Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

The mutant 'Chinese question'

By Chek Ling - posted Friday, 12 June 2020


Thus in the dreamscape of White Australia, until in October 1949 we got discomfited by Mao Tse Tung's declaring that the Chinese people had stood up, China was the sick man of Asia.

But ever-ingenious, in 1951, we embarked on the Colombo Plan to train up the best and the brightest in the soon-to-be abandoned white colonies in Asia. They would be imbued with the best of the West, bulwarks against Mao's march southwards, as he evangelised his universal love for mankind. Eek! The Red Peril! Just 50 years after we'd put down the Yellow Peril!

Perhaps we were precipitate. Chairman Mao turned out to be a mad peasant! His Great Leap Forward starved tens of millions to death; then his 10-year Cultural Revolution, crafted to get rid of his Long March rivals in the politburo, went viral: closed down schools and universities, and produced a whole generation of barely educated youth. At last in 1976 Mao died! In 1978 Deng took the reins, and burnished his capitalist roader moniker with some abandon: What does it matter the colour of the cat, so long as it catches the mice? Mao had twice had Deng expelled from the politburo, the second time during the Cultural Revolution for being a capitalist roader. Deng opened China up for business, this time without the help of foreign gunboats. Yes, open windows will let in a few flies and insects, Deng said. But he too was not for turning.

Advertisement

Corruption grew, and had become a plague by the time Xi took over. All the same, as Bob Carr wrote recently, 850 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty. And we marvel at China's burgeoning middle class, yearning for the fopperies of the West.

Thank God for all that! And on earth, credit to Gough too. His "traitorous" overtures to neighbourliness have earned us a warm welcome to ship our coal, beef, wine and so many other things to Deng's open docks in old Canton, where once boxes of confiscated opium were thrown into the sea! Shanghai docks opened up too, and elsewhere!

China became our cash cow.

Then in 2003 the minerals boom took off. Hawke and Keating had already opened up Australia, for competition, for growth and endless growth! And the resource-hungry China repaid Gough's kindness in container-loads of dollars.

Hubris got the better of us. We squandered our minerals boom on what turned out to be unsustainable personal consumption, unlike Norway which now has the world's largest sovereign fund, husbanded from its North Sea oil royalties. Howard and Costello may now be a little wistful, but at the time we had China, and a minerals boom that would go on forever!

That boom is losing its head of steam now, but China continues to spoil us with cheap consumer goods, investments in our economy, millions and millions every year in student fees and tourist splashings. They love us. One day when they become affluent, like us, they will be like us! They will take on our values! Freedom is human nature!

Advertisement

This adolescent vision of the benign panda in our dreamscape has at times been disrupted.

This time, having blown the bugle, Morrison can't back down. So his bodyguards in the media talk up any semblance of a good outcome from his goading of China. Aussies, poorly educated in the history of our relations with China, if at all, have, like the Red Guards of the Great Helmsman, chanted and hollered. We have every right to ask the commies why it gave us this virus, eh?

And as if not wanting to miss the tide, our ever-confident Senator Concetta Ferravanti-Wells, once Minister for International Development and before that Assistant Minister for Multiculturalism, hollered warnings for "reparations" from China. God have mercy! Is our Connie entirely ignorant of the reparations which the Brits extorted from the sick man of Asia, all for having had to send gun boats to teach China how to trade with the West?

Aye, the best of times, the worst of times: the cash cow has turned into a contagious apparition!

We've been dreaming dreams well past sunrise.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. Page 2
  4. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

26 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Chek Ling arrived in Melbourne in 1962 to study engineering, under the Colombo Plan, from the then British Colony of Sarawak, now part of Malaysia. Decades later, the anti-Asian episodes fomented by Blainey and later Hanson turned him into a mature age activist.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Chek Ling

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Article Tools
Comment 26 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy