Kevin Rudd on the truth about China
In May 2020, The Festival of Dangerous Ideas launched FODI Digital, a series of online conversations.
In ‘The Truth About China’ Kevin Rudd discusses how Australia is ‘dancing with elephants’ –seduced by the economic promise of China while bound to the military might of the USA. Conventional wisdom has it that we should carefully steer a middle path. However, an escalation in global tensions, supercharged by the blame-game around COVID-19, threatens to shatter the prospects of equilibrium. Instead, Australia has reached a fork in the road.
Below is an abridged version of Kevin Rudd’s conversation with Peter Hartcher. You can watch the full discussion here.
Peter — Can I ask you about this pandemic which we find ourselves in? What’s it revealing to us about China, where it began, about the US, and the world order perhaps?
Kevin — Yeah, I’ve been talking to a range of folk both in China and in the United States about this, people who are seeking to be analytical about it, and it’s a tough question.
It’s a bit like the COVID-19 crisis has turbocharged and accelerated the speed timeline and focus associated with pre-existing underlying structural trends in the international order.
So what do I mean by all that? We all know there’s been geopolitical tension between the Americans and the Chinese prior to this occurring, the trade war just being the most recent example. Secondly, on top of that, we also know that China has itself become increasingly assertive in terms of the prosecution of its national interests both within our region, but also globally. But thirdly, with this event, this pandemic, we’ve had an eruption of, let’s call it, new factors.
In the case of the Americans, what I see is a damaged America coming out of this COVID-19 crisis as people look to the appalling state of the American domestic response, the appalling nature of presidential leadership, but more importantly for the rest of the world, a complete lack of interest on the part of Washington in terms of leading a global recovery, either in public health or in the economy, but you know something? Often people stop with their analysis there and they think, therefore, America down, China up. Well, actually no. My own interpretation is that China emerges from this pandemic, this COVID-19 crisis, equally damaged and probably more so, not least because of the origins of the virus coming out of Wuhan, also the series of unanswered questions about notification within China and through the WHO to the rest of the world, and frankly some clumsy attempts by the Chinese wolf warrior diplomats to manage the international messaging around this.
So where do we end up? Both these great powers, I think, more rapidly than any of us would have anticipated, significantly weakened by this event. But the danger is the institutions of global governance have also been weakened. The WHO are just a classic case in point where it becomes almost the battleground for binary geopolitics, and so my greatest anxiety is coming out of this crisis, we don’t end up with China up or America up. We end up with both down, the institutions of global governance weakened, and a trend to what I describe as global anarchy.
Peter — So we’ve seen an America under Donald Trump that’s not really interested in global leadership. We see a China, from your analysis just there, that’s going to be having its reach for global leadership slipping further away. What is this? Is this a world without a leader, or is there a prospect that on the other side of the US presidential election, we may see America expressing interest in the concept of world leadership once again?
Kevin — Well, yeah, I mean in the classic sort of description of these things, in the period after the fall of the Soviet Union, 1991, we moved to a unipolar world. Let’s call it G1, the group of one, called the United States. Then we had an emerging literature in the first decade of this century around about the possibility of a G2, that is, United States and China, between them, through the institutions of global governance like the G20, beginning to, as it were, manage the institutions of global governance, albeit coming from different regions, different systems, different traditions. Then of course the geopolitics of all that began to erupt for various reasons, but rather than this then becoming a new China-dominated world or the resuscitation of the American order necessarily, as a friend and colleague of mine in New York, Ian Bremmer from Eurasia Group, has described it, we don’t end up with G2 or G1. We end up with G0, and that is a drift towards what I again described before as anarchy. Could the Democrats, if they win in November, reconstitute this? I actually believe they can.
Biden is often derided as being old and rambling and all the rest of it, but he is likely to be smart enough to assemble a first-class international policy team, both on international economy and security and foreign policy, and enough of them are conscious enough of where the American drifting global leadership has got to and the China challenge has got to I think reconstitute this. There’s enough intellectual awareness of the challenge. The question is, will they have the political capability of doing it, which of course depends on, do they win?
Peter — So what’s the outlook between, for the relationship between China and the US post-pandemic? You’ve described it in an essay you wrote for Foreign Affairs journal that, I think you described it as not Cold War 2.0, but Cold War 1.5. What does that mean, and what should we expect?
Kevin — Well, if you look at the language around the Cold War, and those of us old enough like us, you and I can actually remember the last Cold War. We belong to the Paleolithic generation who can remember these things, but it had a few characteristics: one, mutually assured destruction in the level of nukes, two, zero economic engagement, three, third-country proxy wars, and four, basically an ideological cleavage.
Now, prior to the events of COVID or prior to the trade war, sure, there was an element of the nuclear competition between the two countries, although the Chinese arsenal is small by Soviet standards, but it’s still capable of a second-strike effect, but what we now have is, through the beginnings of economic decoupling, a removal of that economic ballast to the US-China relationship which has historically differentiated it from the characteristics of the US-Soviet relationship in the old Cold War. And then you’ve got an emerging serious ideological competition, not between communism and capitalism so much as between the authoritarian state versus the democratic state. Third-country proxy wars, not yet, but have a look at the Belt and Road Initiative and whether that gets progressively militarised in the future.
Open question. So why do I pick on Cold War 1.5? There’s enough by way of trend lines to cause us to think that we’re entering into a new period which turns on its head the assumptions that we had about the US-China relationship from the time that Deng Xiaoping returned to leadership in the late 70s and frankly rebooted China for the subsequent 40 years. It’s at that sort of inflection point.
Peter — So with this big picture you’re forecasting with a G0 in terms of leadership and anarchy as you’ve described in the global order, how does this look to Australia, and how does Australia survive in the midst of what you’ve described as anarchy?
Kevin — Well, a trend towards anarchy is the term I’ve used in the article I’ve just penned for Foreign Affairs Magazine, and it’s consistent with my language about Cold War 1.5. So what does it mean for third countries like us?
I think the first thing that we in the People’s Republic of Australia have got a work out — joke — in case anyone thinks I’m being pro-communist, is that we’re not Robinson Crusoe here. Most significant countries in the world who find themselves jammed in the US-China relationship are going through parallel dilemmas.
We might be, as I’ve said before, the first Western canary down the Chinese mineshaft in terms of this national experience, but frankly there are a whole lot of others as well, and not all of them Western democracies.
The second thing is the dilemmas we face, to be fair to Mr. Morrison, who is now the prime minister, are now sharper than I faced, but it was still sharp when I was prime minister. We constantly were faced with decisions which were seen in Beijing as hostile to their interest, and you may recall, back then, I was routinely attacked for failing to manage the Australia-China relationship by being too hardline in pushing back against the Chinese. But it is becoming sharper, and that’s objectively the case.
Therefore, for Australian policy in the future, my own judgment is to execute an appropriate level of balance for the future, we’re going to have to, A, pick our disagreements with Beijing carefully to work out what is essential as opposed to non-essential by way of national policy agreements, B, where we do have different sets of interests of a significant nature with the Chinese, do not sail alone, but in fact, construct effective coalitions with other states both within the region and beyond so that we are not speaking with a single voice.
And third, beyond that, try and prosecute your other interests.
Peter — Okay, so on those two points, the first one being the sharpening of the confrontation really with China now that China’s ambassador to Australia has threatened pretty substantial economic sanctions because of the Morrison quest for an international inquiry into the origins of the virus, how does Morrison, how does the country handle this?
You’ve said elsewhere that it would be pathetic to walk away now. You’ve been critical of the way Morrison got into this, but having got here, you said he can’t walk away. So looking to the future, what are the, as you put it, fights that he should pick and the ones he should leave alone? And on your second theme, which is that Australia isn’t walking alone and shouldn’t try to walk alone, what are the like-minded countries or at least countries with shared interests with which Australia could most prospectively form partnerships?
Kevin — Yeah, well, they’re two great sets of questions. I think on the question of what constitutes a balanced relationship in Beijing in the future, I think I said this, something similar at the time of the launch of your quarterly essay in Parliament House in Canberra at the end of last year. It seems like an eternity ago. But in my relationship with the Chinese leaders, I was always very frank about two things: number one, Australia’s an ally of the United States. It’s not going to change. Just get used to it. You may not like it, but there’s historical reasons for it and there are future reasons for it as well.
Number two, we’re a liberal democracy. We believe in universal human rights. Guess what? That’s not going to change either, and I know you don’t like that, but that’s just who we are.
Number three however, we have a whole bunch of bilateral economic interests which are mutually advantageous that we can prosecute, and number four, there are institutional arrangements in global governance through the G20 and other institutions where we can and should collaborate, whether it’s climate change, dare I say it, pandemic management, and dare I say it also, future global financial management as the size of the Chinese economy continues to be a bigger footprint.
So that’s my kind of approach to how you would have a framework within which to construct a balanced arrangement and be absolutely clear with the Chinese that there are our four principles, and don’t walk away from them.
On the second point, which is who are our natural allies, apart from our friends across the Tasman, the bottom line is this: I think there is a group of countries within the G20 who wish to sustain and enhance the institutions of global governance and do so in a manner which is consistent with the sorts of universal values and common interests which we in Australia would share with them.
Who might they be? Among the Europeans, I would point to significant countries like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, depending on which way Boris wants to take the UK, even Brussels itself. In our part of the world, the South Koreans, also the Japanese. I would say also the Singaporeans and Indonesians, though the Singaporeans are not members of the G20. India, question mark, because it’s never historically exhibited a huge interest in the institutions of global governance. But then throw in the Canadians as well as, in Latin America, the Mexicans and the South Africans in the continent, and I think you start to have a critical mass of interests across multiple jurisdictions where you can get behind what I describe as the necessary support multilaterally to keep the institutions of global governance functioning properly.
Peter — We’ve got close to the entire G20 membership there, I think, except notably it excludes Saudi Arabia and China. Maybe-
Kevin — Your question was, how do you establish a critical mass of, as it were, liberal democracies from multiple, in my case, multiple geographies, and Muslim states as well like Indonesia, around this critical central question of how do we triage the essential elements of the global rules-based system and the institutions which underpin it, both the UN, WHO, WTO, UNHCR and the rest, not to mention what happens at the level of financial collaboration through the Financial Stability Board of global financial markets.
You get those countries behind that, collectively they’ve got some critical mass, but they’ve got to need to start to act that way and not as just a gaggle of 10 separate press statements, which is partly my criticism of Morrison’s half-baked idea about the independent global inquiry. If you’re serious about it, Scotty from marketing, get on the phone, I used to do this all the time, ring your mates in the G20 and say, “Listen, cobber, how about you come on board with us “if we do this?” That way, when you put out your proposal, you’ve got a critical mass behind it. Instead this was a Morrison thought bubble, hastily cobbled together then as an idea, and then a scramble to try and get some international support. I use that as just a case study.
The Honourable Kevin Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister (2007–2010, 2013) and as Foreign Minister (2010–2012). He led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis — the only major developed economy not to go into recession — and helped found the G20. Mr. Rudd joined the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York as its inaugural President in January 2015 and in February 2014, Mr. Rudd was named a Senior Fellow with Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he completed a major policy paper, U.S.-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping.
Peter Hartcher is a leading Australian journalist and author. He is the political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and a political commentator for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Sky News television.
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