she wound back Australia’s security posture and cut defense spending. That was after her predecessor — the man she deposed — Kevin Rudd had flagged China’s growing influence and sought to boost our military capacity.
Labor was inconsistent and weak. The Coalition was naive or blind. Now Australia is trying to make up lost ground. Yet the warning signs were always there.
Is the US able to meet the challenge?
More than a decade ago historian Azar Gat warned that “authoritarian capitalist” states like China and Russia “may represent a viable alternative path to modernity”. Nothing was inevitable about the ultimate victory of liberal democracy.
Looking to the lessons of history, Gat said previous challengers to the global order — Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — failed because they were too small. United States power consistently surpassed others. Without a strong US, he said, “liberal democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the 20th century”.
Is that still the case? Is the US able to meet the challenge? Gat said:
“China and Russia represent a return of economically successful authoritarian capitalist powers, which have been absent since the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, but they are much larger than the latter two countries ever were.”
Gat’s warning about the looming threat of authoritarian states disputed conventional wisdom in 2007, when his article first appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs.
China was not on a pathway to liberal reform; it was, as the architect of China’s opening up to the world, Deng Xiaoping, said, hiding its capacities and biding its time.
Defense Minister Peter Dutton may well be right in warning Australians to prepare for war. Xi Jinping certainly is preparing China for war. Indeed, he is threatening conflict against Taiwan.
But we aren’t prepared, despite being warned for decades this was coming. We don’t have the weaponry. Nuclear powered subs are decades away, if we ever get them.
We need to build high-tech know-how. We can’t even guarantee our fuel supply chains in the event of war.
Yes, we are strengthening alliances: the Quad — Australia, US, Japan and India — and AUKUS with the UK and US. But sovereign defense capacity is a project of nation building. We aren’t having that hard conversation during the election campaign. It is easier to talk of “red lines” and fears of war. They’re the tough words, but how do we back them up?
The 21st century was always going to be defined by the US-China rivalry. America may still be strong enough to rescue democracy.
Xi Jinping, like his friend Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, may fatally overestimate his own strength.
In any case, this is a time of reckoning. Solomon Islands has been a wake-up call for Australia. China is in the Pacific: significant and an important plank in Beijing’s growing influence, but it is not the focus of Chinese expansionism.
Thirty years ago, Zhu Rongji looked at a map and pointed west. China’s challenge today stretches to all points of the globe. -(ABC)