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Managing an outpost at the end of empire

By Reg Little - posted Wednesday, 25 September 2013


Eurasian Diplomacy Marginalizes Anglo-American Power

The Anglo-American world confronts a typical End of Empire moment. China has navigated a number of such situations over its long history and often draws insight from these. The West, however, is inclined to go back to the decline of Rome for some understanding of contemporary processes and the remoteness of the experience appears to offer a type of subconscious reassurance.

Confronting such a tectonic shift in global order, Australia's talk of an Asian Century is profoundly simplistic. It is characterized by naïve hope rather than any resolute commitment to integrate with a subtle and advanced culture that remains an almost total mystery to all but Asian born and educated Australians.

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The simple minded character of Australian diplomacy is evident once one recognises that China is at the centre of peaceful but powerful initiatives that go far beyond Asia and encompass the globe. Groupings like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (China, Russia and four Central Asian members, with less formalized interaction with all major surrounding powers) are little addressed by mainstream media and academia, and almost totally ignored by official policy.

Yet BRICS links China with the distant continents of South America and Africa and has already advanced the development of alternative and independent financial and communication networks. Moreover, both groupings consolidate a new order in the globe's central continent of Eurasia. The Eurasian developments could reduce Western Europe to a dependent fringe and the broader South American and African actions have the potential to peacefully but increasingly marginalize the "indispensable" power of the United States. Such reflections are reinforced by innumerable hints that the United States has struggled to keep up with Chinese asymmetrical strategic thought and rapidly diversifying hi-tech military technology.

These types of unremarked geo-political evolution highlight the failure of Australian diplomacy. There is a total lack of diplomatic representation in the emerging nations of Central Asia, which were part of the old Soviet Union and have been the target of a largely failed American strategy. Moreover, there is no evident awareness of the potential for fast and cheap Chinese rail and road networks throughout Eurasia to transform fundamentally the character and economics of global commodity trade.

Australia Trapped in Past Certainties

Perhaps even more important, Australian diplomacy has done nothing to prepare for a world where today's international institutions may no longer function in any meaningful manner. Defined by Anglo American power after World War II in 1945, these built in many privileges for the English speaking world. Sadly, these privileges have been so abused in attempts to stave off decline that it is hard to believe they can be reformed to serve a new global power structure. Even more sadly, the media rhetoric and propaganda related to "humanitarian interventions" in places like Libya and Syria has only precipitated the decline in the authority of these post 1945 international institutions. This is deeply and widely felt outside the closed circles of a few declining Western powers.

Closer to home, Australia's diplomatic leaders just do not get it. The educational, commercial and administrative elites of four or the five countries focused on in the Australia in the Asian Century report are deeply shaped by the wisdom of the Chinese classics. The rote learning of these classics from a very early age is now being energetically revived in China and elsewhere. Yet none of this is noted in the report. The fabled Gonski Report was equally ignorant and inept in addressing the challenges and opportunities posed by the tradition of education that informs the peaceful rise of Asia.

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In terms of acknowledging and comprehending the civilization that is rapidly transforming Australia's world, the Asian Century report and DFAT's glossy response are close to illiterate. How can Australia have generated more than half a century of positive rhetoric about Asia and learnt close to nothing?

Three answers might be advanced to this question. First, the Chinese classics have been the object of loud and crippling criticism and ridicule for much of that time, a legacy of political failure that followed the mid 19th Century Opium Wars). They have had to rely on the discreet resolve of Asian peoples to preserve their authority. Second, Anglo-American order has drawn skilfully and heavily on a form of intellectual apartheid to assert and maintain its authority. Any thought not conforming with the European Enlightenment's universal values has been denigrated and marginalized, somewhat as captured in George Orwell's novel, 1984. Third, the Chinese classics often translate poorly and need to be memorized in their original language, preferably at a very early age, to reveal their true strength and character. If mastered in this manner they nurture lifetimes of fluid and questioning reflection informed by over four millennia of experience. This culture has demonstrated its strategic superiority over the West's best for more than the past half century. It, nevertheless, remains incomprehensible if trapped in the certainties of two centuries of Anglo-American order.

Shunning Literacy in the Asian Century

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About the Author

Reg Little was an Australian diplomat from 1963 to 1988. He gained high level qualifications in Japanese and Chinese and served as Deputy of four and Head of one overseas Australian diplomatic mission. He is the co-author of The Confucian Renaissance (1989) and The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny (1997) and author of A Confucian Daoist Millennium? (2006). In 2009, he was elected the only non-ethnic Asian Vice Chairman of the Council of the Beijing based International Confucian Association. His other writings can be found on his website: www.confucian-daoist-millennium.net.

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