In his time leading Australia, Kevin Rudd turned heads for his fluency in Mandarin. Now, the ex-politician has harsh words for China’s wolf warrior diplomacy – and his country’s response.
The ongoing centralisation of Chinese power under Xi Jinping is helping to stoke the country’s unhelpful “wolf warrior diplomacy” and aggressiveness on the world stage, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd says.
But he has also criticised the Australian government for “throwing petrol on the fire” with its own belligerent response to bilateral tensions.
Rudd, a fluent Mandarin speaker, is currently president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and in 2017 revealed he was studying the worldview of Xi Jinping for a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University.
Speaking with former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark – who briefly worked alongside Rudd in office, then tussled with him for the top job at the United Nations – the former Australian leader said the Asian superpower’s growing assertiveness was creating new structural challenges to its relationships with countries like Australia and New Zealand.
“China is now not a 100-pound gorilla, it’s a 1000-pound gorilla in the front living room…
“Rather than simply being in a passive position in global and regional policy, it’s now active and assertive and we have seen that – the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, East China Sea, the Sino-Indian border, global governance, global institutions, wolf warrior diplomacy, you name it,” he told a Helen Clark Foundation event on Tuesday.
One of the problems with Xi’s leadership had been the growing centralisation of political power – not just of the Chinese Communist Party against the traditional institutions of the Chinese state, but of Xi within the party.
That had helped to drive some of the more aggressive “wolf warrior diplomacy” despite the private horror of more traditional Chinese diplomats, who questioned whether it was a help or hindrance.
“The current conservative government of Australia has taken what is already a difficult set of structural challenges to the Australia-China relationship… and then, as it were, thrown petrol on the fire through its rolling use of inflammatory political rhetoric.”
“The nature of the Chinese political system, an authoritarian Marxist-Leninist system, is that you don’t get brownie points for under-interpreting the wishes of the leader, you get brownie points for over-interpreting the wishes of the leader.
“And so therefore, Chinese diplomats around the world … have been encouraged to launch onto social media platforms.”
But Rudd was also critical of Australia’s own diplomacy when it came to China, saying it was taking “what is a real problem and challenge for all of us, and then … turbocharging the degree of difficulty by the manner in which it conducts its public megaphone diplomacy”.
“This is where I think the current conservative government of Australia has taken what is already a difficult set of structural challenges to the Australia-China relationship… and then, as it were, thrown petrol on the fire through its rolling use of inflammatory political rhetoric.”
He was not arguing that Australia should under any circumstances remain silent about China’s actions or statements, but “more sophisticated diplomacy” was the best approach.
While China had become accustomed to “swatting away” the concerns of other countries, Rudd believed it did still care deeply about international opinion, given the potential to stoke domestic unrest.
That was particularly true when it came from multilateral bodies with international treaties like the UN or the World Health Organization (WHO).
“When the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva takes a view, for example, on Chinese human rights practices when measured against the Universal Declaration of 1948, this isn’t the subjective view of a bunch of crazy firearm Republicans, hanging out of a bar somewhere in Louisiana – this is the considered view of the international community.”
One potential area for internal ructions was the performance of the country’s economy, with population growth having either already peaked or set to peak soon and political opinion seeming to move against private enterprise.
“If you begin to see the public sector, the state-owned sector, increasingly preferenced over the private sector, greater constraints on the private sector, greater forced mergers by state-owned enterprises in a circular mixed economy model with historically private firms, and you see the establishment now of party committees within all private firms, then … China’s rambunctious natural entrepreneurial culture which we’ve witnessed explode over the last 30 years [may] begin to, as it were, get knocked around a bit.”
Rudd said that industrial policy was one of the obstacles in China’s bid to join the CPTPP, which was nonetheless “quite clever and nimble” diplomacy to expose a lack of American engagement in the Indo-Pacific economy.
“What the Chinese are seeking to do tactically and politically and diplomatically is to say we are actually in the free trade game unlike those American blowhards and as a result we want to be seen in the global public policy, trade policy and political debate as on the continued side of globalisation and the multilateral trading order.
“The challenge for the Americans is to realise this is the real soft underbelly of American strategic policy.”
“They really do get the science now. They understand that unless they radically bring down their own greenhouse gas emissions, not only do they pose an existential threat to the planet, they also pose an existential threat to themselves as a consequence of China’s rise to global great power status by mid-century.”
Rudd said he was reluctant to offer Jacinda Ardern any advice on how to manage US-China tensions, and noted the dynamics of the relationship would fundamentally be determined in Washington and Beijing.
“There are strategic red lines between Washington and Beijing, and we can’t wish them away – they just exist.”
But he said all third countries should encourage the two superpowers to complement their competition with collaboration on “global public goods” like climate action and preparing for the next pandemic, given the existential factors at play.
On climate change, he believed “the arc of history [was] bending in a generally positive direction” towards China’s progressive approach which, while borne out of self-interest, a necessity given its status as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions.
“They really do get the science now. They understand that unless they radically bring down their own greenhouse gas emissions, not only do they pose an existential threat to the planet, they also pose an existential threat to themselves as a consequence of China’s rise to global great power status by mid-century.”
