Tony Abbott has a remarkably clear understanding of the menace that China poses to peace. It's a pity that he took so long in getting to that point, since we would have benefited from such awareness when he was prime minister.
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His visit to Taiwan for an international meeting a week ago was unofficial, but China was up in arms about it, anyway. Countries don't send heads of government to the island, since it's formally supposed to be part of China, so Beijing is wary of them sending such substitutes as former prime ministers.
China can assume that the Australian government at least declined to dissuade Abbott from visiting Taiwan, which sent a deputy foreign minister to greet him at the airport.
The former prime minister said that two years ago he'd decided not to attend the meeting, the Yushan Forum, for fear of provoking China. But China's behaviour since then had persuaded him that its belligerence was all self-generated - meaning that what outsiders did wouldn't make a lot of difference.
That's mostly, but not completely, correct. New Zealand's crawling to Beijing has been rewarded with relatively favourable treatment. But that won't last.
A problem the world has in understanding China is that its diplomatic statements are becoming ever more hysterical, making it difficult to gauge variations in its anger. The statement from the embassy in Canberra about Abbott's trip is worth quoting in full:
"Tony Abbott is a failed and pitiful politician. His recent despicable and insane performance in Taiwan fully exposed his hideous anti-China features. This will only further discredit him."
Can you imagine the Australian embassy in Beijing issuing a statement anything like that about a former Chinese leader?
Perhaps the embassy here was particularly annoyed by Abbott's description of Taiwan as "the so-called rebel province" - meaning that he doesn't think it's a province of China at all.
Or maybe it was his passing reference to "the Wuhan virus", which officials in Beijing must know is the natural English name for the cause of our two years of misery, a name they would hate to become popular.
In his two speeches in Taipei, the former prime minister gave a notably concise summary of the strategic position: China is building up its forces to drive the US from the Western Pacific and is sending aircraft close to Taiwan to intimidate it and wear out the fighters and pilots that are forced to rise to the challenge; this activity may also provoke shooting that Beijing could use as an excuse for war.
If fighting doesn't start that way, according Abbott, China will probably try blockading Taiwan to force submission - but would probably be unwilling to shoot at any US warships or aircraft that escorted merchant ships to the island's ports. I hope so.
Part of his message was actually directed at Australians. He implied that this country should be prepared to fight to defend Taiwan.
"I can't think of a harder decision for an Australian government than the call to defend freedom far from home - except the call to defend freedom close to home with weakened friends and stronger foes," he said.
He means, as this column has previously discussed, that if Taiwan is lost and the US defeated, we must expect the Chinese threat to Australia to rise enormously.
Yet, for all his current insight, Abbott was prime minister in years when Australia most stubbornly refused to accept evidence of Chinese aggression, most notably the attempt at seizing the South China Sea. This country finally began to wake up around 2017, when Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister.
It was also Abbott who, two years after getting our submarine program moving in 2013, dropped his originally correct view that the urgently needed boats should be built overseas. This has left us with the costly, time-wasting plan to build domestically.
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And while he set the defence budget on an overdue upward trajectory, he and his government let our armed forces carry on with projects irrelevant to making the country safe from what should have been the most obvious source of danger: China.
One final point is worth making about Abbott's statements in Taiwan. He was wrong to cite, in all seriousness, an embarrassing interview that the ABC's China Tonight program had last month with Victor Gao, who was once interpreter for former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and is now vice president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank.
Using the most doubtful logic, Gao said Australia's decision to buy nuclear submarines made it a target for nuclear attack. As for the origin of this attack, "you do not need to know whom it will be," Gao said, thereby hinting that he was in on the secrets of Chinese nuclear targeting policy.
Gao was obviously indulging in the not uncommon Chinese habit of chuiniu - which in this context can be understood as shooting his mouth off. No doubt he later had a chuckle about how Australia's national broadcaster had been naive enough to take him seriously.
I personally knew Chairman Mao Zedong's former interpreter. It never occurred to me to ask: "By the way, what's China's nuclear targeting policy?"
The great challenge for journalists covering China is getting access to people with definite, detailed knowledge of what the government there is doing - and it's so much harder when we're not even in the country. Less useful interviewees with fancy titles can be found, and often know a thing or two - but journalists must not exaggerate the status of such people. And we must be on guard against good old-fashion chuiniu.
- Bradley Perrett was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.
- This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.