The Manchurian candidate

Jun 11th 2008
From Economist.com

The ideological convergence of Australia and Japan

WHEN Australia’s Labor Party trounced the centre-right government of John Howard late last year, Japanese commentators struck a note of concern. Just a few months earlier, Mr Howard had signed a landmark agreement, affirming Australia as Japan’s second-ever formal ally, after the United States.

This agreement seemed to be a useful bulwark against a rising China. But now, the commentators argued, the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, a former diplomat, would look at China’s insatiable demand for Australian coal and iron and place his country’s relationship with dictatorial China above that with free Japan.

In other words, Mr Rudd, fluent in Mandarin, was the Manchurian candidate. To make matters worse, his government took office just as Japan’s annual whaling trip to the southern ocean was generating a great deal of bad publicity in Australia, threatening Australians’ largely positive image of Japan. Then, as if to confirm Japan’s worst insecurities, in April Mr Rudd made his first big Asian trip as prime minister to China, not Japan.

Yet the picture is a lot more nuanced than many Japanese commentators—even in a week when Mr Rudd is paying a five-day visit to Japan—seem to realise. Take, first, Mr Rudd’s approach to China. It shows a sophistication that is lacking in European counterparts. At a speech (widely noted in China) to students of Peking University, Mr Rudd made pointed reference to the university’s historical role in promoting intellectual ferment and political activism.

He referred several times to Lu Xun, a great 20th-century author who taught there and designed the university’s crest. As Geremie Barmé, an Australian sinologist, notes, highlighting such a principled dissenter and unyielding critic of authoritarianism would not have been lost on his young audience at a time when China’s rulers insist on orthodoxy.

Mr Rudd went further, suggesting that the “harmony” that the rulers call for can come only with political reform. If any “old foreign friend” spouted such stuff on Chinese soil, then China’s Communists can be counted on to be outraged: for to be such a friend, as Mr Barmé points out, is to be held in a vice-like grip where criticisms are not tolerated. But Mr Rudd described himself as a zhengyou: a true friend who dares to disagree—and he pointedly disagreed over China’s trampling on Tibetans’ rights.

This approach may breed a more confident stance in dealings with China. European leaders made idiots of themselves in trying to articulate their reaction to China’s iron-fisted crackdown on Tibetan protesters this spring: while half-heartedly suggesting they might boycott Beijing’s Olympic games, they allowed China’s “sacred flame protection unit”—in truth, members of the paramilitary People’s Armed Police—to rough people up in Europe’s capitals.

Mr Rudd, by contrast, said it was nonsense to talk about boycotting the games, while making it clear to the Chinese government that its goons would be arrested if they so much as lifted a finger to protect the sacred flame as it passed through Canberra.

And as part of his effort to make Australia “the most Asia-literate country in the collective West”, Mr Rudd has also been addressing Japanese concerns directly. In a speech last week to the Asia Society in which the prime minister attempted to define his foreign policy, he could scarcely have been clearer: Australia’s relationship with Japan, he said, was “a comprehensive strategic, security and economic partnership—and beyond that we have an enduring friendship.”

But, as a Mr Rudd put it, there is a “brittleness” in a foreign policy that hangs on bilateral relations. Nor are democracies, he said, collectively able to tackle regional challenges—remarks that might have been aimed at Japanese fantabulists who think that the quartet of India, Australia, Japan and the United States could act to constrain China’s rise.

Indeed, the centrepiece of Mr Rudd’s vision is a framework of regional co-operation in which Australia’s existing relationships (with America and Japan) are enmeshed. He proposes a new “Asia-Pacific Community”, embracing everyone from India on the western flank to the United States on the eastern one. Quite how this new piece of architecture is to sit astride existing structures, such as the East Asia Summit or APEC, and how it is to be any more effective, is a debate for another day.

For now, it is worth highlighting how similar Mr Rudd’s conception of Asia’s future are to those of many thinking Japanese, including Yasuo Fukuda, Japan’s prime minister, who delivered a notable foreign-policy address last month. Some have already noted that passages from Mr Rudd could quite easily have been spouted by Mr Fukuda: in particular, the need to shape up domestically to face economic competition, and the insistence that a security relationship with America, however vital, is no substitute for greater efforts at building relationships within the region. Two middling powers thinking of ways to foster stability in a fast-changing part of the world: Mr Rudd and Mr Fukuda will have plenty to talk about, and much to agree upon.