Let one version win – ours
June 25, 2025
The Church burned translators of the Latin Bible into English in the late 14th century and forbade its teachings, to ensure only one narrative ruled. Australian sinophobes want their version of what the People’s Republic of China is doing, thinking and planning to prevail.
In the UK, the Brits are waking up – they had their own propaganda fear machine as the media is now remembering: “Growing security concerns had fuelled an increasingly negative view of Beijing within the Conservative Party"0.
“By March 2024, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak described China as the greatest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security. Labour has struck a different tone, making the case for clear-eyed strategic reengagement with the world’s second-largest economy.”
Here in Oz, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute finds and amplifies the “threats”, and explains the “dangers”:
“In March, China irresponsibly conducted live-fire military exercises in the Tasman Sea, just a few hundred kilometres off Australia’s coastline. It later sent a research vessel into Australia’s exclusive economic zone, close to critical Australian subsea communications cables.”
The alarmism assumes Australians confuse km with metres and “close” to adjacent. So, here’s a few facts to help readers judge for themselves:
The PRC has a population of 1.4 billion, so for every one of us there are 52 of them; they’re going OK with a GDP growth rate of 5.2%.
Ours is 3.4%.
The Peoples’ Liberation Army is the world’s largest active and reserve duty military force, with almost four million personnel and a vast array of weapons, including nuclear bombs and close to 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Whether they intend to use them for World War 111 is contentious. Why amass if not to use, ask the dog-whistlers? Some Chinese leaders see the US and its allies as a threat, and so want the powers to defend.
The ICBMs have a range of more than 5500km, technically putting Canberra within reach of a launch pad on the Indonesian archipelago, or from a submarine.
We don’t have Iron Dome protection. Nor do we have ICBMs, so there’d be no like-for-like retaliation without the US equipping the subs on order with the awesome weapons.
The hit most likely wouldn’t be urban ACT but the recently upgraded Pine Gap outside Alice Springs. Former Defence intelligence head Professor Paul Dibb believes the Central Australia spy base would be China’s “most important early nuclear target".
“[This is] because of its ability to give the US instant, real-time warning of a Chinese nuclear attack, the precise number of missiles, their trajectory and their likely targets.” Some may be below the waves.
Last year a CNN report claimed: “Ghost Shark and Manta Ray are prototype uncrewed underwater vehicles — UUVs or drones — introduced recently by Australia and the US respectively."
The Australian Defence Ministry site says: “Ghost Shark will provide Navy with a stealthy, long-range autonomous undersea warfare capability that can conduct persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike.” It expects the first production models to be delivered by the end of next year.
If UUV development succeeds, the $368 million AUKUS deal would merit former PM Paul Keating’s label as “the most poorly conceived defence procurement program ever adopted by an Australian Government".
Despite the pessimism, Canberra went ahead with an early first payment of $800 million in February – only 0.05% of the current US defence budget.
For that money, WA has just bought a 10-year contract for remote area aeromedical cover with the Royal Flying Doctor – services to help all in distress.
A less explosive scenario would have cyber-attacks “crippling everything from electricity grids, internet providers and telecommunications, effectively blinding the population".
“Electronic banking would be shut down, airports and military airfields paralysed. This is one of the key strategic weapons of the Chinese military and would be used in the opening phase of an attack.”
Should an invasion follow – what next? Would the victors take over the iron-ore mines and farms that currently supply their needs, expecting Australians to keep working for an imposed undemocratic government? None of this makes economic or practical sense.
We can muster 90,000 permanent and reserve personnel, so even with the most sophisticated modern weaponry deterrence is unlikely.
Americans (and many Australians) have been conditioned from the media and pulpit to believe communism is Satanic. But the ageing, imposed hatreds that drive so much belligerent policy wane as we meet hornless Chinese citizens, visit their remarkable nation, use their products and admire their technology.
Strangers cease to be dangers.
Beijing claims Taiwan should have been included when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang nationalist troops backed by the CIA were defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist army in 1949.
The losers fled to the then Formosa –130km east of the mainland. After Chiang died in 1975, Taiwan moved from dictatorship to popular rule, holding its first elections in 1996.
University of Zurich sinologist Simona Grano claims Taiwan’s success “contradicts China’s claim that Western values and democracy are incompatible with Chinese culture and indigenous values".
Another factor in the China hate-stoking comes from Keating: Jealousy. “China’s singular crime is to have built an economy larger than the US with industrial breadth and depth that the US not only does not possess but cannot hope to emulate.”
Taiwan’s population is about three million less than Australia but has cornered the semiconductor manufacturing industry providing more than half the world’s supply. Its GDP growth rate is a noodle under 5%.
Officially, Australia has a One China Policy. It doesn’t give Taiwan national government status but tolerates the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. We’ve found strategic ambiguity and the sky remains in place.
Would the current generation of Australians back the US to support its paranoia at losing rank as the self-proclaimed “hottest country in the world,” – a title that literally belongs to Senegal?
Many seem to lap it up. Two years ago, a Lowy Institute poll claimed that although Australians were cautious about involvement in a war, they were overall supportive by “accepting refugees, imposing sanctions on Beijing, sending arms and supplies, even getting the navy involved …"
Trump 2 has turned rogue, yet backing remains steady: “Over 20 years of polling, the Lowy Institute Poll finds overwhelming and consistent public support for Australia’s alliance with the US.”
So we still see Washington as the Great Saviour. Whoever the leader and however deranged, the true believers cling to the cross and cannot imagine any alternative.
An al-Jazeera analysis of an imagined conflict concluded that “despite the overwhelming numbers of troops and equipment, the PLA would still struggle to take (Taiwan) in any meaningful way…
“The resulting battles would be so intense that the PLA could end up destroying the very objectives they would need for the invasion to succeed."
But when it comes to adjusting the world to satisfy old despots’ egos, no cost seems too great. The real or mythical Vietnam War quote is apposite: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.