Last month, the Australian Strategic
Policy Institute announced that its
Executive Director, Peter Jennings, had
warned another ostensibly independent think
tank, the United States-China Economic and
Security Review Commission, that China may
trigger a major military crisis over Taiwan
in the coming year. The catalysts are held
to be twofold: the forthcoming centenary of
the Chinese Communist Party and the domestic
turmoil in the US resulting from the
Covid-19 pandemic.
March 09, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - The context, of course,
is China’s rise as a regional and global power by
means not significantly different from those
employed by the regional and global powers which
have preceded it, but which are now regarded as
anathema (despite the fact that they remain current
in the strategies of those declining powers)
What observers are asked to believe is that this
communication was an instance of the much sought
after advice and wisdom of ASPI on a matter of grave
concern to the western alliance system in general
and the nations of Asia-Pacific in particular.
If this event is “read” beyond the superficiality
of the reports which attended the event and also
placed in the larger context of China-as-Threat,
there are at least four interrelated themes running
through the discourse: the institutions in question
are disingenuous, even dishonest when proclaiming
their independence; what is being promoted and
peddled is a new variant of pornography –
Threat-Porn; finally, whether admitted or not,
financial support for the aforementioned is at the
forefront of all considerations.
ASPI’s proclaimed “independence,” for example, an
ASPI blog by Graeme Dobell, begs the question:
“from what?” It cannot be from the many weapons
corporations and governments that provide funding
for it – and are prominently listed on its masthead.
They do not do so on an altruistic basis: put
simply, their interests are in the profitability of
their operations, not in wide-ranging analyses of
global politics which, as a matter of course, occupy
a place on the spectrum somewhere between ambiguity
and outright confusion.
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As with ASPI, so with the
CECC, created in 2000 by a Defense
Authorization Act, with the legislative mandate
to monitor, investigate, and submit to Congress
an annual report on the national security
implications of the bilateral trade and economic
relationship between the United States and the
People’s Republic of China. It was conceived and
operates as a hyper-vigilant member of the
China-as-Threat chorus.
An interesting appreciation and understanding of
the performative qualities of the CECC-ASPI
interaction can be borrowed from the history of
liturgical music – specifically, the chanting of
psalms whereby, within a limited range of notes, one
body of singers intones the verse and the other
responds with the antiphon.
As now configured intellectually and
analytically, both have the same relationship to
independence as would a collection of court adviser
set up by Louis XIV to advise him on the limits of
the monarchy.
Threat-Porn is hardly new; different variants
were endemic throughout the Cold War and then again
after 9/11. The current version promulgated by ASPI
is designed to arouse both fear and strategic
excitement with every demarche by China depicted in
a sensational manner. An array of amusements and
spectacles – so-called Freedom of Navigation
Operations in the South China Sea and the Taiwan
Straits are produced to satisfy the need for
narcissistic powers to satisfy their cravings and
exorcise their fears.
Prosthetics, off-the-shelf and custom-made, also
help: enhancement is the objective. Magic products
in the form of (temporarily) ultimate weapons are in
continual production for the purpose of satisfying
the need to dominate what, in reality, cannot be
dominated.
In the process, China is not so much critiqued –
a reasonable undertaking in the strategic analysis
as it is with all global actors – but essentially
dehumanised and degraded. The very notion that
China, even a repressive China, has legitimate
security concerns are jettisoned. The quest is to
render China vulnerable, an object unworthy of
empathy, devoid of culture and personality, a target
only for exploitation.
And why? Basically, it saves time to understand
that, whatever China is, it bears the scars of
centuries of western condescension and exploitation.
This, to be clear, does not excuse China’s excesses
and defaults, but neither does it absolve the West
from significant complicity in the present.
To concede this would be financially ruinous to
those who profit from enemification [not sure what
word this is, maybe indemnification?] and the
hostile imagination it creates. Again, in simple
terms, absent China as a rising power in
Asia-Pacific and there is a strong presumption that
the sponsors on the masthead on ASPI’s website would
be significantly depopulated.
To reflect on these traits is to seek a deeper
understanding of what bedevils the major Australian
think tank on strategic matters as they relate to
China. Taken as a whole, the outpourings of ASPI on
China-as-Threat recall the title of Alan Renouf’s
book, The Frightened Country (1979).
At considerable cost to its sponsors – but
currently a profitable investment – ASPI and other
like-minded institutes and centres are reproducing a
strange, psychologically dysfunctional world in
which Australia is, at its core, unable to cope on
its own, or even to contemplate in a serious manner
what it might mean to begin to navigate by its own
domestic and regional lodestars. The future in these
terms, is one of international docility in which
independence is only a declaratory and definitely
not an operational strategy.
Michael McKinley is a member of the
Emeritus Faculty, the Australian National
University; he taught Strategy, Diplomacy and
International Conflict at the University of
Western Australia and the ANU.
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