Cowardly Australians, says the U.S.

The U.S. is suggesting that the Australian Government is being too timid on the issue of human rights with China. All because Australia refused to attend a summit, the subject of which is how to deal with a "rising China".

The summit will be attended by the U.S., Canada, Japan, and New Zealand. Australia will instead be briefed on the meeting afterwards. Interestingly, New Zealand is also taking a pragmatic approach when dealing with China, that is while voicing human rights "concerns" they are still willing to pursue closer ties with China. I wonder if NZ would think of backing out of this summit too?

Of course, there is the whole political asylum seeking issue in Australia. The Aussies won't want to offend China too much by then basically attending a "how to contain China" (at least that is how the Chinese would see it, I assume) meeting?

Here is a transcript of the ABC report.

Ideology is quite dead in international politics nowadays. Since countries like Zimbabwe are probably not so important economically, we can be decent international citizens and boycott them in everything, including cricket. Of course, no country today would dare boycott China unless they want to suffocate themselves economically... no one would suggest we stop playing ping pong or badminton with them. No, never.

I just wonder how long the U.S. can hold up the arms embargo on China.

Anyway, here is what the Australian Foreign Minister has to say about it (from ABC again):

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Well, this is - look, let me answer the question this way: we obviously talk about China and the rise of China with the United States and with just about every country in the world because we're an important part of the Asia Pacific region, and why wouldn't we? I mean, we've just established or are establishing at the ministerial level a trilateral security dialogue with the United States and Japan to talk about a whole range of things, and obviously China will come up in that. So this proposition that somehow, because we didn't go to a particular meeting, we don't want to talk about China is, if I may say so, as politely as I can put it, rather pitiful. I mean, we're quite happy to talk about China with anybody, but in terms of one particular meeting, we didn't participate in that meeting. My recollection of what this was was just an officials-level discussion, and I don't have any particular view about it one way or the other. I don't have a problem with it, but we didn't participate at that particular time, and if it were to happen again in the future, we might or might not. I mean, I'm quite relaxed about it.

Apparently this is a "secret forum"?

TONY JONES: Mr Downer, evidently this was an annual forum, a secret one at that, and it was convened by the Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage. That's pretty senior, isn't it? Why was that invitation turned down?

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Richard Armitage didn't participate in such a forum. We have constant discussions - or did have, when he has the Deputy Secretary of State - with Richard Armitage and Colin Powell, and those discussions from time to time were about China. You know, it's one of many, many forums we get invited to participate in. We don't necessarily participate in all of them. I don't want to, you know, be rude about it. I'm sure the discussions they had over a day or so were useful, but I mean, we have thousands of discussions in a year about China with any number of countries, and to extrapolate from the fact that we didn't attend some particular forum, an officials-level forum, that somehow we feel cowered by China is just breathtaking in its ignorance. I mean, of course we would be happy to talk about China with anybody who wants to talk to us about China.

TONY JONES: Was the problem in this case that it was a secret forum, as has been reported, this so-called Halibutt Group - a name apparently chosen because it couldn't be said in Mandarin?

ALEXANDER DOWNER: (Laughs) I don't know about that; I don't speak Mandarin.

TONY JONES: Sadly!

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Yeah. If it was secret, I would have thought it would be less of a problem in terms of your relations with China than if it was public, actually, so I don't really follow the logic of that. But I can assure you, it's nothing to do with it being secret or not secret. I mean, it was just a forum we chose not to participate in. We have thousands of other ways of communicating on these issues, and this is one of the more breathtaking storms in a teacup that I've seen. But I’m happy to talk about China with anybody, including on the Lateline program.

You can read more in the second ABC report about Australia's stance on other issues in terms of China-U.S. relations. As has been reported some time ago, Australia has made it clear that they would not simply jump into a war against China with the U.S. simply because of ANZUS.

Now, the bit I found interesting is where Mr Downer highlights the different approaches in dealing with China's human rights issues:

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Well, I don't know the numbers. I do know this about China: that China is not a democracy. I know that. I know that in China there are problems with repression, and that's why we have a human rights dialogue with China. We don't have a human rights dialogue with Great Britain, but we do have one with China. We have one with China 'cause we're concerned about human rights issues in China. We have been having this human rights dialogue with China, though, since, I think, 1997 – ‘97 or ‘98. I think it was 1997. Plenty of countries nowadays have human rights dialogues with China - the European Union, some of the individual members within the European Union, Canada and so on. The United States has a different…

TONY JONES: But Mr Downer…

ALEXANDER DOWNER: No, just let me explain this because I think your viewers would be interested, because it's just worth knowing this, 'cause this comes about because of two different approaches. Countries like Australia and Canada and so on, we have a human rights dialogue with China 'cause we think that's the best way to engage them on this issue. The United States has an approach where, every year, they introduce into the Human Rights Commission in the United Nations a resolution condemning China on human rights. Now, our view is that that’s not going to achieve anything. The resolution has never been passed. It's much better to talk to the Chinese face to face about our human rights concerns. It's the best thing we can do in a constructive and practical way.

Obviously, the Chinese don't react well to U.S's annual condemnation of China's human rights. They see this as simply an attempt to internationally humiliate them, and each year they retaliate by issuing their own human rights report on the U.S. But who really takes either of the two seriously when it comes to human rights accusations? Seems like childish bickering to me.

On the other hand, how effective are these "dialogues" that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has with China on the issue of human rights? We don't know exactly what these leaders talk about behind closed doors...

TONY JONES: Okay, we sort of understand the basic principles involved there. These discussions, however, happen behind closed doors, so help us out. Did your dialogue team raise the number of Chinese people - which the US State Department puts at 250,000, a quarter of a million - that are being held in re-education through labour camps or gulags right now?

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Well, we don't - we're not the United States. I mean, we don't always raise everything the United States raise, but we raise a raft of...

TONY JONES: Do you accept their figure?

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Just a second.

TONY JONES: Do you accept their figure? That’s the question I asked you before.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: I don't know the figure. I don't know even if they know the figure's right, but I certainly don't know whether that figure is accurate. I do know that in China there is repression. I do know in China that there are concerns about human rights. I do know China isn't a democracy.

Hmm, OK. So the Aussie-Canadian-Kiwi approach isn't evidentally too effective either. But at least it doesn't really agitate China as much as U.S. way at least.

The interviewer then presses Mr Downer about the gulags (forced labour camps for political dissents) and the statistics etc. He responds:

ALEXANDER DOWNER: I mean, half the time you run the line that the United States can't be relied on for information, and now I'm being told we have to accept everything the United States says. I don't know how many people are held in what you call gulags. I don't know how many people are in so-called re-education camps. I do know that people in China who dissent from the government, who are regarded by the government as a threat to society because of the views they hold - and some of these people are Falun Gong practitioners - have been detained as a result of that, and we don't support that, and we raise our concerns with the Chinese through our human rights dialogue, and obviously from time to time we raise these issues in other meetings with the Chinese.

So here, it's made quite clear that the Australians are not prepared to follow the U.S. blindly. I think this is in line with most other countries at the moment, who were traditionally U.S. allies, including Canada and New Zealand.

And, it seems Australia will look at following NZ's lead in banning Zimbabwe cricket...

TONY JONES: Mr Downer, I need to move on, if I can, to Zimbabwe. The New Zealand Foreign Minister, Phil Gough, has said tonight that what's going on in Zimbabwe right now is something we haven't seen since the days of Pol Pot. Do you agree with him, and what will Australia do to increase or change its measures against the Mugabe Government?

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Well, look, I'm not going to make comparisons with other parts of the world or history, excepting to say that I think the human rights abuses that we've seen in Zimbabwe more generally have been appalling, and what we've seen in recent days - and it's being shown on the ABC and in other Australian media - I think it's quite egregious. I've had discussions with Phil Gough. I have also during the course of today been talking about this issue with Jack Straw, who’s the British Foreign Minister. I have made it very clear to both of them we have to think about other measures that we might be able to take. Now, that's quite an easy thing to say; it's quite hard to think about what effective measures you can take, particularly bearing in mind we eventually got Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth. Well, that was fine, but that doesn't seem to have had any impact on the human rights situation there. I'm going along with Phil Gough's idea that we should approach the International Cricket Council and see if it was prepared to consider banning Zimbabwe from international cricket, but I’m advised that it's unlikely the International Cricket Council will do that. So Jack Straw and I have had a discussion today about this, and we are going to have our officials sit down and try and work out what other types of measures we can come up with, but that's not much of an answer. I mean, we want to find the measures. We haven't got them yet.

...but nothing about Chinese ping pong.