“We are grappling with a regional environment far more complex and far less predictable than at any time since the Second World War,” Dutton said.
China’s defence ministry shot back in a statement on Friday night, denouncing Dutton’s latest attack on China as “groundless” and “extremely dangerous and irresponsible”.
“The blatant hyping of the ‘China threat theory’ and baseless accusations against China fully expose some Australian officials’ Cold War mentality and ideological bias,” ministry spokesman Wu Qian said.
He said Dutton and other China hawks in the Australian government were “pawns of the United States” who wished to contain China and saw it as “an imaginary enemy”.
“They often fabricate various anti-China issues to ‘earn traffic’, publish slanderous and provocative remarks on China to manipulate opinions, and make belligerent moves targeting China to justify their own purpose,” he said.
“Their toxic rhetoric has seriously poisoned the atmosphere for the development of relations between the two militaries and the two countries, and undermined the regional efforts of Asia-Pacific countries on maintaining peace and stability.”
The latest back and forth comes as bilateral tensions show little sign of abating, with Beijing becoming increasingly impatient with Canberra over its close alignment with the US and other regional powers bent on countering China.
On Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused Australia of bullying, while dismissing allegations of “economic coercion” by Beijing and blaming Canberra for actions that “grossly interfere” with China’s internal affairs.
“The current difficulties in China-Australia relations are entirely of Australia’s own making,” he said.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is expected to be at the White House later this month to attend the first face-to-face summit of top leaders of the Quad, a quadrilateral security grouping with the US, India and Japan. Beijing has denounced the Quad as a US-led “
” targeting China.
Dutton and Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne wrapped up a visit to Indian capital New Delhi on Saturday, where they agreed with their hosts to bolster defence ties and cooperate on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region.
Nationalist Chinese tabloid Global Times has expressed Beijing’s deep displeasure over Canberra’s participation in the
featuring all four Quad nations. An editorial last month said Australia had become “a running dog of the US in exchange for protection”.
However, analysts want both sides to ease off on the rhetoric.
While it was understandable that Beijing found the Nazi Germany comparison offensive, harsh rhetoric would only exacerbate mistrust and push middle powers in the region further away, said Pang Zhongying, an international affairs expert at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao.
“Beijing needs to see the big picture behind Dutton’s remarks, and will have to accept the reality that Canberra is just one of the regional players that are increasingly wary of Beijing’s assertiveness in the wake of the coronavirus crisis,” he said.
“As a rising global power, China may need to come up with an effective diplomatic strategy of courting those middle powers like Australia without being labelled as a bully.”
Former Australian prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd also expressed concerns last month over the use of “the rhetorical overdrive stick” by Dutton and other China hawks when it came to navigating complex challenges with China.
But Turnbull was also critical of China’s aggressive wolf warrior-style diplomats and said “largely the people that have got to change course are in Beijing”.
Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, warned that while China’s authoritarian shift posed severe challenges to the Indo-Pacific region, Australia’s haste to confirm Beijing as an adversary might be counterproductive.
“As it ‘emotionally [re]entangles in the apron-strings’ of the US alliance system with its resurrected ‘forward defence’ posture, Canberra will be treated less as a valued country in its own right by Beijing and more as an unvarying function of the larger calculus of relations with Washington,” he wrote in an article last month on the East Asia Forum website.
