Opinion | As Australia pushes back against China, the Western world is watching to see Beijing’s response

China’s growing confidence to deploy economic sanctions against countries that refuse to toe the line is worrying many. Australia is countering this, in a limited sense, but when push comes to shove, will all the talk about getting tough on China turn out to be bluster?

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Published: 3:00am, 14 Oct 2019Updated: 3:05am, 14 Oct 2019

China’s economic statecraft has been shaped not just by its recent surge in wealth. Beijing has watched for decades how Washington wields sanctions against other countries to attempt to bring them to heel. The Chinese remember well how the United States imposed an oil embargo on Imperial Japan in 1941 in response to its occupation of China and Southeast Asia. The attack on Pearl Harbour followed soon after.

More recently, Washington has routinely used sanctions against other countries and areas, with the current list extending from Russia to the Balkans, Iran, North Korea, Lebanon, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name just a few. As a fledgling superpower, Beijing clearly feels it can try the same tactics.

More to the point, Beijing’s psyche on this issue was moulded in the decades following the Korean war, when China was subject to a US embargo itself and forced to rely on trade and technology from the Soviet Union.

From the time the Communist Party of China took office, its leaders learned the hard way about how trade could be used as a diplomatic weapon. Amy King, senior lecturer in strategic and defence studies at Australian National University, says of that period that Communist Party leaders “had not anticipated the US-led embargo, and, when it came, were surprised how quickly it disrupted the Chinese economy”.

In the 1950s, Dr King says, Beijing deployed trade as an inducement to drive a wedge between the US and its allies, such as Japan and Britain, by offering to open its market to imports. Beijing’s attempt to break the US embargo was also the start of a tradition that has survived into the next century, of an effort to build ties with Asia and Africa and dilute relations with “imperialist” America.

The world looks very different for China today, following its development into an economic behemoth. As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China has joined multilateral sanctions efforts against North Korea and Iran, in both cases primarily under pressure from the US.