The Diplomacy Of The Fig Leaf

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday December 29, 2008

IT IS regrettable, and worrying, that the annual China-Australia dialogue on human rights issues has been allowed to slip off the diplomatic calendar in this, the Rudd Government's first full year in office. True, Kevin Rudd earned credit for publicly raising human rights issues during his visit to Beijing in April. He was also reported to have stated Australia's concerns about religious and internet freedom, and civil rights in Tibet, to China's Premier, Wen Jiabao, in August. Both Mr Rudd and his Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, said repeatedly such issues would be pursued again when senior officials of the two governments met for their annual talks in the second half of this year. Instead, for the first time in 11 years, the dialogue was not held.

The Foreign Affairs Department said last week it hoped the first such talks of the Rudd prime ministership would be held early in the new year. The delay, it said, was due to scheduling difficulties, caused partly by China's hosting of the Olympic Games. While this may sound plausible, it is a bad precedent. Much of the value of the human rights dialogues is that, under an agreement reached in 1997, they are held every year. Australia is one of only two nations with which China has an arrangement for regular exchanges, at a senior level, on exceedingly sensitive issues. Should these annual dialogues come to be regarded by Beijing as occasional rituals, to be cancelled if inconvenient, their diplomatic usefulness would be debased.

Obviously, what can be achieved by such talks, even when held every year, is limited. They are held in private, and what the public hears about them tends to be blandly reassuring. Progress was described as "incremental, but positive" in one Australian departmental report. Meanwhile, for all the talk, reports of grave civil rights violations by the Chinese authorities against their own citizens are still all too common.

Yet it is a diplomatic plus that Australian officials have had this regular forum to present Australian concerns to their Chinese bureaucratic counterparts, in addition to bilateral meetings at leadership and ministerial level. So is the readiness of the Chinese, until now, to listen. The dialogues may be a diplomatic fig leaf - the purpose is to obscure rather than to reveal the naughty bits - but they do make discourse between opposites possible.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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