Chinese Economics Thread

[taxiya]

And what is RCEP but a signal of the future? By all accounts, the China-Korea-Japan Free Trade Agreement is now being fast tracked

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The release of the list is a statement that the Chinese government has given up on the China-Australia relationship.

Normally issues are resolved behind closed doors, but this very public statement means the gloves are off.

Australia is going to be a very visible example of what will happen if you actively work against China.

48% of Australia's exports go to China.
3% of China's exports go to Australia.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

That is the key of the list.

 

[taxiya]

Spare me your absurdities. Everyone know why China is doing this.

Australians only know what their media told them "what China did" and "why China is doing them". So no, most of Australians don't know what is actually going on and what is coming if they keep on like this.

This list serves as the condensed summary directly to the Australian population of what they have never heard from the Chinese perspective. This list serves to cut through the Australian media twisted reports.

And the list is somewhat hypocritical because PRC also does some things it accuses Australia of doing.

Once the first shot is fired, everybody is entitled to shoot. Nothing is hypocritical anymore. Don't expect China to turn the other side face.

If we were in a hot war, this list would be the official declaration of war after all the skirmishes, therefor the importance.

 

[emblem21]

Australians only know what their media told them "what China did" and "why China is doing them". So no, most of Australians don't know what is actually going on and what is coming if they keep on like this.

This list serves as the condensed summary directly to the Australian population of what they have never heard from the Chinese perspective. This list serves to cut through the Australian media twisted reports.


Once the first shot is fired, everybody is entitled to shoot. Nothing is hypocritical anymore. Don't expect China to turn the other side face.

If we were in a hot war, this list would be the official declaration of war after all the skirmishes, therefor the importance.

That is true, people only here what the government tells them, not the other side of the argument due to the Australian being sheltered by the media. Sooner or later, this will blow up in Australia's face as once this truly eats into the everyday Australian, things will change. I mean before, the Chinese prospective is actively being hidden but now Chinese prospective are slowly seeping though now that the economic consequences are beginning to show. Should Scott Morrison fail the economy as bad as that of Trump, expect the liberals to go down fast and the opposition doing everything they can to ensure that the relationship between China and Australia is mended as best as possible. It happened to Malcolm Turnbull and it will eventually happen to Scott Morrison once the corporations and businesses in Australia gets truly affected, they will turn on him and like Malcolm, there political careers will be more or less over.
Australia started this fight by doing the bidding of Pompeo and now, they will have no choice but to suffer for it. No one asked Australia to confront China on anything and now that they continually do so, well, they are now scared big time and if the economy fails, they will too. Just wait for the rest of the western world to be fully locked down due to covid, Scott Morrison will have no room to move at all

 

[hashtagpls]

I don't know if PM Morrison can do much; Australia is more or less a satrapy of the US CIA; the intelligence and military control australian politics and they in turn are controlled by the CIA.
What it appears China is doing, is appealing to the merchant billionaire class of australia to do something against the anti China crusade initiated by the ASPI-US agents; especially since throughout 2018-2019, ASPI and the Australian Federal Government under the control of ASIO (Australia's intelligence agency which is once again, answerable to the CIA) conducted pogroms and intimidation against China friendly politicians and chinese media.

Either Australian billionaire merchant class does something ie pulling funding from senators who advocated war with china, pressuring Mossion regime to act on these Chinese list of points, or else Australia is going to be in for another depression.

 

[emblem21]

I don't know if PM Morrison can do much; Australia is more or less a satrapy of the US CIA; the intelligence and military control australian politics and they in turn are controlled by the CIA.
What it appears China is doing, is appealing to the merchant billionaire class of australia to do something against the anti China crusade initiated by the ASPI-US agents; especially since throughout 2018-2019, ASPI and the Australian Federal Government under the control of ASIO (Australia's intelligence agency which is once again, answerable to the CIA) conducted pogroms and intimidation against China friendly politicians and chinese media.

Either Australian billionaire merchant class does something ie pulling funding from senators who advocated war with china, pressuring Mossion regime to act on these Chinese list of points, or else Australia is going to be in for another depression.

Sadly this all simply comes back down to, the only way Australia could truly change is when the USA finally goes into a full on economic collapse/depression that will strike the whole nation to the extent that not even these deep state elements can handle the situation. Once that happens, the USA will have to focus all there attention on fixing the USA or else all there influence around the world is going to mean nothing when the US becomes a Mad Max and everyone else wouldn't want to follow the USA into that. Hell if Australia still tries to enforce the will of the USA even then, well Australia is due to answer for all the stupid things they helped the USA with in the past decade and if the Australia goes into a depression, well, I am pretty sure that Australia will have to surrender or face the consequences.

 

[hullopilllw]

Spare me your absurdities. Everyone know why China is doing this.
And the list is somewhat hypocritical because PRC also does some things it accuses Australia of doing.

Everyone here know you are either trolling or outright ignorant.

 

[Temstar]

Here we have a lottery for container slots on ships going to Europe. Exports are so strong now that both ships and containers are running out in China. 40ft containers are now going for $10,000 USD each and here we see 143 exporters with demands for 280 container slots fighting for 90 available via lottery.

 

[localizer]

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[Lethe]

A lot of members here have access to both English media and Chinese media, but I suppose majority of them read more English media than the Chinese ones - my guess and common sense, with no rigorous statistics to back it up.

The impression of Australia among Chinese had been interesting, remote and slightly more positive of all Western countries. Mainland Chinese probably viewed it as a relatively friendly place for travel, study, invest and, indeed, even immigrate.

These have all changed gradually starting a few years ago, when Australia had pushed itself at the forefront of Sino-US conflict, which has been the defining and overriding themes globally and among Chinese community in the last few years. Australian banned Huawei from its National Broadband Network project back in 2012, which started to attract my attention about Australia from a geopolitical standpoint. I had followed Professor

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on his China focus and the ensuing debates in Australia on the subject on and off over the years. Professor White was prescient, I have to say, to see the quandary that Australia would be put in with the rise of China and its impact on Australia. Australia took the first shot across the bow when it banned Huawei from the 5G participation, the first in the world. Since then, it has taken the lead in both rhetoric and actions against China: from the so-called Chinese influence operations, South China Sea, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the most indignant of all: calling for an independent inquiry of the origin and mishandling of Covid-19, a clearly politically-motivated call bordering on war crime investigation. The list is too long to list here.

Now, Australia considers itself a western nation even though it is in the Asia-Pacific region, giving its ethnic composition and history. An Anglo-Saxon outpost of sort. It is understandable that it will align with western countries in certain matters, particularly the US due to its security relationship. But what has really enraged China and Chinese people in general is why Australian felt that it had to take the lead in the western crusade against China, positioning itself as the attack dog of the US. China had no quarrel with Australia, unlike, say, Japan which has territorial and historical disputes with China (I'm leaving out the US for obvious reasons). China is no security threat to Australia and doesn't consider Australia a security threat to China or geopolitically important enough to even bother to invest in the so-called political influence operations or large-scale spying operations. Worst of all, China has been Australia's single largest customer, with close to 30% of its export market and has been responsible for Australia's uninterrupted growth over the last quarter century. And what does China get for all these?!

When Global Times called Australia a "paper cat," what it really tried to say is that Australia is feigning like a heavy-weight boxer with all its anti-China blusters. Many Australians were probably offended by GT's characterization that Australia was like "a piece of gum sticking to China's shoes," in other words, a nuisance with its constant harassment against China. But a lot of Chinese were actually humored and humiliated by Australia's accusations that China somehow even bothered to put its resources and reputation at stake to engage in some serious influence or spying operations in Australia. All these nuisance and harassment have been adding up nonstop, and the call for inquiry of Covid became the backstab and the last straw that broke the camel's back. Enough is enough.

That has been my view of Australia's behaviors against China in the last few years. It's been an evolution that gets where we're today. Would be interested in hearing what you and others have to say on the subject. I personally think that deep-seated racialism and strong insecurity about its future in a non-white region increasingly not dominated by the US have caused all the seemingly very irrational behaviors.

I appreciate you taking the time to write this thoughtful post. I think that our perspectives on the Australia-China relationship have a great deal in common. Like you, I have found Hugh White to be one of the most thoughtful Australian commentators on the relationship, both in terms of recognising how profoundly the rise of China alters our strategic environment and challenges the cultural assumptions that underpin how we see ourselves, our nation, and its place in the world. Professor White is also to be commended for laying out the full range of future policy directions available to Australia going forward, without the usual framing of "Australia and America together forever and ever and ever" that does so much to constrict public discussion here.

The most detailed account of my own thoughts on the Australia-China relationship can be found in this post from a couple months back. In brief, I think that the rise of China poses profound challenges for Australia, but not insurmountable ones. I believe that Australia should certainly seek to protect and promote its interests as a small nation operating in the shadow of great powers, and that multilateral institutions and a "rules-based global order" offer the best means of doing so. I think that a certain level of friction in the Australia-China relationship is to be expected and that Australia should not reflexively accede to the wishes of Beijing (or Washington), though we must always be conscious of the power relationships that exist. At the same time I am greatly troubled by the trends in the Australia-China relationship that we have seen these past several years. I believe that the Australian government has managed the relationship poorly, and in doing so has inflamed tensions to levels that are unnecessary and undesirable.

The call for an "independent investigation" into the origins of COVID was an appalling political misjudgment and I'm not sure which possible explanation for it is worse: that it came from a politically naïve Prime Minister unaware of what he was doing, or that it came from a Prime Minister who was fully aware of how that call would be received in China (amid broader controversies regarding western attitudes towards China's engagement with the established institutions of the "rules-based order", in this case the World Health Organisation) and chose to make it anyway.

I am worried about the level of cultural-political-institutional-strategic entanglement we have with the United States and the extent to which it compromises our capacity to act or even think clearly and independently about our interests and where those diverge from those of the United States. I am worried about the racial-cultural attitudes that underpin much of our anxiety about China: our combination of arrogance and anxiety that comes from our history as an Anglo outpost in Asia, established atop the wreckage the indigenous cultures we encountered. I am worried about our political system and media environment and how elements within those structures thrive off conflict and short-term domestic political gains at the expense of intelligent and sober husbandry of a critically important relationship that must endure indefinitely in the future.

So I am critical of many aspects of how we have handled our relationship with China. But I do want to outline one perspective that I believe carries weight within the Australian decision-making apparatus. That perspective explicitly views the Australia-China relationship as a long-term project, and believes that it best serves Australia to make a robust defence of its interests, and to weather the resulting diplomatic storm, now rather than later. The idea is that we can communicate to Beijing what our interests are, what we will and won't stand for, and the pressures that we will or won't accede to. In the short-term this is expected to result in choppy diplomatic waters as China tests our resolve, but it is hoped that this will be offset by a longer-term benefit of "setting the bounds" for the Australia-China relationship going forward into the future. Essentially, the idea is that it is better for Australia to weather China's displeasure now, while China's power is still relatively limited and the US still remains an effective guarantor of the prevailing international order, than to do so at some unspecified point in the future when the relevant power dynamics are decidedly less favourable for Australia. That's not to suggest that this is a sensible plan, or that it has been well carried out, but there is at least a rationale for why Australian decision-makers, conscious of the hostility they are provoking from China, are continuing to act as they do.

Unfortunately your post did not directly address my question, which was if and why Australia is actually seen as a noteworthy subject for discussion within China and in Chinese-language media. It is entirely to be expected that the relationship gets a lot of coverage in Australia, but from China's perspective I would've thought Australia would be well down the list of countries and relationships worthy of attention, irrespective of how well or poorly the relationship was going. Reading between the lines, you've suggested that Australia has "taken the lead" in the "western crusade" against China, functioning as Washington's "attack dog". If that perspective on Australia is indeed widely held within China then that is very regrettable and something that, I believe, we should seek to change. For as you say, there is no fundamental reason born of history or geography why Australia and China should not be able to enjoy a reasonably harmonious relationship that benefits both nations.

 

[Equation]

Look the bottom line is deep down many Anglo Christians (whites) are afraid to lose their imperial territories as time and the world changes that favors the East (China in particular). Some people therefore just can't accept that.