In an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Geremie Barme, a professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University, commends Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s recent speech at Peking University, in which the PM urged China to join the rest of humanity as “a responsible global stakeholder.”
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a speech to an audience at Peking University, China’s pre-eminent tertiary institution. Given the tensions over Tibet and the Olympic torch relay, as a practised diplomat Rudd could have taken the easy path by speaking in platitudes about the strength of the bilateral relationship and any number of mutually acceptable and anodyne topics.
Instead, with finesse and skill, he chose to address the students on the broad basis for a truly sustainable relationship with the economically booming yet politically autocratic state that is China. In doing so, he rewrote the rules of engagement in a way that can only benefit Australia and our relationship with this important country…
To be a friend of China, the Chinese people, the party-state or, in the reform period, even a mainland business partner, the foreigner is often expected to stomach unpalatable situations, and keep silent in the face of egregious behaviour. A friend of China might enjoy the privilege of offering the occasional word of caution in private; in the public arena he or she is expected to have the good sense and courtesy to be “objective”, that is to toe the line, whatever that happens to be. The concept of “friendship” thus degenerates into little more than an effective tool for emotional blackmail and enforced complicity.
See also this op-ed from the Washington Post: Australia to China: Let’s Not Be Friends
