China is about to wipe out, with the stroke of a pen, Australia's biggest export markets for wine, lobster and a few other commodities, against WTO rules and a bi-lateral FTA. Seems like it should be a bigger deal, and not just in Australia....
Richard McGregor
22.5K posts
Richard McGregor
@mcgregorrichard
Lowy Institute, Sydney, via Taipei, Tokyo, HK, S'hai, Beijing, London, DC. Author of The Party on CCP; Asia's Reckoning, on China v Japan + XJP: The Backlash.
Sydney
Joined May 2011
- ICYMI, a time line from @LowyInstitute displaying how China displaced the US as the trading partner for most countries:
00:00 - "The angry summer playing out in Australia right now was predictable." The relationship between the bush fires and climate change, laid out in detail:
- "Way before Nato existed, Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday." newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/s…
- "China wants to have its cake and eat it. Privately they remain aligned with Russia, but publicly they don’t want to be tainted because of guilt by association.” Why Beijing is squirming over Ukraine:
- “Fifteen years ago, if I talked to Western colleagues about the negative aspects of China, I was treated as a right-wing, China-hating, Japanese scholar. Now, people listen to us.”
- Put simply: The US threw out fake journalists whose work makes no difference; and China got to throw out real journalists whose work was invaluable. Who thinks this was a good trade, besides the MSS in China and a few ardent hawks in the US?Trump officials’ move to constrain Chinese state-run media in US backfired, says @BenYt. It gave China the pretext to expel almost all journalists for NYT, WSJ and Wash Post. The world relied on their great reporting for China news, including on the virus. nytimes.com/2020/04/19/bus…
- Amazing, and potentially big implications for everyone from Tim Cook to Terry Gou (still contemplating a career in Taiwan politics) to anyone waiting on their new iPhone, Apple shareholders, the party secretaries of Zhengzhou and Henan, and on and on.....The latest Foxconn worker protest video
00:00 - On top of that, the Taiwan/Tasmania analogy isn't clever and isn't original. It is a Chinese talking point which Keating has taken on board."It would be like the Chinese saying to us, look, we think Tasmania..." No, it wouldn't be. Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating demonstrating his historical and strategic illiteracy on Taiwan. Kudos to @FergusonNews for challenging him.
00:00 - "One would think the Chinese leadership, which has made a fetish of their 'century of humiliation,' would be wary of deliberately fostering the same resentments in a country that will one day be a formidable competitor."
00:00- The most interesting thing about this story is that News Ltd is reported on as if it is a fully-fledged political player - changing policies while confidentially briefing affected parties and negotiating with dissenters in its ranks.
