Standing up to China

Australia needs more cowboy and less kowtow in its current dispute with China. Our foreign, security and trade policies need more principle and less of the ‘pragmatism’ that has brought us to this sorry point of affairs.

China will lose in the blame game

In the space of a few short weeks, popular perceptions of the Chinese state in Australia have shifted in ways that, if replicated elsewhere, are going to be truly damaging to China’s international standing in the years to come.

Let’s not ‘snap back’ towards China

The one thing Australia can’t do as we get the pandemic under control is ‘snap back’ to the old ways of doing business with the one-party state that is the People’s Republic of China.

Will China learn from the Covid-19 epidemic?

Coronavirus infected over 80,000 in China after news of the initial outbreak was suppressed by the communist authorities. Will China learn the value of free speech to avoid future tragedies, or double down on state oppression?

Coronavirus and the death of Xi’s ‘China Dream’

Globalisation was already ill and Coronavirus is killing both it and Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’. That’s big news for Australia’s economy and security in the future.

Helping China chart a diplomatic course

China’s international behaviour reflects its friendlessness. Like Russia it relies on bullying and bluster, subornation and subversion rather than negotiation and persuasion, and Australia can help it chart a more productive path.

The reality of Chinese influence in Australia

The corrosive issue of Chinese state interference in our democracy needs to be handled in a calm and orderly way, but the government must also be honest and open with the Australian people about the challenge we are facing.

Facing facts over China

Instead of looking to some ‘Beijing happy-o-meter’, we need to define our relationship with Communist China as China defines its with us – through decisions and actions rather than words.

China’s ethnic persecution laid bare

The Chinese leadership – and their Western apologists – can no longer hide behind hollow denials about the horrors taking place in the Xinjiang region.

Engineering consent

The Chinese Communist Party’s coercive and invasive technologies for monitoring public behaviour are being picked up by other authoritarian states around the world.

Unplugging the Chinese outrage machine

We must not allow the CCP to create a world beyond its borders in which we all feel compelled not to think – and so not to say – what Beijing doesn’t want to hear. And we need to see this paranoid CCP behaviour for what it is: weakness and anxiety masquerading as power.

Understanding China’s view of international order

Whether you agree with any part of China’s perspective or not, it’s worth understanding how China’s foreign policy elite see regional and global power issues and the place of China on the world stage.