“50 years after Gough Whitlam established diplomatic relations with China, what has changed?"

Gough Whitlam gets close and personal with the Whispering Wall. Soon-to-be
Ambassador, Steve FitzGerald, looks on.
Click above to go the article at The Conversation

With thanks to an Occasional Reader for sending this. I’d been meaning to note the golden anniversary of Australia China relations. Seems not much is being done in Oz to celebrate, though it’s nice that Penny Wong and Wang Yi seem to have eased some of the trade tensions that have arisen from the Chinese trade sanctions on Australia. 

I was partner for seven years of that man labelled above, Steve Fitz Gerald. He accompanied Gough Whitlam on that 1971 trip and was to be named Australia’s first Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China in 1972. He was ambassador until 1977. I arrived at the Embassy in Peking -- as it was then in English -- in 1976, and served some time with Steve. When I came back to Australia in 1981, worked a bit for the Office of National Assessments as an intel analyst, until Steve made me an offer to join him in his firm, doing consulting on the then nascent Australian business involvement with China, focussing on investment and projects rather than straight trade. I was with Steve until 1990, when the fall-out from the Tiananmen massacres destroyed out business. I took an offer of the Australian government to go back to China as a Trade Commissioner, first to Shanghai then to Beijing, though that got short circuited by a revamp of Austrade and I ended up in Hong Kong as the regional boss, as Executive General Manager, East Asia. 

I knew Tony Walker, the author this piece when he was in Peking at the same time as me. That’d be around 1980-ish. We had quite a lot to do with each other, diplomat and journo, swapping stories, leads and scraps of intel. I admired Tony for his grit and determination to get a story, to get it right and to respect confidences.

He says that noone predicted the massive rise in China’s economy and Australia’s engagement with it. That’s mostly true. Though I do recall that Steve wrote several linked Ambassadorial Despatches which caused a ruckus in Canberra, in the Department of Foreign Affairs. Because he was predicting a rapid rise in China’s economy, opening of the Cultural sphere and huge opportunities for Australia. Most at aussie’s Foggy Bottom, pretty much all of it, thought he was over-egging. But it turned out his predictions actually under-estimated the history-crushing changes China was to go through. And out engagement with it. TL;DR of Tony’s figures: China’s economy in 1972 was twice as large as Australia’s; in 2020 it was 13 times as large. 

Tony concludes saying “ it would be foolish to bet against China”. And while I’ve also been saying that for pretty much four or five decades as well, I’m no longer so sure. There are some very serious problems on the ground in China -- debt overhang, failure of the consumer-led GDP to replace investment-led growth, unemployments, ageing population -- which might mean it’s had its apotheosis already.