Rudd Helps Spring China From Its Trap

The Age

Monday April 14, 2008

John Garnaut

Australia's PM could be the one to help China's leadership escape its world of "good and evil".

WHEN Kevin Rudd first met Hu Jintao in Sydney, he received and accepted a spontaneous invitation to his family to attend the Olympic Games. Bantering in Chinese, the President Hu momentarily forgot his usual stiff and pre-scripted self.

Since then, Rudd has frequently used the dreaded "T" word and Chinese sources believe he has reduced his Olympic Games "commitment" to a possibility, contingent on what else might turn up in his diary.

On Saturday, Rudd met Hu for the second time. According to Rudd, they traversed ground that had already been covered with lower-ranking Chinese leaders.

According to Hu's account, he told Rudd: "Our conflict with the Dalai clique is not an ethnic problem, not a religious problem, nor a human rights problem. It is a problem of either preserving national unity or splitting the motherland."

President Hu talked about opening the door to dialogue with the Dalai Lama but actually nailed it shut. He attacked the religious leader for trying to "split the motherland", "incite violence" and "ruin the Beijing Olympics" (even though the Dalai Lama had said exactly the opposite of all those things the night before).

What could Rudd possibly say to all that?

The domestic political point is not that Rudd has not done as well as people say he has in China. No other world leader could have done better.

But behind the scenes it was an exceptionally tough trip. They reached an agreement on climate change, even if it lacked the substantive content Rudd would have liked.

But his climate change minister, Penny Wong, did cement her relationship with China's most important climate change bureaucrat, Xie Zhenhua. And Rudd held meaningful conversations with China's No. 2, Premier Wen Jiabao, and an important 20-minute private conversation in Mandarin with Wen's designated successor, Li Keqiang.

And the tone of Rudd's meeting with President Hu is said to have been positive.

Rudd's exceptional speech at Peking University is receiving global attention because it faced up to problems that were not just about Chinese domestic politics or even the bilateral Australia-China relationship.

The global context is that the Tibetan uprising has caught China's leadership hopelessly trapped in an old, Maoist binary world of good and evil that leaves no room for negotiation or even rational conversation. China is paying a very high price for the tanks that blocked the road of political reform and open intellectual engagement back in 1989.

At the same time, the Olympic torch has become a vector for transmitting the Tibetan conflict from China through Europe, the US and shortly to Australia.

China's propaganda has transformed the torch from a piece of aluminium into an inalienable piece of Chinese sovereignty. Any affront to the torch has become an attack on China. It is not only the Communist Party that equates the torch with Chinese pride. This formulation is being adopted throughout the majority Han population within China and throughout the world.

The coming Beijing Olympics had unified the world's Chinese communities around China's optimistic future. But the Olympics have now been fused with the Tibetan uprising.

Unfortunately, the possibility of a Chinese "catastrophical event", as Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens puts it, is a little easier to imagine now than it was a month ago.

Venerable China hands believe the world political and economic order is facing a major challenge. One such person is Sidney Rittenberg, an American scholar who knew China's top leadership intimately and was later jailed by them for 16 years.

Rittenberg believes Rudd is in a "unique" position to explain to both China and the world what they need to do. He says Rudd began to exercise his responsibilities in the Peking University speech.

Rudd, wisely, is constantly telling reporters not to overestimate his role in all of this. But people such as Rittenberg think that if he can't coax a little moderation out of the West or China then it is not clear who can.

© 2008 The Age

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