My thanks to Bernard Yegiora for his research and considered thoughts. My thanks for Keith Jackson for bringing this piece to our attention (and to Tess Newton Cain for highlighting it on Twitter).

Bernard, while I appreciate your perspective, I think it is worth emphasising that the credit from the Exim Bank of China has to be re-paid. This is different to, say, the Coral Sea Cable, which was a gift to PNG from the Australian government that does not need to be re-paid. See Jeffrey Wall's analysis of the PNG government's debt to China in the telecommunication sector: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/chinas-debt-trap-diplomacy-is-about-to-challenge-papua-new-guinea-and-australia/

Near the end of your piece, you mention that Huawei took 25 students from the University of Technology in Lae to China for training. This reminds me of a piece I helped a colleague here write about China's media strategy in the Pacific. In this, we noted some instances of Pacific journalists being taken to China. I apologise as this is perhaps not directly related to the topic of the blog post here, but if that paper is of interest, it is available here: http://dpa.bellschool.anu.edu.au/experts-publications/publications/7865/ib-202029-chinas-media-strategy-pacific

Thanks again for the thought-provoking piece.

Amanda
Dr Amanda H A Watson

Nice comment Philip.

China has clearly stated that their foreign policy is based on the 5 principles of harmonious co-existence. As such, war is detrimental to their progress, in particular the growth of their economy.

Phil has made many valid points about the hypocrisy and self serving rhetoric being directed towards China from the USA and, to a lesser extent, from Australia.

That the western powers, led by the USA, have made many grievous errors in judgement in relation to foreign policy since the fall of the USSR is incontestably true. Many people have suffered death, disaster and dispossession as a direct consequence. This reflects very badly indeed upon all of us who have the privilege of living in the wealthy and generally safe nations that constitute the "developed world".

It also is true that powerful interest groups can and do seek to influence how our governments think and behave, often for entirely self serving reasons.

Whether this includes what President Dwight D Eisenhower called "the military industrial complex" urging governments to make war is, I think, highly debatable but this is nonetheless a commonly held belief.

That said, it remains unequivocally the case that the Chinese government is anti-democratic, authoritarian, prone to promulgating official lies and perfectly willing to persecute anyone who has the temerity to offer an opinion that conflicts with the official orthodoxy.

As for hypocrisy, Xi Zinping's recent speech urging the world to embrace free trade is so breath takingly hypocritical that it defies credulity.

The recent promulgation of a law authorising Chinese naval vessels to fire upon foreign vessels which enter China's self defined sphere of influence in the South China Sea ought to alert even the most enthusiastic Sinophile that there are reasonable grounds for concern about the direction of Chinese foreign and military policy.

At least in a democratic society, as the USA has recently proved, we can vote the bastards out of office when they behave badly. Not so in China, where the party controls everything and the people are obliged to conform to its dictates.

I think Phil is implying that there is some sort of moral equivalency between the USA and its allies and a China ruled by the CCP. If this is so, then he is making a mistake.

The lessons of history are clear enough on this score.

Democratic governments, for all their faults, generally do not seek to impose their will upon either their own citizens or others through threats, intimidation or force. Where force is used it is generally in response to open aggression or an actual or perceived threat.

Persuading a generally reluctant population that such actions are needed or warranted usually requires the expenditure of huge amounts of political capital and the results are frequently problematic, as has been the case in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

For authoritarian regimes, as General Karl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) famously wrote in "On War", "war is the continuation of politics by other means". It is merely another tool to be used to achieve a desired end.

Unhappily, China is led by people who, in my judgement at least, are perfectly willing to resort to warfare to achieve their foreign policy objectives.

After all, their greatest leader Mao Zedong said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. In saying this, he was referring to the plain fact that it was only by use of force that the CCP achieved control of China.

This idea is still prevalent within the ranks of the CCP and, of course, the Peoples Liberation Army. It is reflected in the growing belligerence of Chinese diplomats towards those who criticise or dissent from what the Chinese government deems to be the correct line of thinking.

So, while Phil is right to point out that we are sometimes hypocritical and fall short of the standards we set ourselves, we ought not make the mistake of believing that this disqualifies us from pointing to the faults and failings of others.

My comments should not be interpreted as implying that the Chinese people or even its government are inherently bad or bent upon world domination. I do not believe this.

The problem lies in the inherent nature of authoritarianism, where there are insufficient checks and balances to deter the leadership from persuading itself to embark upon ultimately disastrous courses of action, especially when they come to believe their own propaganda and carefully cultivated political mythology.

Any student of history ought to be able to point to many examples where authoritarian leaders have convinced themselves that their "special" talents or circumstances mean that war is a logical means by which to solve a political problem.

Sometimes they are right, at least for a time, but the results of such thinking are usually catastrophic.
We must hope that all of the world's leaders keep this firmly in mind when they are considering how to respond to the many problems now confronting our rapidly changing and complex world.

Huawei produces excellent technology. Its 5G equipment is probably the best at the moment.

As ever with China, the problem is not Huawei but its susceptibility to the needs and desires of the CCP and the authoritarian government that it maintains.

In the context of a real and ongoing cyber conflict between China and the democratic powers, it makes no sense to create an IT network reliant upon technologies that can be manipulated or hacked to provide intelligence and facilitate cyber warfare on behalf of the Chinese government.

It is nonsense to dismiss this concern as irrelevant or trivial. The evidence of large scale and sophisticated cyber activity by the Chinese and Russian governments, or their proxies, is quite overwhelming.

PNG is now hopelessly compromised by its reliance upon Huawei's technology.

This means that there can be no engagement with PNG on a secure basis when it comes to, for example, confidential trade discussions or the sharing of intelligence or other sensitive information.

This is a problem for Australia and other democratic powers because PNG remains a strategically significant place from a defence standpoint.

Quite how this situation can be remediated is not clear to me or, I suspect, anyone in the Australian intelligence and defence communities.

How many pieces of silver went Duma's way? More Belt and Roadisms = Entrapment.