China Is Trying to Bully Australia, But It Won’t Work This Time
Donald Trump’s brawl with China hogs the headlines, but Canberra’s may be far more tantalizing — and potentially more impactful.
Few leaders have gotten under Xi Jinping’s skin like Australia’s Scott Morrison. One reason: a warm relationship with Trump, the Chinese president’s nemesis. Since grabbing the premiership in August 2018, Morrison has courted the mercurial U.S. president. A risky gambit considering China is by far Australia’s biggest export market.
Morrison also irked Xi by calling for an international probe into the origins of COVID-19. That eminently reasonable response to Beijing’s opaque handling of a pandemic has Xi’s government lashing out in ever-intensifying ways.
Australian industries from iron ore to barley to wine to lobsters to sugar to cotton are all bracing for Chinese tariffs, dumping investigations, port delays — or all of the above. Tourism spots and hospitality-related industries already reeling amid coronavirus fallout are preparing for a long Chinese-traveler drought. Beijing is encouraging mainland students to enroll elsewhere rather than fill classrooms Down Under. (…)
The world is watching Xi versus Morrison intently. China pledged to become a stable stakeholder world power, not just a shareholder. Here is Xi’s chance to prove it.
Morrison has an unappetizing choice. He can either make nice with Xi to preserve trade links, as South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s has tried to do. China alone bought more than $11 billion of Australia’s agricultural goods between 2018 and 2019. The stakes are even higher for resource sectors like mining.
Or Morrison can do what predecessors including Malcolm Turnbull also pledged to do: diversify growth engines away from the China-only model of recent decades. Topping the to-do list: tax changes to catalyze a more vibrant startup scene; incentivizing innovation; raising productivity; improving infrastructure.