The mutant 'Chinese question'

Thus in the dreamscape of White Australia, until in October 1949 we got discomfited by Mao Tse Tung's declaring that the Chinese people had stood up, China was the sick man of Asia.

But ever-ingenious, in 1951, we embarked on the Colombo Plan to train up the best and the brightest in the soon-to-be abandoned white colonies in Asia. They would be imbued with the best of the West, bulwarks against Mao's march southwards, as he evangelised his universal love for mankind. Eek! The Red Peril! Just 50 years after we'd put down the Yellow Peril!

Perhaps we were precipitate. Chairman Mao turned out to be a mad peasant! His Great Leap Forward starved tens of millions to death; then his 10-year Cultural Revolution, crafted to get rid of his Long March rivals in the politburo, went viral: closed down schools and universities, and produced a whole generation of barely educated youth. At last in 1976 Mao died! In 1978 Deng took the reins, and burnished his capitalist roader moniker with some abandon: What does it matter the colour of the cat, so long as it catches the mice? Mao had twice had Deng expelled from the politburo, the second time during the Cultural Revolution for being a capitalist roader. Deng opened China up for business, this time without the help of foreign gunboats. Yes, open windows will let in a few flies and insects, Deng said. But he too was not for turning.

Corruption grew, and had become a plague by the time Xi took over. All the same, as Bob Carr wrote recently, 850 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty. And we marvel at China's burgeoning middle class, yearning for the fopperies of the West.

Thank God for all that! And on earth, credit to Gough too. His "traitorous" overtures to neighbourliness have earned us a warm welcome to ship our coal, beef, wine and so many other things to Deng's open docks in old Canton, where once boxes of confiscated opium were thrown into the sea! Shanghai docks opened up too, and elsewhere!

China became our cash cow.

Then in 2003 the minerals boom took off. Hawke and Keating had already opened up Australia, for competition, for growth and endless growth! And the resource-hungry China repaid Gough's kindness in container-loads of dollars.

Hubris got the better of us. We squandered our minerals boom on what turned out to be unsustainable personal consumption, unlike Norway which now has the world's largest sovereign fund, husbanded from its North Sea oil royalties. Howard and Costello may now be a little wistful, but at the time we had China, and a minerals boom that would go on forever!

That boom is losing its head of steam now, but China continues to spoil us with cheap consumer goods, investments in our economy, millions and millions every year in student fees and tourist splashings. They love us. One day when they become affluent, like us, they will be like us! They will take on our values! Freedom is human nature!

This adolescent vision of the benign panda in our dreamscape has at times been disrupted.

This time, having blown the bugle, Morrison can't back down. So his bodyguards in the media talk up any semblance of a good outcome from his goading of China. Aussies, poorly educated in the history of our relations with China, if at all, have, like the Red Guards of the Great Helmsman, chanted and hollered. We have every right to ask the commies why it gave us this virus, eh?

And as if not wanting to miss the tide, our ever-confident Senator Concetta Ferravanti-Wells, once Minister for International Development and before that Assistant Minister for Multiculturalism, hollered warnings for "reparations" from China. God have mercy! Is our Connie entirely ignorant of the reparations which the Brits extorted from the sick man of Asia, all for having had to send gun boats to teach China how to trade with the West?

Aye, the best of times, the worst of times: the cash cow has turned into a contagious apparition!

We've been dreaming dreams well past sunrise.