Aussie Cold War Warrior should stop seeing China through Washington lens: former FM

Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr said in an opinion editorial on Saturday that the Australian Cold War Warriors should stop seeing China through the Washington lens.

"Has Australia the wit to nurture a policy based on our interests as well as values, or can we see China only ideologically and through the Washington lens?," Carr asked in the opinion published by daily newspaper The Australian that should have come from an elected senior Australian politician following a near fortnight of divisive anti-China media reporting.

Carr said the "Australian Cold (War) Warriors" rage is partly a fury the Australian government has not signed up to the ideological agenda of clicking to the heels of the United States in the Asia Pacific.

A few of the recent articles in Australian media included a "McCarthyist indictment": anyone who had ever said a positive thing about the China-Australia relationship is "a rat, a fly, a mosquito or a sparrow".

"The fact is it is a huge wrench for some Australians to see China except through U.S. eyes," Carr said.

"Some Cold Warriors find it very hard."

Carr said Australia's "Cold Warriors" have spent too much time in U.S. think tanks and not enough time reading a Henry Kissinger analysis titled "On China", or walking the streets of Chinese cities.

The Australian media attacks didn't stop at Carr.

Over the past two weeks, the Australian Chinese diaspora were branded as spies, potential members of an "intelligence vacuum cleaner" on fears of disloyalty to their adopted country by "having an allegiance to a foreign power". The spy tag was also brandished to the more than 1 million Chinese tourists visiting Australian shores.

"Apart from this model of Chinese intelligence collection having significant problems, this kind of reporting raises issues about how the media shapes public perception of links between the Chinese diaspora and the Chinese state," former fellow of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, John Lee, wrote on the Lowy Institute for International Policy's online blog.

"Australia should be engaging its Chinese diaspora, both citizens and PRC nationals, as a resource to build our place in the transnational services economy," Lee said, adding "it's far from certain" Chinese professionals will be willing to stay "in a country where they feel treated as potential spies, or where sovereign risk is perceived to be high".

Carr said with the uncertain future of power in the region, it is "wise to keep options open" as the former and current Australian prime ministers have done, and to deploy what former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating called "the elasticity of diplomacy' -- that is, to bridge gaps of political values and stay open to possibility." Endit