While it is refreshing to hear from former US ambassador John Berry that the Biden administration is not likely to leave Australia to stand up to Chinese bullying alone, it is timely to reflect on how the China problem evolved and if it is the existential threat to western democracies many in Washington and Canberra appear to believe.
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Proposals such as expanding the "quad", the alliance between Australia, India, Japan and the US, seem to presuppose the existence of an imminent military threat from Beijing.
This is despite the fact China's force projection capability is constrained by the lack of a blue-water navy and the fact that for millennia the Celestial Kingdom has preferred to grow its hegemony through trade, cultural infiltration, and soft power rather than military intervention. The forced reclamation of Tibet, which had effectively been a subject state from 1715 to 1913, in 1950 was the exception and not the rule. The last time China measured its military might against the west during the Korean War it ended badly. Mao lost almost 200,000 troops.
While closer ties between the US and Pacific nations, including ours, are welcome, Australia needs to be mindful of the fact that excessive attempts to contain Beijing can have the opposite result to what was intended.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after decades as a pariah state, the Chinese Communist Party leadership welcomed initiatives for it to re-engage with the west, first by France and subsequently by America and Australia, with open arms.
De Gaulle's emissaries, Nixon and Whitlam were greeted with cheers, bouquets, and charming and gracious hosts. Mao, and his long-serving foreign minister, Chou En-lai, knew not even a nation state of almost a billion people could go it alone in a rapidly changing world. If China was to survive and prosper it needed access to western markets and, even more importantly, western technology.
Half a century later the situation, at least in the mind of Mao's successor and ruler for life, Xi Jinping, has changed. Xi believes that China, buoyed by 40 years of growth that has lifted more people out of poverty than in the entire history of mankind, has regained its eminence as "the middle kingdom". After more than a century of oppression and humiliation it can dictate to most other nations, including Australia, on its own terms.
The fly in the ointment is that China's size and population is not only a strength but a weakness. The principal challenge for every Chinese ruler since Qin Shi Huang Di 2200 years ago has been the struggle to maintain national unity.
That fight, which is ongoing as crackdowns on possible sources of dissent such as Hong Kong's democracy protesters, the peaceful Falun Gong, and the Muslim Uyghurs attest, drives much of China's aggressive foreign policy posturing.
When Xi's minions stamp their feet and wave their iPhone clones at the foreign devils in Canberra, Washington or Ottawa the message is as much for domestic consumption as the paper tigers abroad. It is 1984 all over again: "war is peace", "freedom is slavery" and "ignorance is strength". And, as was the case in Big Brother's Airstrip One, external threats are the key to suppressing dissent at home.
Unfortunately for Xi, history suggests monocultural and self-sustaining regimes such as this have a limited shelf life when exposed to mass communications, international travel and other external influences.
The Chinese Communist Party's greatest challenge is best expressed in the words of an old song made famous by Judy Garland: "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree"?
