贵人鸟女运动上衣:A paradoxical blessing for Gillard’s China vi...

来源：百度文库编辑：九乡新闻网时间：2024/04/29 17:06:35

A paradoxical blessing for Gillard’s China visit

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2011-4-22 13:25

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is at the moment on her visit to Japan, which the country she is not that friendly with. Later, she will visit China, which has already been in the spotlight of the global public. Claiming by her own of her weaknesses in diplomacy, this female PM may soon start the toughest test of her diplomatic wisdom – in Beijing. Gillard treads finest of lines in China trip.

When Julia Gillard visits China soon, she will come face to face with one of the toughest diplomatic issues that an Australian leader has faced. It is not about human rights, climate change or the free trade agreement. It is about how she positions Australia in the growing power struggle between the world's two strongest states.

One is our major ally, the other our biggest export market and the locomotive of our economy. And they are fast becoming bitter strategic rivals. Gillard's misfortune is to find herself in the Lodge just when China's rise and America's response meet head to head. She tells us she isn't interested in foreign policy, but she has no choice. She is the one who has to navigate Australia through the power shift that is transforming Asia.

No doubt she would prefer to dodge the whole issue. She probably looks back with grudging but growing admiration at the way John Howard managed these things. He steered Australia's trade with China to dizzying new levels of growth, and at the same time took the US alliance to dizzying new heights of backslapping camaraderie.

But Howard 's approach to the US-China problem was more subtle than it seemed. It had two parts.

First, he reassured everyone by denying there was a problem. His mantra was that escalating strategic competition between the US and China was not inevitable, so Australia did not have to choose between our relationship with China and our alliance with the US.

Second, without saying much, he shifted Australia decisively China's way. For most of his time as PM, Howard pointedly refused to join the US in criticising China on strategic issues. In fact, far from lining up on America's side against China, he tried to position Australia as a kind of honest broker between them.

So all the time Howard was talking up Australia's support for America in the Middle East, closer to home in Asia he was quietly edging away from Washington. Historians may well say that Howard used his unconditional support for America in the war on terror to shield his shift towards China.

China now takes 25 per cent of our exports and rising. It has become the world's second-biggest economy, and seems set to become the biggest. It is openly contesting American leadership in Asia, and America is starting to push back. Not even Howard could pretend any longer that Australia does not have difficult choices to make between the US and China.

Getting these choices right is even harder for Gillard because, like Rudd before her, she carries domestic political baggage that Howard didn't. Rudd worried that his fluency in Chinese would make him seem too pro-Chinese. Gillard has to live down her past as Victorian Labor left-winger - historically the most anti-American section of mainstream Australian politics. Both have felt they need to prove to the voters that they are loyal to the alliance.

That is why Gillard's visit to Washington in February featured such overblown rhetoric. ''America can do anything,'' she said, clearly urging America to confront China's challenge.

If she repeats what she said in Washington, her hosts will be very displeased. They may well decide to teach her the same kind of lesson they taught Howard in '96, and this time the lesson could be even harsher. Gillard can hardly afford to weather Beijing's displeasure when our whole economic future depends on them.

So she is in a tight spot. The way out of it is to stop doing foreign policy on the fly and start thinking more deeply. Our interests would best be served by a new Asian order in which America plays a central role - alongside a more influential China, a revived Japan and an emerging India.

Gillard should say exactly this. It will not be an especially popular message in either Washington or Beijing. But at times like this it is no good trying to curry favour in either capital, let alone in both. What Gillard needs instead is the imagination to see how fast Asia is changing, the vision to decide what future would work best for Australia, and the courage to sell that vision in both Beijing and Washington.

But wait, a not-so-ambitious and not-so-talent diplomat is still possible to trump her predecessor Kevin Michael Rudd.

The Prime Minister has admitted previously that foreign policy is not her forte, and no one in Canberra or Beijing is expecting any attempts at a breakthrough in the Australia-China relationship during the next few days.

Let's hope these predictions are correct. For the moment, lowering Australian, but more important Chinese, expectations for such a breakthrough is the more prudent strategic and diplomatic approach. Which means, paradoxically, Gillard's lack of foreign policy experience and ambition could well be a blessing in disguise.

First, we need some context to the foreign policy dilemma facing Australia. For the best part of 100 years, the sure path for Australian strategic policy has been to attach ourselves to the dominant naval power in the region.

Fortuitously, Britain and then the US also happened to be our most important trading partner. But for the first time in Australian history, our leading trading partner is no longer our strategic ally.

Making the dilemma even more diabolical is the fact China is already the primary strategic competitor to our American security guarantor and ally. That China could just as well become a strategic partner or enemy of the Americans in the future adds extra confusion to the mix.

The search for a foreign policy grand strategy that will allow Australia to manage. if not decisively resolve, these dilemmas is an alluring one. Yet the pursuit of an important breakthrough with China can be dangerous.

The key is to see the world as Beijing sees it. Without hyperbole, China is probably the loneliest rising power in history.

Distrusted by every leading power with interests in Asia, it has few genuine friends and allies outside North Korea, Burma and possibly Pakistan, allies that are proving a liability as much as an asset. Despite China's growing importance to the world economy, Beijing has watched all leading regional capitals move closer to Washington in strategic terms even as their trade with China deepens.

Moreover, authoritarian China is rising as an outlier of the "democratic community" that has emerged in the region under American leadership since World War II.

Whether this is Chinese prescience or paranoia is beside the point. What is relevant is that Beijing views winning friends and influencing people as an unavoidably competitive and zero-sum game with the other large powers, particularly the US. In this respect, any breakthrough or improvement in strategic co-operation between Australia and China is accepted as genuine only if it involves a corresponding distancing of our strategic relations with the US.
Close examination of conversations and debates between Chinese officials and strategists when the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd came to power in late 2007 will confirm that this is indeed how Beijing thinks.

As a middle power in a world of giants, modesty has its virtues. Until our experts do the hard work of calculating where we have leverage over China and the areas in which we must clearly concede - and this has hardly begun - seeking the holy grail of modern Australian foreign policy is better left alone. Rudd had immense ambition to chart a new history of breakthroughs in Australia-China relations. In doing so, the former leader inadvertently mismanaged Chinese expectations and ultimately lost control of the relationship. In contrast, Gillard's lack of interest in foreign affairs is not an advisable trait in any national leader. But her lack of ambition in wanting some historic breakthrough and co-operation should ensure that no expectations are falsely raised in Beijing next week.

When Kevin Michael Rudd initially stepped up in 2007, Chinese had the optimistic expectations toward this Chinese studies expert PM. However, the diplomatic relationship turned out to be highly challenging soon. Rudd’s ambition to achieve a bilateral diplomatic breakthrough has ironically led to a dilemma which later becomes the legacies for Gillard.

But for Gillard, it was not necessarily bad news.

First, with Beijing’s LOWER EXPECTATIONS of a non Chinese expert, Gillard has less possibility to disappoint Beijing and therefore subtly boost the relations.

Second, her lack of ambitions – or conservativeness – stands at the RIGHT TIMING of balancing between relations with U.S. and with China.

So, paradoxically, it is possible that her “weakness at experience and ambitions in foreign diplomacy management” may bring her luck to relations with Beijing, trumping the Chinese expert PM Rudd out.

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