Stern Hu a pawn in China’s great game

The fact that Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu and his three Chinese citizen colleagues are languishing in a Shanghai jail has very little to do with any crimes against local laws they may or may not have committed. Their trial will serve China’s purpose - another flex of the muscles in its increasingly tense arm wrestle with the West.

Hu was a player in a tough league, the representative of a powerful company that has the iron ore that China desperately needs. Beijing’s negotiations to get that ore at a price it considered fair had collapsed, its attempt to exercise control over Rio through a buy-in deal by state-owned Chinalco had failed. Some form of pay-back was probably inevitable.

China is on the march, and getting in its way is a dangerous exercise, especially for a mid-range Western power like Australia. As its influence spreads through the South Pacific and further afield into South America and Africa, the Rudd Government’s attitude can be summed up by the comments of the then Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, Duncan Kerr at an Australian Institute of International Affairs seminar last year:

“We welcome China’s increased presence in the Pacific,” Kerr said in answer to a question. “It is inevitable that China is a growing economic presence in our region and will have a growing economic footprint in the Pacific.

“We simply want to do all we can as a good and effective friend to all the Pacific Island countries and particularly as chair of the [Pacific Island] Forum to not only open the door to their engagement in as constructive a way as possible, but to encourage that process.”

And on China’s increasing support for the illegal military regime in Fiji: “I think it is very important for me not to respond in any way which might even be privately thought that we take the view that China is in a sense fermenting a difference between our position and the rest of the international community on Fiji.

“I do not fall into the cast of those who are warning against the dangers of China’s presence in our region. We see broadly China’s investment footprint as positive. We expect that an expanding economic power will expand also into the Pacific.

“Does that potentially raise issues that will have to be managed? Of course it does, but no more so than any other large expanding economic force in an area where we would be seeking to harmonise international action to get outcomes.”

Sort through this barrage of weasel words and you will discover that while the Australian government is not denying that China’s expansion into its perceived sphere of influence is happening, it is going to pretend it is all very altruistic and that we can work together for what the spin doctors delight in calling a “win-win” situation.

China is probably the least altruistic nation on earth. Its actions are guided by a single and all-embracing principle: the advantage it gives us in our long-term mission to achieve global economic and political hegemony.

It was not always the case. In the 1960s China was serious in its efforts to build a Socialist bloc in the Third World in competition with the West and the Soviet Union. It charmed many of the contemporary leaders in Africa and South America with highways, dams, presidential palaces and office blocks all in the name of the international brotherhood of workers and peasants.

Those days are long gone. Today China is back in the developing world, but for one reason only - to get the best possible deal for the natural resources it needs to fuel the fastest growing economy on earth.

Its presence in Africa is exposed by French journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret in their book China Safari. Their painstaking research involved them visiting a dozen African countries and attending (with some difficulty) the 2006 China Africa Summit in Beijing.

The result is an extensive and important publication on the expansion of China’s foreign policy and its successful penetration into a continent once considered the preserve of the former European colonial powers supported by the United States.

Everywhere they went the Chinese were moving in, taking over run-down factories, unprofitable mines, disused port facilities, refitting them and making them not only work, but turn a profit. One aspect of the Chinese penetration that goes down well in some parts of Africa is its lack of demand for internal reform, human rights and democracy that accompanies the largesse. As one Congolese official said pointedly: “People can’t eat democracy.”

What should be most worrying to the West is that China does not simply turn a blind eye to the depredations of many African regimes, but is aggressively promoting its own brand of rigid social control as the way forward. Historian Yuan Wu in his book on China’s modern involvement in the continent slams British and American actions since the end of the Cold War which:

In their customary deceitful fashion made democratic progress a condition of financial aid … Fortunately the scurrilous machinations of the West, which have caused so much tension within African nations, have been foiled, and the waves of democratization on the continent have started to weaken since 1995.

To extrapolate back to the South Pacific: Fiji’s self-appointed Prime Minister, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, can rest easy in his bed at night knowing that his new friends in Beijing thoroughly approve of the way he does business.

The news is not all bad. Michel and Beuret found evidence that the West has learnt from its past mistakes in Africa while the Chinese are repeating them. Local workers in a Chinese-owned copper mine in Zambia have to make do with corrugated iron shacks; employees at a similar British-owned facility 50 kilometres away enjoy an Olympic sized swimming pool, sports fields, free health care and company-built schools.

Despite a subservient Zambian press, which relies heavily on official Chinese news agencies for most of its coverage, the cry ‘China Go Home’ is increasingly being heard.

So what does the future hold? There are no signs yet that China is heeding the warning signs resulting from its aggressive, sometimes ruthless, economic expansion. For the moment it seems bent on forging a coalition of authoritarian, one-party states, much preferring deals with dictators and juntas to difficult and unreliable multi-party parliaments.

In his article China Pursues ‘Manifest Destiny’ Through Mercantilism and Imperialism, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the US Business and Industry Council, William R. Hawkins points out that Cuba, Iran, Burma and North Korea, identified by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as “outposts of tyranny”, have ties to China.

“The violent international politics of the 20th century were dominated by the rise of Germany and Japan in the first half of the century and of the Soviet Union in the second half,” he writes.

“China’s rise is potentially even more unsettling to the world order, especially if it continues to pursue its mercantile-imperialist course in league with rogue states.”

There seems little the West can do, or wants to do, in the face of this process. We have become too reliant on China’s appetite for raw materials to fuel its economic expansion. This is especially the case in Australia where the government admits that even the most muted criticism of the treatment of Stern Hu and his colleagues will only worsen their situation - a tacit admission that China’s court system is all about politics and nothing to do with justice.

In the end reform will have to come from within the country, but given the iron control the Beijing mandarins exercise over their population, that could be a long time down the track.