China Fires a Warning “Shot” at Australia! By James Reed
This material below is worth reading, from News.com, because it is mainstream, and issues some of the warnings I have made at alor.org about China over the years. We are facing an increasing China threat, and it is time for all of us to take this deadly seriously. Most sheeple, especially from the Freedom Movement, are still asleep, or have their hobbies entertaining them. But, in the future, maybe they will look back in horror … but, I doubt it. I have already gone through the five stages of preparing for death, and am ready to meet my maker.
“A defence watcher has said that China’s withdrawal from a high level agreement with Australia is a “warning shot” across Canberra’s bows that far more punitive retribution could be coming if the country doesn’t start playing ball.
Last week, Beijing ripped up the China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED), reportedly as revenge for the Federal Government’s cancelling of Victoria’s co-operation deal with China on its flagship Belt and Road infrastructure grand plan.
Dr John Coyne, of think tank the Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), told news.com.au that the backing out of the Victoria deal is part of a growing global reticence over the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has “embarrassed” China.
On Thursday, China’s state economic planner said it was halting all activities of the strategic economic dialogue (SED).
China’s National Development and Reform Commission accused the Government of “launching a series of measures to disrupt the normal exchanges and co-operation between China and Australia out of Cold War mindset and ideological discrimination”.
Those “measures” was widely interpreted as including the ending of Victoria’s BRI agreement, which happened just days beforehand.
The SED was the main bilateral government level economic forum between China and Australia with an aim to encourage investment between the two nations and smooth trade and finance talks.
However, China analysts in Australia pointed out the ending of the SED had little direct effect given it hadn’t met since 2017. Additionally, Beijing’s withdrawal didn’t change any trade agreements, although these have been disrupted in other ways.
Nonetheless, it was the first time China had taken measures against Australia during the current impasse specifically because it was displeased with the Government’s policies.
While it’s suspected the slapping of tariffs of goods such as barley and wine are due to Beijing’s anger with Canberra, it has insisted that’s not the case.
For instance, tariffs of more than 200 per cent on wine was officially because of claims Australia was dumping the product onto the Chinese market.
“It’s not good news. This is clearly a diplomatic signal, and it’s a very visible signal from China expressing displeasure over recent announcements in Australia, particularly related to the scrapping of Victoria’s Belt and Road framework,” Caitlyn Byrne of the Griffith University Asia Institute told ABC News last week on the ripping up of the SED.”
Now, consider the issue of Chinese military bases in the pacific, with the report this time from the Left.
“Let’s be honest: Australians have never had much time for our South Pacific neighbours.
The island nations that lie to our north and north-east, stretching from Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands to Vanuatu, Fiji and beyond, may be close to us geographically, but we have not found them especially interesting, important or profitable.
With a few honourable exceptions, and tourism aside, Australians have been indifferent to our nearest neighbours’ dramatic landscapes, their rich and diverse cultures, and their general welfare, and we have seen relatively few opportunities for trade.
Only their strategic significance has attracted us: the islands scattered widely across the north of our continent are critical to our protection from armed attack. Our closest neighbours are crucial to the defence of our continent simply because of their proximity.
Military operations are governed by distance. Whether you can sink a ship, bomb an airfield or seize a town – and, critically, how much it will cost – depends on how far your forces must operate from their bases and how far the enemy must operate from theirs.
For much of our history, distance has worked to Australia’s advantage. We have been secure because we are remote. But we lose this advantage if a potentially hostile great power can operate from bases close to our shores.
The China wake-up call
“We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries and neighbours of ours.” That was then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in April 2018, responding to press reports last April that China was seeking to build a naval base in Vanuatu.
The story was swiftly and categorically denied by both Beijing and Port Vila, and Julie Bishop, then minister for foreign affairs, poured cold water on it. While it may prove a false alarm, it seems Canberra has received credible indications that China is indeed actively seeking a military base somewhere in the South Pacific.
It would be hard to overstate the significance of such a development, were it to occur.
This would be the first time since Japan was pushed out of the islands at the end of the Pacific War that any major power, other than one of our allies, has sought a military base so close to Australia.
Establishing a base in our neighbourhood would be a low-cost, low-risk way for China to show off its growing military and diplomatic reach and clout. Moreover, by ignoring the noisy complaints that would surely emanate from Washington, Beijing would show that it is willing to defy the United States.
And it would send an unambiguous message to us here in Australia, signalling Beijing’s rejection of our claims to our own sphere of influence in the South Pacific, and sending a stark warning of China’s reach and its capacity to punish us if we side too vociferously with the US or Japan against it.
One option is a radical recasting of our relations and role in the South Pacific, to draw our neighbour much more closely under our wing. But the better option would be to step back, abandoning our traditional ideas about keeping intruders out of the South Pacific. In fact, there may be no alternative.
China poses an unprecedented challenge to the strategic assumptions that have framed our policies since European settlement. We have never encountered an Asian country as powerful as China is now, let alone as powerful as it will likely become in the decades ahead.
The costs to us of trying to keep China out of the region might simply prove impossible to bear. Or, to be more precise, it might prove cheaper to build military capabilities that in a war could neutralise Chinese bases in the South Pacific (by denying access to them and subjecting them to strike attacks) than to prevent China from establishing such bases in peacetime.
Building forces that could counter Chinese bases in our neighbourhood would mean that we could feel less anxious about the establishment of such bases, and relax the imperative to preserve the sphere of influence we have for so long assumed we must maintain.
This would not mean abandoning all interest in our nearest neighbours and succumbing to the indifference that has historically weakened our relationships with them. On the contrary, we should make great efforts to maximise our role and presence – not in the form of an exclusive sphere of influence, but as one of the region’s major partners.
The costs to us of trying to keep China out of the region might simply prove impossible to bear
It is possible to imagine Australia actively engaged in the South Pacific not to exclude China (or any other power), but to work with it where possible, and to work against it where necessary, to protect our interests and the interests we share with our small neighbours as best we can.
We should start to treat our smaller close neighbours as independent at last.
The uncomfortable reality is that preserving an exclusive sphere of influence in the South Pacific is not going to be possible against a regional power that is far stronger than any we have ever confronted, or even contemplated. It might turn out that the more we try and fail to exclude China from the South Pacific, the less influence we will have there.
If Scott Morrison is as serious about the South Pacific as he claims, he should start, paradoxically perhaps, by abandoning the idea of an exclusive sphere of influence, and then by guiding Australians to take a much greater interest in our neighbourhood than we ever have before.”
That is the warning, of sorts, of what to expect from the Left. Be afraid, be very afraid, but do not allow fear to neutralise you. This is the battle of history. Australia should have acquired nuclear weapons when the British were testing them here in the 1950s, but instead followed the Fabian socialist mantra of “populate or perish,” immigration stupidity in a world of technology. Still, if we want to survive, Australia has the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, if it could stand up to the Left.
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