China's government has announced it is indefinitely suspending all activities under the China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue – the first formal freeze of a diplomatic mechanism since relations between the two countries soured.
China's main planning body, the National Reform and Development Commission, announced the move in response to actions by the Australian government.
Beijing accused Australia of carrying out a "series of measures to disrupt normal exchanges and cooperation" and said the Commonwealth government had a "Cold War mindset" and practised "ideological discrimination".
High-level ministerial communication had already been frozen by China's government and this latest move comes after the Morrison government last month cancelled a Belt and Road agreement between China and the state of Victoria.
"Recently, some Australian Commonwealth Government officials launched a series of measures to disrupt the normal exchanges and cooperation between China and Australia out of Cold War mindset and ideological discrimination," the National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement explaining the decision.
Relations between China and Australia deteriorated last year after Canberra called for an international inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting trade reprisals from Beijing.
Love to be so scared of any form of socialism that you manage to re-close China. Nixon is malding somewhere in hell.
China won't re-close, but Australia's pro-US barking has really been the stupidest one to date. Like the US economy cannot exist without China at this point, they understand that, but Australia is just yoloing it with these mindless attacks, losing a huge export market: wine, coal, now this.
It’s honestly the opposite I thought would happen, I think under a Labor or perhaps even Turnbull-style Lib government we’d pivot towards China and leave the US to rot. But the insane true believers like Scomo and Dutton are in charge now and they’re more than willing to go down with the ship.
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Oh most def, if Turnbull had somehow survived long enough to make it to a choice between US led foreign policy or Chinese led, he would’ve been knifed by the psychos in that party.
Rudd I always saw as a mining tax thing, but I’m sure it was multifaceted.
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this, if a 5 Eyes nation actually elected someone who wouldn't side with the US over China they'd be gone within a month
5-Eyes has been staring cross-eyed for the last four years. Tony Blinken's trying to straighten everyone out. But he's also juggling the demands of a post-Reagan "Business Friendly" political landscape.
You can't be business friendly while picking a fight with your largest trading partner. So we try to pivot to alternatives - India, Brazil, Nigeria - only for these country to go up in flames in the face of COVID.
We're already alienated large chunks of Western Europe. Japan's decades of stagnation relative to China suggest that maybe we're not the best allies to have. Our endless saber-rattling with N. Korea is not playing well in S. Korea. And the Huawei fight is showing the limits of what even a coordinated action by Settler Colonial Western Governments can achieve.
At some point, westerners are going to have to abandon even the flimsiest pretext of neoliberal economic models or just give up and do business with the Chinese normally. Australia can't exist as an industrial export economy if it's decoupled from the nearest superpower and its multi-continent spanning trade regime.
i agree, good analysis, i'd add that there is a further option some 5 eyes countries refuse to ever give in to China and just disolve into full fascism but I imagine that will be closer to the imperial core
That's just what we do to PMs anyway though
The winds can still change imo, now that China is actually fighting back, i think/hope even the staunchest idiots will see where things are going for them financially or if they don't someone else will come to replace them. The US has no allies and are more than happy to take over the markets they made their "partners" abandon. This has been the case with European natural gas, for example, as well as the Czech Republic where a dubious accusation about something that happened in 2014 made them reject the Russian vaccine as well as the tender Russians won to build a nuclear plant there (in favor of the US based Westinghouse in all likelihood, and much more expensive ofc). It's not a lot of fun to be a suzerain: you get a lot of support from US politicians on twitter and not a lot of else, while your infrastructure is deteriorating.
The pessimist in me says that if Ozzies are willing to let their whole continent burn to defend coal profits, they'd do just about anything to defend white supremacy.
Yeah under different leadership maybe aus does the smart thing and does a balancing act of trying to not piss off either side but they've dove head first into being a running dog so maybe they aren't the most rational long term policymakers.