“WHEN I was a little girl you amazed me by landing on Mars. I’ll always remember thinking, on that great day: you guys in Beijing – you can do anything.” Australian prime minister’s address to National People’s Congress – circa 2060.
My morning commute involves a ferry ride across Hong Kong harbour. It always provides a dramatic scene, but especially so when ships from the US Pacific fleet are in town (as they are this week). Passing close by, one cannot help feeling, as an Australian, a sense of quiet reassurance knowing these giant machines of war – the ultimate guarantors of peace in the Pacific since 1945 – are fundamentally on our side.
A Chinese aircraft carrier would not, I suspect, elicit quite the same emotion.
The US has, of course, not always been the dominant military force in Hong Kong harbour and the Pacific. On my parents’ kitchen wall in Australia hangs a photo taken at the end of the 19th century – the British century – showing the same harbour filled as far as the eye can see with ships from Her Majesty’s navy. Today, they have all but vanished – “one with Nineveh and Tyre”, in Rudyard Kipling’s prophetic words.
There were other global hegemons here before that great empire that gave our nation birth.
A short distance across the same stretch of water lies Macao, the first European colony in East Asia. It was the Portuguese century once, as strange as that sounds today. Yet how impressive they were: the first people to circumnavigate the globe, the first with a genuine global empire stretching from Japan to Brazil to India to Indonesia to Africa. Those Portuguese, they could do anything.
We are now told that it is the “Asian century”. The Gillard government commissioned a white paper, Australia in the Asian Century due to report back in a few weeks), which explicitly endorses the concept.
The Asian century is not, though, just a declaration that Asia is economically important. Vasco da Gama and Marco Polo knew that. Nor does it simply denote that Asia (relative to a declining West) is perhaps more economically significant than it has ever been. Rather, the phrase ‘the Asian century’, so matter-of-factly stated, is actually a rather radical proposition: it is an assertion that the particular cultural, ideological, military, financial, legal and linguistic world of the American century will be displaced and shaped instead by a vague abstraction called Asia.
But what do people really mean when they use “Asia” in this context? That this is now the century of the Cambodians, Kazakhstanis or the Koryaks of Kamchatka? I would suggest, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, they mean China.
Kevin Rudd refers in the same breath to: “the 21st century, the China century, the Asian century”. Yes, India, Iran, Indonesia, Japan and Israel are all very important, as were Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil during the American century. But we would not be talking about the Asian century were it not for China’s rise.
Given this, to my mind there is something disconcerting about how blithely many Australian business leaders and politicians proclaim that this is the Asian century, often in a self-congratulatory tone about their own supposed far-sightedness.
To those who consider it an inconsequential turn of phrase, ask whether a British prime minister in 1900 would have issued a discussion paper entitled: Britain in the German century. It would have been seen, at the very least, as needlessly conceding a very important point.
Note also that wiser heads, such as Hillary Clinton, are usually very careful not to use it, preferring instead formulations such as: “America’s Asia-Pacific century”.
It is true that Australia may not, at least for the foreseeable future, realistically aspire to have the same position of global dominance as great powers of the past (although one likes to believe that deep in the bowels of Canberra there is a plan there somewhere). But at the same time we benefit enormously from the status quo and should be doing all we can to see it maintained for as long as possible.
It profits none to give the impression we view with equanimity the prospect of the People’s Republic of China assuming the role that the US has in our region or as a new global order-maker. There is precious little to suggest that such a future would ultimately result in a net gain for Australia over the present arrangement. It also in all likelihood would not be in the interests of other Asian countries, including China itself.
There is nothing inevitable about the China century, the Asian century. Those interested in a peaceful and prosperous century ahead should think long and hard before parroting such glib geo-political slogans.
First published in The Australian as “Caution Ahead in Asian Century” on 31st May 2012.
