Is China Colonizing Australia?

The relationship between Australia and China has, for the most part, been highly beneficial, but political differences and Australia's defense ties to the US have, at times, posed problems. Relations between Beijing and Canberra soured over the past year. One issue was the growing concern in Australia over China's influence on domestic politics. Tensions grew after Australia passed the Foreign Interference Bill in June 2018, requiring lobbyists working for foreign countries to register as “foreign agents.” Welcome to The Atlantis Report. Australia is very dependent on China as a market for minerals and food. It is also increasingly the object of Chinese investment, which may one day exceed that of the traditional investors, the UK, the US, and Japan. China is the #1 trading partner of Australia. As a result of this, Australia is torn between her traditional allies and friends and China, her new benefactor. China wants Australia’s cheap mineral , mines, natural gas, milk and beef. Australia wants China to buy natural resources and expensive real estate. Australia is China's second most popular target market for Chinese property investors. Nearly 33 percent of Australia's exports go to China , primarily driven by china's significant demand for minerals . China, in fact, buys more from Australia than Japan, the US, and South Korea combined. Australia’s agriculture sector has also caught the eyes of Chinese investors. The biggest importers of Australian wine used to be the U.S. and the U.K. just a few years ago. Today, it's China. And now some of China's most prominent winemakers are buying up vast vineyards with the intent of selling the wine that's produced in Australia directly into China. Australian wine exports to China surged 40%. And wine only scratches the surface. China's investment in Australia's agricultural sector has gone from $300 million to more than a billion dollars in just one year. The shift is being driven by China’s booming middle class which has high demand for things like produce, meats, dairy, and minerals. Beyond just Chinese companies buying minerals from Australian mining companies to use in their factories, there are also sizable amounts of investment coming in from Chinese companies. Overall, it’s safe to say that the Australian mining sector would not be what it is without China, but Australia also relies on the billion people up north to act as customers for another crucial aspect of their economy: education. As strange as it might sound, universities, which in most cases are non-profits, form a sizable part of the Australian economy as Australian universities are some of the most successful in the world at attracting international students. The country is home to about 875,000 international students across all types of schools. Now, of course, remember, the entire population of Australia is only about 25 million. What that means is that, in the entire country, 1 out of every 28 people are international students. Of these international students, the highest proportion, by far, is Chinese, at 30%. That represents a quarter of a million Chinese students studying in Australia. On the flip side, that means that at any given time, 1 out of every 5,000 Chinese people are studying in Australia. Within universities, Chinese make up 10% of the average student body, however, considering they tend to cluster together. Individual universities have far higher proportions. All in all, these Chinese students contribute more than about $10 billion a year to the Australian economy. There are also plenty of other sectors that play a part of China’s enormous economic influence in Australia, such as tourism, manufacturing, services, and more. There's a lot of millionaires in China. And their wealth is growing at a much faster pace than the total value of Australia’s housing market. The combined wealth of all of China’s millionaires was only slightly more than the entire value of Australia’s housing market back in 2011. But, today, China’s millionaires are worth twice as much. And that gap is only expected to continue. Meaning China’s massive surge in wealth makes it only more likely that China will continue buying up assets in Australia. Given how much the two economies are interlinked, therefore, as China has risen, so too has Australia. This link to the success of one of the biggest economic success stories ever has helped Australia earn an impressive record. It has gone 28 years, since 1991, without a recession. While the rest of the world struggled through the Asian Financial crisis, the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and the Great Recession, Australia just kept on going with quarter after quarter after quarter of economic growth. By most measures, in modern history, no developed country has ever gone such a long period without a recession. But this all, of course, has a flip side. Such heavy economic reliance on a country that politically, Australia doesn’t always agree with; it is dangerous. An Australian-Chinese trade war would undoubtedly cause a lot more damage down under than up north. At the same time, there are quite a few efforts by China to influence Australia. China has made plenty of attempts to tip politics in the country in their favor. As one small example, Chinese Communist Party-run or affiliated WeChat accounts, a popular a social network in China released posts critical and mocking of Australian politician and current prime minister Scott Morrison in the run-up to the May 2019 Australian election. Beyond that, the Chinese government has been known to unofficially sponsor specific pro-China, ethnically-Chinese candidates for various Australian offices through a variety of methods. In the media, China has been known to impart vast control over Chinese-language outlets in Australia and responds harshly to criticism through defamation lawsuits and more. On university campuses, the Chinese Communist Party is known to have vast amounts of influence, with accusations that the government has built spy networks within Australian universities to monitor Chinese students and their political views. In one instance, a Chinese student studying in Brisbane participated in a rally supporting the anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong, and days later, the student's family back in China were visited by the authorities. There is an obvious but unspoken threat by China to Australia—if you make things difficult for us politically, we’ll make things difficult for you economically. How things typically work in China is that, in order to achieve business success, even when running a fully private company, one needs to be cozy with the Chinese Communist Party that runs the government. Therefore, even if a Chinese company is entirely private, it knows that it needs to act in a way that aligns with China’s politics. Of course, while some of China’s tools of economic warfare are more traditional, like tariffs, a lot of its influence stems from the actions of the private sector. Any private Chinese company knows that, if Australia suddenly took a hard pro Hong Kong independence stance, for example, the CCP might not be happy about continued business with the country. Australia’s therefore in a tricky spot where it’s a western country socially and politically, but in many ways, an eastern country economically. As a result, taking a political stance against any actions by China comes at a much higher cost than that of a less economically linked country. Australia quite literally cannot afford to lose China. A trade war with China on the scale of the US’ would devastate the Australian economy. China no doubt has done wonders for Australia, but the point is that too much reliance on any economy, no matter how strong that economy may be, is a risky strategy. When that strong economy is run by a foreign government that can adjust its flows in an instant, that’s even riskier. According to one study run by the Reserve Bank of Australia, if China’s GDP contracted by just 5%, that would result in Australia’s GDP falling by 2.5%. That is a clear-cut case of economic reliance, so, if Australia wants to keep up its unprecedented period of economic growth regardless of how China’s doing, diversification is crucial. I think China will use its economic power to keep Australia from joining the USA in its encirclement of China, and its attempt to make China waste its resources and efforts of militarization. I think China’s government is much too smart to fall for this. The Belt and Roads strategy is their approach to worldwide hegemony. Australia has been in China since 1972 and has a long record of good relations apart from a period when Hong Kong governor Chris Patten sucked in Foreign Minister Garth Evans to supporting his “too little, too late” democratization effort in the mid-’90s. Fortunately, the foreign affairs people kept PM Keating from buying into the British face-saving fiasco. The voyage will be difficult, but Australia demonstrated extraordinary courage in leasing Darwin port to China for 99 years. China’s attempt to buy a massive block of properties in Central Australia has now been twice rejected, but the feeling is that it will eventually be approved. Australia’s foreign affairs department has been remarkably deft since 1972 when PM Gough Whitlam recognized China, and the department found itself without any Chinese language trainees to send. Within five years, the Australian Embassy was renowned for having some of the best linguists in Beijing. Australia has opened its home to the Chinese, there is no doubt about this. One should remember, Australia is a small country, just over 20 million people, merely one single city in China! To Australia, China is a mammoth superpower, gargantuan in population and economic might. both are cognisent of the threats and risks to the friendship, these are complex, many and distorted by China`s size. Personally, I don’t think their governments will have good relations in the near future. The basic idea of Australian diplomacy as close to China in economy and close to US in security will become hard to reconcile in the future . There is a joke that says, the primary purpose of the Australian Navy is to protect the sea trade route to ship iron ore to China from , guess who ! The Chinese Navy. Yes, I do believe Australia can survive if all trades with China were shut down, but definitely, they will have a difficult time.










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