Visceral Emphasis
Australia’s knowledge approach to China, the British invaded the Chinese state of Tibet in 1903, China and Vietnam agreed to boost ties and build a community with a "shared future".
UPGRADE: A visceral emphasis on fear over engagement has marked Australia’s approach to China since 2015. Will the Albanese Labor government value knowledge and engagement over ignorance and fear?
IT WAS ARGUABLY the most mismatched war in history. The British invaded the Chinese state of Tibet in 1903, leading to the deaths of an estimated 2,700 Tibetans.
China and Vietnam agreed on Tuesday (Dec 12) to boost ties and build a community with a "shared future", three months after Hanoi upgraded its formal relations with the United States.
Australia’s China knowledge capability: gratitude, dismay, hope
By Jane Golley
A visceral emphasis on fear over engagement has marked Australia’s approach to China since 2015. Only 17 Australians graduated with Honours degrees in China Studies between 2017 and 2021 across the entire country. This year no grants were awarded by the Australian Research Council for China-related research or collaborative research involving Chinese institutions. Will the Albanese Labor government follow in the steps of Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Rudd, by valuing knowledge and engagement over ignorance and fear?
Last week I attended the 33rd Chinese Economic Society Australia (CESA) Conference, hosted by Macquarie University in Sydney. It was a fantastic opportunity to gain new perspectives and knowledge on the Chinese Economy, spurring new research ideas in the process.
Of more than 60 conference participants, I was the only one who grew up in Australia, and one of only three without Chinese heritage. I found myself thinking about how I’d found my way to becoming an academic specialising on the Chinese economy and when, if ever, a new generation of Australians would embark on such a pursuit?
First of all, I felt gratitude, for Australian government policies in the past that paved the way for the life I’ve had. I know many other people of my generation who feel the same. Good government policy to encourage knowledge about Asia positively impacted our lives and enabled us to explore our geographic neighbourhood with confidence, humility and excitement.
These policies were chronologically traced by the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ report on Australia’s China Knowledge Capability (ACKC), published early this year. A key finding of the report is that Australia is looking seriously deficient in our ‘Core China capability’: grounded in relationships in China, informed by a world-class understanding of China, and integrated across academia, industry and government to serve Australia’s national interests.
It wasn’t always this way.
The report’s timeline of the policies that have shaped Australia’s ‘China knowledge capability’ is revealing. It begins with the arrival of the first Australian exchange students in Beijing in 1973. This followed prime minister Gough Whitlam’s visit that year, the first diplomatic visit by an Australian prime minister to the People’s Republic. Born in 1971, my path was being paved by these events.
I was the perfect age when the Hawke government introduced its National Language Policy in 1987, offering funding for teaching Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese in Australian schools.
My local public school in Canberra offered Japanese for the first time and a trip to Japan – I was in Year 11 and decided to go. The trip was so enthralling that I chose Japanese as a major in my economics degree at the ANU, spending one of the best years of my life in Japan in 1991. As the report identifies, “Asia-focused language and area studies degree programs flourished” through this period, and it was wonderful to a part of that.
In my first job after graduation in 1993, I joined the newly-established Asia Section in the Commonwealth Treasury – an initiative of then treasurer Paul Keating – and was tasked with monitoring China (at the time Japan was too important for a young graduate). I was immediately hooked.
As Australia was heading towards its ‘peak’ China knowledge capability – identified in the ACKC report as 2002 – I was immersed in doctoral research on Chinese regional development, interspersed with as many stints in China as I could squeeze in, making (imperfect) efforts to learn Chinese along the way.
I returned to Canberra and the ANU in 2003, the year the Howard government ceased federal government funding for Asian languages in schools, shifting the responsibility to the state level. Australia’s decline in its hard-earned Asian literacy began at this time, but my own knowledge continued to build on the foundations laid in school, university and the Public Service.
The ACKC report identifies the ANU China Update series as one of the great success stories of translating knowledge into capability. It “grew out of the long era of mutually beneficial engagement between Australia and China”. With twenty volumes published since 1998, the series has fostered research collaborations between Crawford School of Public Policy’s China Economy Program and scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and China’s most prestigious universities, along with other world-renowned Chinese economy experts.
Currently supported by BHP, the China Update has “positioned Australia amongst the world leaders in economic research on the PRC”. Knowledge sharing between and among government, business and academia and between Chinese and Australian experts is central to its success.
Personally, since writing my first ‘Update’ chapter in 2004, the series has provided an incredible opportunity to interact with Chinese economy scholars from all over the world, and to bring PhD students into the fold. Some of these students have gone on to academic and public service positions in Australia and China, others have joined the World Bank, while one is the co-founder and CEO of an industrial services conglomerate in Cameroon. China knowledge, developed in Canberra, now spanning the globe.
The ANU also benefited hugely from the establishment of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) in 2010. Generously funded by the Rudd Government, CIW was created to encourage “scholars, thinkers and policy specialists” to engage in inter-disciplinary approaches to understanding the Chinese world, spanning history, culture, philosophy, politics, economics and more.
While not without its critics, it was a wonderful place that brought business people, policy makers and scholars together to immerse in all things Chinese, as I had the privilege of doing from 2010 onwards. The Centre’s China Story Yearbooks present wide-ranging perspectives on contemporary developments in China, Taiwan and the Chinese-speaking world, disseminating academic knowledge for non-specialist readers.
Without the Australian government’s support, none of this would have happened. So why my current dismay? The ACKC timeline ends with a “post-2010” period, identified as one in which Australia’s China policy shifted towards a strong focus on the opportunities for Australian trade, and little else. This shift has resulted in “critical gaps and serious signs of decline” in our deep China knowledge.
Funded by the government’s Foundation for Australia-China Relations, the authors of the ACKC report, the Australian Academy of Humanities, presumably chose to be diplomatic in omitting the even sharper policy shift, apparent from around 2015, with the Turnbull and successive governments prioritising security concerns about China, with a visceral emphasis on fear over engagement.
The drop-off in student enrolments since this time is alarming: only 17 Australians graduated with Honours degrees in China Studies between 2017 and 2021 across the entire country! This indicates that a devastatingly low number of young Australians are embarking on the intellectual and professional journey that Australian governments in the past encouraged me and so many others towards.
The Chinese Studies Association of Australia at its Annual General Meeting in Sydney on 8 December noted the findings of the ACKC report and registered its concern that this year no grants had been awarded by the Australian Research Council for China-related research or collaborative research involving Chinese institutions. The incoming President and new Council were instructed to take this up with the Asian Studies Association because of the wider implications for the development of Asian Studies in general.
Without the advanced cultural, linguistic, and analytical knowledge that students develop during their Honours programs and that academics extend through collaborative research, we are taking a huge risk. As former Ambassador to China Frances Adamson points out in her Foreword to the ACKC Report, the risks of making “strategic miscalculation – a real danger in an increasingly volatile world” will rise, just as the likelihood of “positive outcomes” will fall.
It is these risks that somehow give me hope – that the Albanese Labor government will follow in the steps of Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Rudd, by valuing knowledge and engagement over ignorance and fear. Because, as the ACKC Report explains so clearly, it is undeniably in the national interest to do so.al
Read more here.
Britain’s invasion of Tibet
By Emily Zhou and Nury Vittachi (Friday Writers, 2022)
IT WAS ARGUABLY the most mismatched war in history. The British invaded the Chinese state of Tibet in 1903, leading to the deaths of an estimated 2,700 Tibetans.
And just five British officers.
This extraordinary story has three main elements:
First, the presence of a western superpower, known for its unmatched weaponry, acting provocatively to secure its sphere of influence, far from home.
Second, the circulation of rumors about threats: In particular, a tale that Russian invaders were planning to invade multiple countries and had to be stopped, and that China was quietly working as Russia’s partner.
And third, the existence of a country positioned in-between these powers: one which was very poor and not officially at war with anyone.
The description above sounds like it could refer to events in Europe today.
But in fact, the exact same elements describe a forgotten battle that took place just over a century ago.
The British “expedition” to Tibet
IN AUGUST 1903, General Francis Younghusband led a party of British officers, and a large support unit of soldiers from British India, towards Tibet, which was at the time a state governed by China under a deal struck in 1720.
They spent about three months setting up and positioning the “expedition” at the Chinese borders. Then they waited for an excuse to move into Tibet. Why?
General Younghusband had come to believe that Russia had a large secret military presence in Tibet, and was planning an invasion to sweep across multiple borders, snatching Tibet from the Chinese and taking India away from the British. World domination was the plan. The contest was called “the Great Game”.
He had two pieces of evidence: one was the presence of a Russian monk named Argvan Dijiev in the Dalai Lama’s group of senior supporters, and another was the sighting of cluster of Russian rifles in Tibet.
The General wanted to head off the Russians and invade Tibet himself, taking at least part of it from Chinese rule to British rule—as they had done with Hong Kong, on the other side of the same country.
PROVOKING AN ATTACK
But he needed an excuse to justify crossing the border, so he repeatedly tried to provoke the Chinese protectorate into a confrontation, according to Duel in the Snows, a detailed record of the invasion by historian Charles Allen.
But the army struggled to get the violent response they wanted.
Then, in December, the British heard about some tension in the area, with Tibetans trespassing into Nepal. This was not technically part of India, but could be viewed as a de facto protectorate of the British.
Younghusband interpreted this as an act of Tibetan hostility against the British, and claimed the moral right to cross into Chinese territory.
It was later shown that the incident was small and had been misrepresented. Some Nepalese yaks and their drovers had trespassed into Tibet, and the locals had driven them back.
THE INVASION BEGINS
But by then the invasion had started. The heavily armed British party moved into Tibet on December 12, 1903. The 3,000 fighting men were armed with two Maxim machine guns and four pieces of heavy artillery. Literally thousands of workers followed to service the troops, and there were several thousand mules and yaks to carry food and weapons.
The British army included many Gurkhas and Sikhs, who had experience at fighting at high terrains, where the air was thinner.
General Younghusband, anxious to present the British as heroes, was intent on presenting the invasion as the fault of the Russians.
BLAMING THE VICTIMS
But Lord Curzon, British Viceroy of India, told him to downplay the concerns about the Russian monk and the rifles, and blame it entirely on Tibetans violating the peaceful British frontier.
“Remember that in the eyes of Her Majesty’s Government, we are advancing not because of [monk] Dorjyev, or Russian rifles in Lhasa, but because of our Convention shamelessly violated, our frontier trespassed upon, our subjects arrested, our mission flouted, our representations ignored,” Curzon wrote. The tone must be one of British outrage against the behavior of people in the Chinese territory.
When the British encountered Tibetan leaders, they insisted that this was not an invasion – although this was plainly untrue: armies don’t march into other countries bristling with weapons. One reporter was happy to share the real reason for the invasion in one of his dispatches, printed in a British newspaper: “England can defy the [Russian] czar in his thinly-veiled efforts to gobble up India.” (The cutting is printed further down in this report.)
But how unbalanced was this fight going to be? Historian Charles Allen said: “It was a clash between the mightiest political power in the world and the weakest.”
SLAUGHTER
The situation became tense, and in open ground near a village called Guru, fighting broke out, with British accounts saying that a Tibetan fired the first shot after arguing with a Sikh from the invading army.
The British had advanced weaponry and a highly trained army. The Tibetans had primitive muskets, handmade swords, plus bows and arrows, knives, and herding whips. Most of the Tibetan “soldiers” were peasants, shepherds, or monks, pressed into service.
It was no contest—just wholesale slaughter. In a short space of time (one witness said four minutes), hundreds of Tibetans lay dead.
The remainder turned to flee.
“Bag” as many as you can, the British commanders said, using a hunting term for killing. Soldiers shot the retreating Tibetans in the back, although at least one eventually lowered his rifle. “I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire, though the general’s order was to make as big a bag as possible,” wrote Lieutenant Arthur Hadow, commander of the Maxim guns detachment. “I hope I shall never again have to shoot down men walking away.”
At least 700 Tibetans died in what became known as the Massacre of Chumik Shenko. The result was a bloody river winding down the snowy mountain range. And that was the prelude to what some call the War of Gyantse.
A SHORT WAR
Two more battles followed, the first at Red Idol Gorge, again easily won by the British. The final stand for the locals was at a high level rock fort at Gyantse. With British superiority in weapons, strategy and combat, the Tibetans quickly lost the final fight too.
Where were the troops from Chinese heartland? Technically, Tibet had become part of China some two hundred years earlier, and should have been protected. The power system since 1727 was that China’s Imperial Commissioner-Resident of Tibet would grant official seals and certifications to the local religious and political governor known as the Dalai (達賴).
CHINESE WEAKNESS
However, the First Opium War in 1840 had shown that the Chinese philosophy of focusing inward was no longer tenable in a world where expansionist military powers were operating by a might-is-right policy.
The Qing Dynasty Chinese simply did not have the strength to protect Tibet.
During this period, the Dalai Lama fled to Outer Mongolia, while a Qing Dynasty commander named Youtai tried to negotiate peacefully with the British – at once stage, even offering food and drink to the invaders. In contrast, the Tibetan army had run out of food, swallowing snow to stave off hunger and thirst.
General Younghusband, meanwhile, was thrilled with the way his army won every battle.
Historians estimate that between 2,000 and 3,000 Tibetans lost their lives. Army records show that just five British officers lost their lives in combat, plus 29 “native” (ie, non-white) soldiers. Other lives were lost through illness, accidents and other circumstances.
UNEQUAL TREATY
Now it was time for an unequal treaty to be promulgated. Just as the British had used military strength to seize Hong Kong from the Chinese in 1841, so Younghusband could use the same method to take another piece of land for Britain.
On August 30 1904, the British army marched into Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. They demanded that the authorities sign a document called The Convention of Lhasa (拉薩條約). This forced the Tibetans to pay a huge sum of money to the British. A large piece of land called the Chumbi Valley would be ceded to British rule until the money was paid.
The British General deliberately named a sum so large that he calculated it would take at least 75 years for the Tibetans to pay off the debt. So Chumbi would become a second Hong Kong in effect: long-leased British territory in Chinese land.
The British also insisted that Tibet would no longer be allowed to have relations with any other foreign powers. That would force the hidden Russia army to leave.
The authorities in Tibet signed. There was no choice.
FALSE PRETENCES
But as time passed, an embarrassing problem gradually came to light. There were no Russians. The rumours about a secret Russian army in Chinese territory were entirely false. An entirely non-existent threat had been used to justify an invasion.
To the credit of the British, while General Younghusband tried to present his side as heroic, some voices in the UK objected to what clearly a slaughter of untrained people armed only with medieval tools.
The British eventually toned down the demands of the Lhasa Treaty, and the Chinese leadership paid the bills on behalf of the Tibetans’ regional authority.
SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
But the story ends with a strange twist.
Towards the end of his stay in Tibet, General Francis Younghusband, on a “dreamy autumn evening”, climbed to a peak near where the soldiers were camping and looked back to the Kyi Chu valley.
He felt an extraordinary spiritual force sweeping over him. “I was insensibly suffused with an almost intoxicating sense of elation and goodwill,” he wrote down later. “The exhilaration grew and grew till it thrilled through me with overpowering intensity. Never again could I think evil, or every be at enmity with any man.”
He felt deeply sorry for the slaughter of Tibetans he had presided over, and became a deeply spiritual man: not conventionally Christian, but with a range of beliefs that one would today call New Age. One of the groups he founded commissioned the famous hymn Jerusalem, about Jesus visiting England.
His former domestic helper, Gladys Aylward, moved from the UK to China, where she spent the rest of her life working as a social worker and missionary, with her speciality being to help the Chinese government end the foot-binding tradition. Her life story become a hit Hollywood movie called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, released in 1958.
REMEMBERED IN CHINA
Today, the 1903 invasion of Tibet has been largely forgotten in the west. But the Chinese remember what happened. A melodramatic 1997 Mandarin-language movie called Red River Valley dramatized the tale, and won several awards in that country.
But it’s a shame the story of the Tibet invasion is not more widely known. In theory, we learn from our mistakes. If the world remembered what had happened in that part of the world, 120 years ago, humanity might even have avoided some of the problems we see in the conflict in Europe today.
Read more here.
China and Vietnam agree to build 'shared future'
HANOI: China and Vietnam, at odds over claims in the South China Sea, agreed on Tuesday (Dec 12) to boost ties and build a community with a "shared future", three months after Hanoi upgraded its formal relations with the United States.
On Chinese President Xi Jinping's first visit to Hanoi in six years, the two countries announced 37 deals, including on diplomatic ties, railways and telecommunications.
As China and the United States vie for influence in the strategic nation, the agreements mark an achievement of Vietnam's "Bamboo diplomacy", although analysts and diplomats said the improvement in relations could be more symbolic than real.
Vietnam agreed to "support the initiative of building a community of shared future for humankind", according to a joint statement shown to reporters on Tuesday, after sources said China had been pushing for it. The joint statement is expected to be formally signed on Wednesday.
The countries' diplomats had debated the "shared future" phrase for months, following Hanoi's initial reluctance to use it, say officials and diplomats.
The Chinese term literally means "common destiny", but its translation in English and Vietnamese is "common future", which may be seen as less demanding.
"One declaration, many translations," said a diplomat based in the Vietnamese capital, commenting on the interpretation of the term.
In diplomatic ties, the upgrade is symbolic, Le Hong Hiep, a specialist in Vietnamese strategic and political issues at Singapore's Iseas–Yusof Ishak Institute, said.
"Vietnam's mistrust of China runs deep, and from the Vietnamese people's viewpoint, there is little to no 'shared destiny' between the two countries, as long as China continues to claim most of the South China Sea," he said.
Despite close economic ties, the neighbours have been at odds over boundaries in the South China Sea and have a millennia-long history of conflict.
In a sign of possible de-escalation, however, they signed two cooperation agreements for joint patrols in the Tonkin Gulf in the South China Sea and to establish a hotline to handle fisheries incidents, according to one of the agreements.
RAILWAYS, DIGITAL SILK ROAD
Apart from taking ties to a level Beijing may consider above those with the United States, the upgraded status came with the announcement of 36 cooperation deals, according to a list of documents seen by Reuters, and the joint statement on diplomatic ties.
That was short of the 45 initially proposed, according to one Vietnamese official, and missed agreements on critical minerals and rare earths on which Xi had urged more cooperation in an opinion piece published on Tuesday in a Vietnamese state newspaper.
Deals included two memoranda of understanding on cross-border rail development, including one mentioning developing aid.
Top officials in both countries had urged a boost to a rail link between the southern Chinese city of Kunming and the northern Vietnamese port of Haiphong, which crosses regions in Vietnam rich in rare earths.
China's ambassador to Vietnam Xiong Bo said earlier this week Beijing was ready to offer grants to develop rail connections, though the volume and terms of possible loans are unclear.
Boosting transport links would allow Vietnam to export more to China, especially farm products, while Beijing wants to further integrate the country's north with its southern supply chain networks, where Chinese firms are moving some operations.
Stronger rail networks would speed up the import of components from China for assembly in Vietnam, effectively expanding China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
So far the Hanoi metro is Vietnam's only project to have received BRI loans and it has not been labelled as part of the initiative, as the country's leaders often grapple with widespread anti-Chinese sentiment.
The two countries agreed to jointly promote the "two corridors, one belt" initiative, which is the Vietnamese term for infrastructure projects supported by China.
Xi's visit is also expected to boost plans on what is known as the Digital Silk Road, and the two countries signed several deals to cooperate on telecommunications and the digital economy.
The content of the agreements is not known but officials had said the increased telecoms cooperation could include digital infrastructure such as 5G networks and undersea optical fibre cables.
Read more here.