On Australia’s plan to re-acquire the Port of Darwin…China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, recently described Australia’s plan to re-acquire the Port of Darwin as unwise and problematic.
Xiao publicly criticised Canberra for seeking to take back the port now that it has become profitable, after leasing it out when it was unprofitable. He described this move as “ethically questionable” and “not the way to do business.”
He underscored that the Chinese company Landbridge had obtained its 99-year lease through proper market processes and had since invested substantially in the port’s infrastructure. In his view, such investment should be respected rather than reversed.
Xiao suggested that if Australia were to forcibly take back control of the port, China would feel obliged to take “measures to protect the Chinese company’s interests.” While he did not specify what those measures might be, he implied they could carry economic consequences or have broader implications for bilateral trade and investment relations.
He further argued that altering the agreement could affect “substantive investment, cooperation, and trade” by Chinese companies in the region—reflecting Beijing’s view that such a move could deter future foreign investment.
Xiao’s comments form part of the broader tensions between Canberra and Beijing over strategic infrastructure, foreign investment, and national security. While the Australian government maintains that regaining control of the Port of Darwin is in the national interest, China views any move to unwind the lease as destabilising commercial norms and bilateral relations.
In an earlier interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in Hobart, Xiao described China’s naval deployments and drills near Australia as “normal” activities for a major power—routine training operations rather than a message or threat directed at Australia. He urged Australians not to over-interpret or misinterpret China’s military movements in the region.
He also
emphasised that there was “no reason” for China to threaten Australia, even in
the context of these naval activities. (You want to sink ships of your biggest
trading partners? Come on!)
Coming of age…
Perhaps China should have asked Britain to return HK ahead of 1997.
ReplyDeleteChina certainly had the moral authority to demand so. But they didn't. Instead they allowed the British to remain and instead, they used HK as an opportunity to re-build China after the madness of Mao"s economic policies. By selecting nearby Shenzhen as one of their Special Economic Zone locations for their early experiments with capitalism.
Is it possible that instead of evicting the Chinese, Australia could gain more, much more, from opportunitues to learn how to better run a port from the Chinese. Or are Australians too proud to learn from "Chinese peasants"?
Like how the London Metals Exchange abruptly changed its rules causing Malaysia to incur huge losses in tin trade futures to try and break the LME cartel in the 1980s, this Darwin port reacquisition is just another example of anglo-phony goalpost shifting.
ReplyDeleteHow is Albanese who obsequiously went to Beijing to make amends and canvas more trade with China to explain away that this is not outright theft under his watch?
He can't say the port under China management is a national security threat as it only functions to facilitate shipments and port employment favorable to Australia, furthermore paid for and invested heavily.
And Canberra can't use this nefarious move as leverage to stop China's naval circumnavigation of the Australian continent because Beijing can also demand by reaction that Australian naval projection present to Aukus future be stopped off her coastlines in the first place.
The underlying question to ask is how much has the US State and Pentagon agencies entrenched themselves in the ziggurats of Canberra's China relations policies.
If both the US and its vassal Australia continue with their idee fixe against China that had started with the US' surveillance station at Alice Springs, then the future of Australia-China relations will remain just a palpable notch above the last batch of iron ore and lobster export.
Meanwhile, Trump says Xi is his good friend. However, he has ignored how while he was exchanging niceties in Buenos Aires during his first term, his Justice department was imposing on Canada's Trudeau to ankle-lock Huawei's Meng for over two years.
Similarly, his Colby of The Strategy of Denial is now using the new US National Defense Strategy to corral Seoul into extending the use of US forces in South Korea from just focusing on the DPRK to focusing on China containment as well in tandem with Japan's Takaichi proposing remilitarization to the extent of nuclearisation of the JDF.
The latter is likely to happen now that even more the DPRK won't be denuclearizing as its economic lifeline China will be threatened and when that happens, Seoul will likewise follow. Has Colby thought of that?
A US that treats the Pacific as its western pond ends up supplying the policy detonator to nuclearize the whole of Northeast Asia, especially when it has abandoned its medium-range nuclear disarmament despite having an arsenal of over 5,000 nukes.
It is laughable that while all this is brewing, enters Trump again to threaten Seoul with roll-in of more tariffs because South Korea was too slow to invest more in the US.
Hit foremost will be Samsung and SK Hynix which make memory chips for an IT industry already foreseeing heavy rises in chip prices because of focus on AI chips under a TSMC that is being pressured by Nvidia's Huang to make more.
Don't they know chips fabrication plants take over two years to get started, a timeline that won't meet present demands in an industry that has to use express aircargo planes to zip chips from gate to all over the world?
Meanwhile, the US National Security Strategy that talks about focusing on just the western hemisphere is but a feint lost on no one.
It wants to prevent hegemony in Asia but it omits to say it is hegemonic from the start and as far back as the 1950s when it first identified Taiwan island as its First Island Chain pivot to lock in China.
2/2
ReplyDeleteToday, it wants to supply huge quantities of arms to Lai under its Six Assurances of its Taiwan Relations Act which were crafted even before the ink had dried on the US-China Shanghai Communiques.
It is not just on defense that the US is exerting sleight-of-hand tactics. It is also using its tariff card. First, raise the ante as leverage, second walk down the exorbitant rate in exchange for what it wants, and finally, start another sanction elsewhere to create a new cycle of horse-trading to its advantage.
Seeing such shenanigans, the Global South has already moved on. That's why Carney's Davos speech resonated so much, not that Europe and Nato can operationalize its remits as Rutte has disavowed the transition on grounds Nato cannot fit itself autonomously ex-the US.
Suffice to say, Darwin is just one of many targets. To try and decapitate China's global supply chains, the US first banned China shipyard cranes ostensibly because they represented a surveillance national threat. Next, it imposed heavy harbour fees on calling China ships, now delayed by a year. Finally, it turns its attention to ports around the world where China has invested.
One such now is the Panama port run by Hongkong's CK Hutchison. Panama's high court has just evicted its China investor on dubious grounds of 'unconstitutionality and nullity' of the contract in much the same way the US' Rubio has opined Venezuela's contract to supply oil to China was so opaque it justified the US navy to seize, read: steal, Venezuelan oil tankers enroute to China.
In short, any contract between China and another party is 'fair', jungle, darwinian, game for US 'cease and desist' on basis 'might is my right' at gunpoint.
The US' Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has in fact identified other such ports in which China has invested. Undoubtedly, they will be the next targets for de-sinofication:
https://www.cfr.org/trackers/china-overseas-ports
The US eagle has wounded itself but still preys on others on the basis it has sole monopoly over the feigned morality of its might to bring others down to its level so that it can remain competitive enough to be relevant.
But as the incoming FRB chairman Marsh weakens the US dollar however without benefit to US exports and thus current account surplus, US bond yields will rise, all the more as the US treasury prints more fiat money to shore the US debt repayment in an ouroboros dance but with a complex gumbo of contradictions and pythonesque absurdity.
It remains to add China has many sterling-minded analysts and commentators; precise, comprehensive and worldly, their analyses as translated in substacks are alas not distributed enough to the world outside China, a danger which had destructive antecedent when she introspected.
The danger to narratives today is all the more truculent when one considers Breakneck's Wang's simplification of China as a state of engineers who build whereas the US is a state of lawyers who argue. The unstoppable force of being argumentative will always cause trouble to the immovable rock of the quiet builder, especially during this historical Zeitenwende.
Maybe that's why Xi said the world was undergoing profound changes unseen in a century.
Shall one light for you a Zhonghua as we ponder that carefully?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-Gp1Tv9vRGY