Lunacy: Australia pays the US billions to “keep those Chinese at bay”
Mar 27, 2024
When Canberra told us we had to join the US in its cruel attempt to prevent a Vietnamese peasant army from overthrowing a US-armed Saigon government, some of us thought the politicians were plain stupid.
When they told us the men on bicycles wearing rubber sandals were the puppets of a China seeking to thrust further in our direction, stupid seemed too kind a word.
But today when we are told we have to pay the US billions to buy nuclear submarines to keep those Chinese at bay pure lunacy seem the only words possible.
It’s about time Canberra, and our mainstream media, did some homework.
Over Taiwan, China is supposed to show its aggressive intentions. Yet it allows Taiwan to maintain military bases on islands, formerly used for anti-China sabotage, only a stones throw from Xiamen beaches in Fukien province in the south of China.
Presumably it will have to do something about those hostile islands before it invades Australia. It will also have to do something about those two million Taiwanese working in China.
And do something about those South China sea islands which it tamely allows Taiwan to occupy. And about those claims by the former Nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan to large areas of Myanmar, India and Mongolia, which Beijing has chosen to ignore.
Over the years it has become obvious there is something in the Australian DNA that prevents it from understanding Asia. Even when occasionally it sets out to do something about the problem it latches onto weird ideas like using surplus French teachers to teach Chinese to young school-children.
China is not the soft-hearted nation of some imagination; when it sees its interests threatened it can turn nasty, as it did to Vietnam over Cambodia in 1979.
But if there is one thing it has learned over its millennia of existence in Asia it is to accept governments and nations as they are.
It is a lesson we could all learn, particularly newcomers like ourselves.
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and presidency of Tama University, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
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