A foreign policy based on facts, not fears

September 16, 2025

Geoff’s article was a careful diplomat’s assessment of how Australia might work more co-operatively with a rising, but peaceful China. It needs to be recognised that the vast increase in China’s armed forces capabilities is a direct response to the decades-long encirclement of China by the US. It has no intention of allowing the US to begin another century of humiliation. It is adopting a sensible policy response to that effort by the US, by focusing on defence, not on the distant projection of military power.

Its principal focus is the five principles for peaceful co-existence set out first by premier Zhou Enlai in 1953 and which China has faithfully followed ever since. They are “mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.”

There is no sane reason to doubt these drivers of China’s foreign policy in the light of its overwhelmingly peaceful rise since then. Unlike the US, which has permanently engaged in aggressive war over almost that entire period. The primary lesson for us is to cease projecting our Western propensity for foreign violence onto a fundamentally different culture.