No need to bring up sins of the past

Everyone can play the history game, but not everyone wants to mention the war

Perhaps irony isn’t part of the CCP’s diplomatic lexicon.

CHINA’S top diplomat played an invidious game this week, seeking to rekindle the old enmity between Australia and a now close ally that was once an old enemy. “In the Second World War Japan invaded Australia, bombed Darwin, killed Australians and treated Australian POWs in a way that was humanly unacceptable. You can look at the video, YouTube, the pictures and the photos,” Xiao Qian, the new Chinese ambassador, told a Canberra press conference.

He warned against Australia’s close relations with Japan, claiming that the Japanese have never apologised for World War II.

“I hope that the Australian government and Australian people would have a clear mind of what happened and be careful about what might happen in the future. Once somebody threatens you, he might threaten you again,” Xiao Qian said.

Perhaps irony isn’t part of the CCP’s diplomatic lexicon.

At the beginning of the week, I was not in a receptive mood for this latest somewhat disingenuous blustering from the Chinese Communist Party.

I was laid low with Covid – or the “China virus”, as Donald Trump called it.

But I was not quite low enough to meekly accept the instructions of China’s new ambassador.

Admittedly, some of my grumpiness might be attributed to contracting Covid – but also to history and to a long, worldly scepticism regarding ambassadors of many nations.

In the 17th century the English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton most accurately defined his tawdry trade when he provided probably the most enduring description of his own job: “An honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country.”

Of course, I know nothing about the bloke and cannot comment on the honesty or otherwise of ambassador Xiao Qian.

But the ambassador’s motives were clear: to drive a wedge between Japan and Australia, both allies of the United States, as well as being each other’s closest security partner in Asia.

Japan is Australia’s third largest trading partner and generally much better disposed towards us than is often the case with our biggest trading partner.

That is the major geopolitical and diplomatic conundrum facing Australia: our reliance on a nation driven by antithetical beliefs.

Similarly, it’s the poser for China; their reliance on a stubbornly, sometimes chaotic democratic country, is obviously a source of enormous frustration. Hence, they revolve between icy restraint and heated over-reaction. And we between wishful thinking and disappointment.

Let’s hope the two foreign ministers, Penny Wong and Wang Yi, are both honest people who can lie effectively for their countries and sort it out.

The tough talk this week from ambassador Xiao Qian was coming at the same time as the CCP seemed to be countenancing a thaw in the frosty relationship.

That prompted Japanese ambassador Shingo Yamagami to warn: “We have to be vigilant because when it comes to policy, nothing fundamental seems to have changed on their part.”

While everyone can play at the history game, it is also true (aside from the Chinese ambassador this week) that not everyone wants to mention the war.

The Japanese would like to forget it, and indeed many can.

I was once filming on the infamous Burma Railway, in Hellfire Pass, where it was said that one Japanese prisoner died for every sleeper laid. There I was amazed to find Japanese wedding parties. Young couples were travelling to Thailand to tie the knot in the killing ground.

When I questioned them about choosing such a gruesome and surely shameful location, they told me they knew little about the war and had never heard of the Burma Railway. They just thought it was a beautiful and romantic place to get married, and the travel company was offering a good deal.

Likewise, back in the first decade of this century, when it wasn’t unwise for an Australian journalist to travel to China, discreetly and not on camera, I would ask people in the street how they felt about the massacre of students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Some were embarrassed and non-committal. But what amazed me at the time was that most claimed, genuinely it seemed, never to have heard of it.

They had completely forgotten the recent past, while I relearned what George Orwell said in his novel 1984 about history in dictatorships: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In post-war Germany at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, ordinary Germans were often asked how they had explained to themselves the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours. Whatever were they thinking had happened between 1933 and 1945 to the millions who vanished?

The chillingly infamous answer was, “Wir haben es nicht gewusst,”

which means “We did not know.”

Every nation has selective memory, or would wish to have.

Covid fog has befuddled my mind and I can’t quite remember what it was I wanted to forget about Vietnam and Afghanistan, Tampa, Manus Island et al.

I’ll get back to you if my memory returns.

Communism is often as selfrighteous as democracy is selfdoubting.

I’ve argued with authoritarians (when they will allow it) that without rigorous debate and questioning, how any regime can chart a reasonable and sensible course.

In democracies governments get chucked out if they get it too wrong too often. If a dictatorship gets it wrong, the whole nation goes down with it.

It’s not all bad news. After lecturing us on who our friends should be, ambassador Xiao Qian told the media that the relationship was “at a critical stage of turnaround”.

He toasted the new year with a glass of Australian red wine, which in China would be too expensive to waste on the press. It would be subject to a 200 per cent tariff.

The tariff was punishment for a long list of Chinese “grievances”, among them I remember our questioning the origin of Covid.

Or is just it Covid making me think that?

Once I had good friends in China back in the days I could go there. Like people everywhere, they just wanted to have some fun and get on with their lives.

However, some journalists I met were braver than I could ever be in the circumstances and spoke out for freedom and self-determination.

God knows what happened to them.

But if it ever happened here, I would certainly not be writing about political matters.

I would be writing a trout fishing column.