LESSONS TO LEARN FROM ‘CHINA CRISIS’

THERE are two big lessons to be learned out of the Chinese rejection of a small – a very small – portion of our coal exports to that country.

The first is that the 1.4 billion Chinese in China do not all automatically assume that they have been placed on Planet Earth for the sole purpose of giving 25 million Australians a free ride to guaranteed, limitless and never-ending prosperity. Far less, that they happily accept such an obligation.

The second is that what ‘China does’ is complicated. We need to beware of jumping to easy and seemingly obvious conclusions – that, for example, they are rapping us over the knuckles because we sided with the US on some matter.

Part of this lesson is to ignore ‘China hands’, so-called experts all, who purport to provide ‘the answer’ for behaviour. Arguably it’s not just pointless to try to work it out but counter-productive and even damaging.

The core mistake is to see China either as a cohesive centrally directed stillcommunist monolith or as a ‘Confucian form’ of 21st century (robber) capitalism with formally almost as many billionaires as the US and in truth perhaps more.

It’s of course both and neither, and there are multiple layers of control and decisionmaking, not just beyond our ability to get to grips with but even to understand.

Closing certain ports to Australian coal exports might be driven by a local power struggle between government and industry, between differing factions in either or both, at the local level, at the provincial level, at the national level or over-lapping dynamics of multiple levels.

It might be driven by environmental pressure; it might be directed at favouring a particular group of local coal