The 3 September military parade in Beijing, celebrating victory in World War II, is not a cause for hysterical histrionics. In Beijing, there was no equivalent to waving of the Nazi “Blood Banner” (Blutfahne) as in the intoxication of the 1934 Nuremberg rally.

Australian media coverage, however, lacked perspective. It treated as a footnote approximately 20 million Soviet citizen and 17 million Chinese civilian deaths in World War II. The allied struggle deserves thoughtful commemoration. The Beijing parade was nowhere near as frightening as sending federal troops into American cities in the name of a fake emergency so as to wage personalised presidential “retribution”.

Has there been the same continuous negative coverage of the extraordinarily expensive Washington show of force to celebrate the double birthday of Trump and the US Army? Bob Carr and particularly Dan Andrews have been cursed to the nth degree as “useful idiots". A media, bristling with indignation, held hostage an entire news cycle, featuring Andrews shaking hands with Xi Jinping. This is not to mention the picture of him wickedly lurking in the back row of a picture taken, not at the Foreign Ministry, but at the International Friendship Association.

While the latter receives state funding, it has often served as a useful “non-governmental organisation” that promoted scarce mutual understanding, based on “people’s” diplomacy, when there was none between states in the Cold War. With today’s raging anti-China media, will it be possible to advance engagement when even the smallest gesture of friendship with China invites accusations of national betrayal? Not shaking hands can be a diplomatic blunder, not to mention a rude insult. US secretary of state John Foster Dulles made a big mistake at the 1954 Geneva Conference when he instructed General Walter Bidell Smith not to shake the hand of “Godless terrorists” like Zhou Enlai.

Nixon and Kissinger later attempted to make amends in 1971, not only by warmly shaking hands, but also by recognising the relevance to normalisation and recognition of Chinese concepts of international relations. It was one of the rare occasions when the US freely accorded the Chinese a sense of equality and mutual respect.

The media should succour courteous engagement. Engagement is fundamental to the national economic interest, but dynamic diplomatic co-operation is still ideologically constrained by the “China Threat” that informs Australian national strategy, force structure, intelligence and the defence budget. Failure to resolve the contradiction between economic and security priorities frustrates forward rational policy.

Choosing between China and the US is not necessary, but current foreign and security policy is still emphatically predicated in alliance with the US and the containment of Australia’s best trading partner. Prime Minister Albanese talked up engagement and the task of “greater co-operation” during his July visit to China; however, the economy-security conundrum is still a taxing liability. The parade in Beijing resurrected Australian Cold War commitments to “peace through strength”.

China’s second containment unnecessarily threatens to burden the national economy with an irrational security focus, predicated in dated Cold War antagonism. In today’s context, it must be asked whether Australia should placate “derangement”. Surely, Aussies are not lemmings. The “China Threat”, as anachronistic Cold War ideological thinking, continues at a time when the US has reached the tipping point between democracy and autocracy. Can a churlishly, protectionist US still claim the leadership of the free world while flouting international organisation and law? Will the cancellation of foreign aid win friends?

Can the US pressure allies in a time of economic uncertainty to take on increasing military expenditures when it trashes democracy, human rights and climate change at home and declines to take strong action against autocrats abroad? What would be the point of “like-minded countries” rallying to such failing leadership while containing China? Australian policy can reset alliance relations in this light. Enhanced engagement with Beijing is not a rejection of relations with the US and need not be seen as encouraging China’s dominance of the world.

The media’s failure to advance “the contest of ideas” is abetting a massive intelligence failure, which inhibits policy from correctly identifying and responding to the positive aspects of Chinese policy, which have increasingly been embedded in a positive view of Chinese history and culture. Imperial overreach or world domination are seen as uneconomic and immoral.

In Beijing, in mid-July, Xi’s brief welcoming remarks highlighted the one theme, “seeking common ground while reserving differences” (qiu tong cun yi). The latter has been repeatedly justified on the basis of Chinese policy dialectics stressing “seeking the truth from the facts” (shi shi qiu shi). Normalisation and the successful recognition of what was “Red China” was specifically achieved on this basis. Ideology, as the expression of superior values and institutions, was earmarked as “reserved”. Perhaps one should not quibble, but Albanese picked up on Xi’s opening remarks, specifically endorsing what was translated in English as “seeking common ground and sharing differences” as the basis of Sino-Australian relations. The last two characters of Xi’s four-character concept, cun yi, mean to put aside differences to focus elsewhere on co-operation. Differences are tolerated rather than “shared”.

“Seeking common ground while reserving differences” originates with the traditional Chinese policy dialectic that currently informs “harmony with differences” (he er butong), or “harmony without uniformity”. It has been bedrock policy since 1954. It enabled Sino-American normalisation in 1971-72. The US statement in the first Shanghai Joint Statement was especially illuminating in the putting aside of differences: “…no country should claim infallibility, and each country should be prepared to re-examine its own attitudes for the common good". China disavowed “superpower” status, opposing “hegemony and power politics of any kind". The two sides resolved to guarantee “normalisation” in “peaceful co-existence” through “seeking common ground while reserving differences”.

F. Scott Fitzgerald presciently observed that the test of intelligence is “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind at the same time”. The Australian media’s disinterest in facts and its uninformed subscription to the “China Threat” is distressing. Albanese’s citation of Whitlam in Beijing was, in fact, historically congenial. The media’s beating of the war drums drowns out its vaunted “contest of ideas”.

Having ignored the essential contents of China’s policies, it obstructs a policy breakthrough in a time of American “derangement” and lack of international commitment. Friendly allies do not foreclose one another’s aspirations to peace. Original “normalisation” lacked the momentum needed to cancel the “China threat”. Policy today should, nonetheless, reject “infallibility” in favour of the original logic of “normalisation”. The alliance with the US can be maintained on the basis of the earlier Sino-US consensus on “seeking common ground while reserving differences” even as Australian policy drops the absolute implications of the “China threat”.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.