Defence experts question Canberra's China stance

CANBERRA - Australia faces yet another conflict of interest in its already strained relations with China as defence experts from Beijing and the United States question Canberra's strategic thinking.

Despite the signing of a A$50 billion ($60.85 billion) Gorgon gas deal between PetroChina and Exxon, China has been angered by earlier investment decisions, the row over the detention of Australian iron ore negotiator Stern Hu, and Canberra's view of Beijing as the leading long-term threat to regional security.

The Australian Defence Department is now objecting to the acquisition by a Wuhan Iron and Steel Company subsidiary of a 50 per cent interest in a mining project in the Woomera weapons testing range in South Australia.

Canberra has previously rejected Chinese investment in Australian miner OZ Minerals because of its operations in the 127,000 sq km range.

The conflicts in dealing with the trading partner that has cushioned the impact on Australia of the global financial crisis, but which is also the region's rising military superpower, has disturbed regional experts analysing the defence white paper released in May.

Their concerns were expressed in papers prepared for a forum by the Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute, canvassing views from China, India, the United States, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia and New Zealand.

In China, Shanghai Institutes for International Research fellow Zhang Chun said the white paper was trying to rebuild Australian middle-power leadership, lost when the end of the Cold War removed its position as a "balancer" between East and West.

Zhang said the white paper justified increased defence spending by highlighting dangers ranging from terrorism to climate change, and by identifying China as the main source of threat.

"Even as [the Australian military community] has embraced the view that China's first priority is economic growth, and that the nature of China's growth locks it into interdependency with the global economy, it has worried that China's economic growth will change regional security and strategic relativities," he said.

Zhang said the white paper was "old wine in new bottles", relying on Canberra's special relationship with the US to balance the rise of China - "the final resort of Australian leadership among middle powers".

Commodore Uday Bhaskar, director of India's National Maritime Foundation, regards the white paper as ambivalent, especially in regard to China.

See Seng Tan, associate professor at Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the white paper cultivated the impression that Australia was still riding shotgun for the US.

"Far from distancing Australia fromthe unfortunate image ... of the nation as willing deputy to America's sheriff to the world, the white paper in effect nudges Canberra towards strategic congruence with Washington and greater reliance on the American nuclear deterrence than before,"he said.

Jakarta feels more comfortable with the white paper, which it regards as far more positive about Australian perceptions towards Indonesia than previous assessments, spurred by the election of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor Government.

But Rizal Sukma, executive director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, said Indonesia believed the "China factor" had been exaggerated, especially given Beijing's internal problems.

In Wellington, Victoria University defence and security policy expert Lance Beath said New Zealand saw no reason to doubt that China and India would be anything other than "responsible stakeholders" as they moved to secure their interests as rising great powers.

Beath said New Zealand did not have Australia's responsibilities of alliance with the US, and would not regard US strategic primacy as a necessary precondition for regional stability and good order.

"I think that a future New Zealand government could contemplate with reasonable equanimity the emergence of either China or India, or both of them, as the great powers of the region, even if that day may still be some generations off," he said.

In the US, Thomas-Durell Young, of the Naval Postgraduate School's Centre for Civil-Military Relations, doubted Australia's ability to fund its planned, massive, military upgrade, which includes strike jets, warships and destroyers.

He also said the Rudd Government had slipped back into Fortress Australia thinking.

"Australia's ultimate security is inexorably tied to the Western international political and economic system, rather than to the security conditions in its own immediate region." ON THE WEBaspi.org.au