9/07/2021

The Morrison government is provoking China to please America - Paul Keating (Former prime minister of Australia)

 


The Coalition government is ignoring Australia’s interests by pushing us towards a confrontation with Beijing, mainly to be seen in Washington as America’s fawning acolyte.

The Morrison government is wantonly leading Australia into a strategic dead end by its needless provocations against China. China is not the old Soviet Union. It is not attacking or forcibly incorporating countries into a grand union, nor is it exporting some kind of universal ideology. And it does not threaten nuclear Armageddon on a daily basis, as the Soviet Union did. Save for its front porch, the South China Sea, it broadly keeps to itself.

Its great problem is that it is now a state as large as the United States, and with the potential of being much larger – an unforgivable sin for American triumphalists. And that sin has radiated over those Australians with a fawning, obsequious attitude to the United States. How dare China shirtfront American economic pre-eminence!

This is what all this warmongering is about – China’s presence and scale. China’s rise is simply not in the American playbook – its very existence and at this scale is an affront to America’s notion of itself as the exceptional state, the proselytiser of divine providence.

Australia is a continent sharing a border with no other state. It has no territorial disputes with China – indeed, China is 12 flying hours away from the Australian coast. Yet the Morrison government, both through its foreign policy incompetence and fawning compulsion to please America, effectively has us in a cold war with China.

It is true that China, like all big states, has become ruder as it has got bigger. Under Xi Jinping and in its new foreign policy adolescence – its grand coming out – it expects other states to afford it deference and jump to its tune. But big states are invariably rude; it is the role of foreign policy to navigate the dangers without pulling the roof in – without military conflict. For big-state rudeness, we need look no further than Iraq and Vietnam.

But we now have an ambassador to the United States, Arthur Sinodinos, usurping the role of the foreign minister by making declaratory statements to claim that China’s coercion in the Pacific is now a bigger threat than September 11 terrorism and that ANZUS will hasten military and economic tie-ups to counter Beijing. Sinodinos has even invented a Chinese challenge to “the way we run our domestic economy”. Would any sane person suggest the various Chinese trade bans are a cause for war – or anything like a cause for war? But Sinodinos does.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton says Australia needs to be in a position to defend its waters in the north and south – implying, without any basis whatsoever, that China may be a military aggressor. that’s a posture China has never shown any sign of.

The Morrison government is needlessly and irresponsibly pushing Australia towards a headlong confrontation with China – and doing it, in the main, to be seen in Washington as America’s fawning acolyte. The whole notion of Australia’s right to an independent foreign policy – a right to be itself and act in its own interests – is being suborned by a government determined to subordinate its interests to those of another country.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the conservatives put all their strategic faith in Britain. Now, dull as ever, and with the same fear of abandonment, they are placing their faith in the United States – having no faith in Australia’s ability to make its way in Asia as a proud, resourceful and intelligent state in its own right.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well thought out comments by Keating. Why is the world so short of the brilliance of leaders of old and now have sycophants hemming their Governments?

Of course, the reality tells the whole story. Their slave master, the USA has two whimsical leaders in succession, one a mentally deraigned maniac followed by a mentally dementia afflicted walking dead. We cannot expect the tailwaggers to do any better, right. In fact some tailwaggers are trying to do one up on the master, like Johnson and Morrison.

Since the rise of the USA, the usual stance has been to hype up threats, whether from Communism, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran among others, and even fabricated such threats like from Iraq, besides coercing it's tailwaggers to follow and act as the battering ram to carry out their agenda.

If China had ambitions to colonise Asia, they would have done so during Admiral Cheng He's time. Asians need to know what is China's stance over the thousands of years of it's history and compare that with the USA's short few hundred years of tumultuous war mongering stance all along.

A-Non-Yes-Mouse said...

Present pro-Western leaders are mainly people of greed (fattening their own bank accounts), cowardice (balls-carrying) and corruption (legalised or circumvented).

You can detect them through their behaviours, speeches, policies and interactions easily.

Anonymous said...

That narrative about China's military buildup and bullying in the South China Sea is all bullshit. Now they are also trying extra hard to pry Russia and China apart because together there is no way the USA can dominate unilaterally.

The real issue leading to all this is that the USA cannot accept the fact that China is rising and on the way to overtaking the USA, a scenario that they find very hard to come to terms with. How dare a communist country, touted as sick and backward, overtake a democratic icon with a system that had always been touted as the best there is and that the whole world must adopt. All the regime changes have been geared towards this goal and their motto is adopt or perish.

Anonymous said...

The system adopted by the British had been tried in ancient China long times ago in the era of the 7 kingdoms periods. King of Zhou although was appointed as the head had no control of the armies of other kings. Emperor Qing was the one to unite all armies and created one China. It is history. However, British systems is slightly different from Ancient China; Scotland, Ireland,etc are individual countries recognised by UN. In due course, this countries may decide to leave British on self-interest, than it is the end of Great Britian. Those countries following the DNA of British system would be subject to self disintegrated. Eg, Singapore was been expelled from Federation of Malaysia. Maybe Texas, California may leave USA on self-interest. India would also be reseted in the future as English languages would be replaced with each individual local languages,eg tamil, hindi, arabic, many others.

A-Non-Yes-Mouse said...

COVID-19 Singapore: Self-Deception Is The Worst Enemy In Any War

Whether it is Pandemic or Endemic, the fact remains that the COVID-19 coronavirus is still COVID-19 coronavirus. You can change the terminology to anything but the fact remains that the COVID-19 coronavirus does not become less contagious, less infectious, less deadly or less mutatable. By simply changing the nomenclature or terminology, if you expect to be able to live with the coronavirus, you are only deceiving yourself and your fellow countrymen.

To win any war, be it a military confrontation or a pandemic, one needs to know oneself, one's enemy and the environment. In addition, one needs to deceive the enemy instead of deceiving oneself. Self-deception is the worst enemy in any war. One can only fall into self-deception when one does not know oneself, does not know the enemy and does not know the environment - all the three main ingredients of knowledge. It's like a blind man fighting with an invisible ghost in the dark.

Singapore's poorly conceived strategy of "Living with the Coronavirus, like flu", despite numerous warnings by concerned citizens, is a self-deceiving, self-defeating suicidal strategy that is doomed to fail miserably right from the word go. In just three weeks into is commencement, this self-indulgent deception of a strategy that is no strategy, is now revealing its kamikaze suicidal reality, exponentially.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic last January, starting with the ill-conceived advice of "Don't wear a mask if you are well, wear a mask only if you are unwell", there is no shortage of such blunders. At every stage of turning in this Pandemic, whenever the spread of infections subsided, the smart alecs (fools) are quick to rush in to show Singaporeans and the world how smart (foolish) they can be. This is really baffling!

Now, with infections hitting more than 230 per day, and hospital beds getting crowded, the healthcare system is again being challenged and the medical facilities and staff are being over-stressed. The hindsight-dependent Multi-Ministry Task Force (MTF) has no choice but to react in its normal flip-flopping fashion again. Arrogance, stubbornness and foolhardy have no place to stand but must collapse to give way to prudence and propriety.

When will the "Experts Committee" resign instead of hiding behind a stonewall of silence of late, after giving all the un-expert experts' advices to the MTF? Their continuous failures, one after another, is really appalling. They clearly show that the coronavirus is in many ways and many times smarter than their expertise and serious lack of initiative, foresight and professionalism.

The lesson to learn here is that the National Vaccination Program has failed to prevent widespread infections. In fact, it has achieved the reverse. It has proven that those who have been fool-ly vaccinated have been fooled and lulled into a lucid state of Mental Complacency, harbouring a false sense of safety and security, thereby exposing themselves carelessly and needlessly to the COVID-19 coronavirus, and becoming infected and spreading the infection everywhere they go.

Instead of trying to outsmart the COVID-19 coronavirus by mere reactive actions (after closely monitoring), why not, for goodnes sake, start to take proactive actions?

I hope they don't need me to tell them what those proactive actions are.

Can fools ever learn?


LIPS At Your Service.

Anonymous said...

They still believe in the lies of their white gods. Whatever the white gods do must be the right thing. The best vaccines, live with the virus, open up the economy, the benefits outweigh the risk, daft, daft, daft.

Yes, the experts are more daft than the thinking public laymen.

Anonymous said...

Washington believes being poor is Chinese people’s fate; poverty in China is an indispensable prerequisite for the security of the US

Former Aussie PM Paul Keating recently said that China's "great problem" is that "it [China] is now a state as large as the United States, and with the potential of being much larger - an unforgivable sin for American triumphalists."

The former Aussie head of state made such a statement when accusing the incumbent Aussie government of wantonly leading Australia-China relations into a strategic dead end. He said that China was not forcibly incorporating countries into a "grand union" or exporting a universal ideology. Nor did China impose nuclear threats, said Keating. But he believed that, "China's rise is simply not in the American playbook - its very existence and at this scale is an affront to America's notion of itself as the exceptional state - the proselytizer of divine providence."

As long as China keeps its development momentum, the US will not "forgive" it whatsoever.

China is encountering strategic containment and suppression from the US at the current stage. No matter how it happened, it’s the collective fate of Chinese people who must overcome it in a collective spirit.

Who pushed forward China's rise? Who provided the fundamental driving force of this trend? This is the dream of several generations with noble aspirations and the Communist Party of China united the Chinese people. The Chinese people as a whole eventually turned the dream into a historic trend.

In the past 2 or 3 decades, Chinese people became aware of their rights and their desire to pursue a better life was fully awakened. Almost all the Chinese people work hard to achieve these goals.

Now there are color TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines in almost every household in China. The country's GDP became the 6th largest in the world by 2000, surpassing Italy. Then the Chinese were able to afford private cars and houses with property rights. And in another decade, China's GDP surpassed Japan's to become the second largest economy in the world. Yet at that time, it was still far from the total GDP of the US.

The Chinese people then began to buy better cars, as well as improve the housing and environments of their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Moreover, they started to strengthen ecological protection, develop tourism, gradually build a social welfare system, and digitize their life. As a result, China's GDP today is more than two-thirds of that of the US.

But are the Chinese satisfied? Not at all. Modernization in China needs to be refined continuously. The serious income disparity between regions and different groups needs to be replaced by common prosperity. Those who get rich first need to bring others along. The welfare system in China needs to be further improved so that the next generation must live better off than the previous one. Food needs to be safer. The difficulty of seeing a doctor needs to be fundamentally solved. Every citizen's retirement needs to be secured. Accidents during production should be further reduced. When Chinese people take all these things up to another level, China's total GDP will surpass that of the US and become the world's No.1.

No one can stop Chinese people from collectively pushing their country to become the world's top economy as history progresses. Even though the Chinese government certainly has not planned the timetable and roadmap to become the world's No.1, this is a "people's war." It will be as vast and mighty as a big river. It will be an unstoppable tide.

Chinese people have already started a national movement for common prosperity with speed and on a grand scale., and have shown their strong ability to turn that pursuit into reality.

This is China's "unforgivable sin" to the US, as Keating put it. Yet China is simply bettering itself.

Anonymous said...

(Cont_d)

What can China do? Reason with the US and convince it to chill? Obviously, doing so is useless. The only way that can make the US "forgive" China is for the country to stop developing. This means the Chinese will stay in the No.2 position forever. It means Chinese people will have to stop the effort to further improve their living standards, all deprived of the natural human rights to pursue a better life. Moreover, according to the law of social development, once China stop moving forward, chaos could emerge. If this were to happen, the Chinese could not maintain their current moderately prosperous way of life.

This is the nature of the China-US game. The truth is, even if China's GDP surpasses that of the US one day, Chinese per capita wealth will be far less than that of the US, Europe and the entire Western world. But even so, Washington will not allow it. They believe that being poor is Chinese people's collective fate. The poverty in China is an indispensable prerequisite for the security of the US and the world.

That being said, playing the game and continuing this struggle has become the only choice for all Chinese people. All Chinese are on the same boat in this struggle, not only responding to challenges for the future of their country, but also fighting for the future for themselves and their children. Chinese people must unite and use the powerful reality that will continue to form a force for the US to abandon its ambitions to crush China. This will force them to believe: Accepting the possibility that China, which has a population four times the US population, will exceed it in terms of total economic prowess. They must accept that coexisting with China peacefully will be their best choice.

- Beijing


Anonymous said...

What is happening is also a showdown between two political systems, democracy versus communism. For well into a century. Communism has been a competing political system with democracy, over much of the century, with democracy succeeding in eclipsing the communist system by progressing much faster to entice nations to adopt. The fall of the Soviet Union was a big setback for communism.

Since then, China has refined the communist system with capitalist tone, and that helped it to progress even faster than democracy could imagine, with top down power to make decisions, unlike democracy that is defined by people power. It worked so well that China progressed so much faster and that made the USA and the democratic West uncomfortable to find their system unable to match China's progress head on. It is a bitter pill to swallow and they basically refused to swallow nor accept it. Hence all the effort to put China down or they will lose the ideological high ground.

The more the West try to put China down, the more adamant China will move to overcome the odds. And such Western effort to derail China's progress is actually pulling the Chinese closer together to fight the common enemy, as they did before, with the Nationalist and Communist closing ranks to take care of their common enemy, the Japanese.

It is what they say, a blessing in disguise. China is making preparations for countering the many obstacles and eventualities created against them by the West, which they would otherwise have put on the back burner. Keep watching!

Anonymous said...

The Whites wants every other race to be poor, not just the Chinese. Even their own Black population are not spared. For them creating wars, subterfuge, making regime changes, sanctions, stealing other country's resources are all means to make those victim countries remain poor. In Africa, South America, South Asia and Middle East, centuries of colonisation did little to elevate most of the poverty still prevalent in those countries.

When China started helping with infrastructure developments, which is to them contrary to their agenda and therefore they have been throwing aspersions, spanners, using terrorist to subvert the BRI, which are all measures to ensure China will have a hard time to succeed in eradicating poverty across the Euro-Asia continent.