The Stern Hu affair is a worrying preview of a world run on China’s rules

Wednesday, 22nd July 2009

The Chinese are happy to call Australia their true friend until we dare to question their unarguable rightness, says Eric Ellis

They are faraway times now, but before Stern Hu was interred in the bowels of a Shanghai star chamber, maybe he sampled the beaches of southern Sri Lanka, or trekked into that wild panhandle of north-eastern Afghanistan that juts into China. Or maybe he’d been to Mandalay, most anywhere in Africa or to the most venal border town I’ve ever had the misfortune to be trapped in overnight, a nasty Chinese railhead called Suifenfe, populated with the most ferocious prostitutes servicing timber merchants on their way to waste Russia’s forested far east.

If Hu — or Kevin Rudd for that matter — had spent time in any of those places, he’d better understand why he’s now designated an Enemy of the Chinese People, about as serious a charge the Chinese Communist Party can lay, and presumed guilty of whatever crime it chooses, before the unlikely event he is released from his nightmare into the arms of Rio Tinto, his family and an outraged Australia.

On that Lankan seascape, in Burma, Afghanistan and all those other miserably poor places where just a fraction of China’s $2 trillion pile goes a very long way, he’ll have seen myriad Chinese quietly doing their solemn patriotic duty for the party’s cherished zu guo — guaranteeing the motherland’s economic security by plundering foreign mines and oilfields, building Chinese-run ports, refineries and airports, painstakingly assembling a quasi-sovereign supply chain that connects the raw stuff fuelling the ‘economic miracle’ to toiling minions back home, who export it as finished products back to us. This network is all centrally supervised by Beijing, and it will never be finished. No other country so obscures the boundaries between State and Mammon on such an industrial nationally-interested scale. It’s an awesome undertaking, but get in the way of it, by having too much say in pricing commodities fuelling a strategic industry like, well, steel, then China will try to permanently excise you from the game.

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