Can Australia and China Save the World?

Mark Beeson argues that if we are to survive unprecedented levels of cooperation are needed, no matter how unlikely.

Global governance is failing. Nothing highlights this reality more dramatically than our collective inability to adequately address the degradation of the natural environment. Addressing an unprecedented problem of this magnitude and complexity would be difficult at the best of times. Plainly these are not the best of times. 

Even if climate change could be dealt with in isolation it would still present a formidable challenge. But when it is part of a poly-crisis of intersecting issues with the capacity to reinforce other more immediate, politically sensitive economic, social and strategic problems, then the prospects for effective cooperative action become more remote.

Indeed, the poly-crisis makes it increasingly difficult to know quite which of the many threats to international order and individual well-being we ought to focus on. The ‘we’ in this case is usually taken to be the ‘international community’, which has always been difficult to define, generally more of an aspiration than a reality, and frequently noteworthy more for its absence than its effectiveness. 

Nation states, by contrast, can still act, even if we don’t always like what they do. The quintessential case in point now, of course, is the administration of Donald Trump. Because it is by any measure still the most powerful country in the world, what American does necessarily affects everyone. This is why its actions on climate change - withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, gutting the Environmental Protection Authority, giving encouragement to fossil fuel companies – matter so much.

But nation-states can also be forces for good, and not just for those people who live within the borders of countries in the affluent global North. On the contrary, states that oversee a reduction in CO2 emissions are not only helping themselves, but they are also helping their neighbours and setting a useful example of ‘good international citizenship’.

When global governance is failing, and being actively undermined by the Trump regime, it is even more important that other countries try to fill the void, even if this means cooperating with the unlikeliest of partners. Australia and China really could offer a different approach to climate change mitigation while simultaneously defusing tensions in the Indo-Pacific and demonstrating that resistance to the Trump agenda really is possible. 

Friends with benefits

In the long-term - if there still is one – environmental breakdown remains the most unambiguous threat to our collective future, especially in Australia, the world’s driest continent. And yet Australia’s strategic and political elites remain consumed by the military threat China supposedly poses, rather than the immediate, life-threatening impact of simultaneous droughts, fires and floods. 

One of the only positives of the climate crisis is that it presents a common threat that really ought to generate a common cause. Some countries are no doubt more responsible for the problem and more capable of responding effectively, so they really ought to overcome the ‘logic of first mover disadvantage’: no doubt some other country will take over Australian coal markets, but someone has to demonstrate that change is possible.

China, is possibly at even greater risk from the impact of climate catastrophes because of water shortages and, paradoxically enough, rising sea levels that will eventually threaten massive urban centres like Guangzhou and Shanghai. While there is much to admire about the decrease in poverty in the People’s Republic, it has come at an appalling cost to the natural environment. China also has powerful reasons to change its ways.

Unfortunately, Chinese policymakers, like Australia’s and their counterparts everywhere else, are consumed with more traditional threats to national strategic and economic security. This may be understandable enough in a world turned upside down by an unpredictable administration bent on creating a new international order that puts American first and trashes the environment in the process.

But in the absence of accustomed forms of leadership from the US, and the international community for that matter, states must look to do what they can where they can, even if this means thinking the unthinkable and working with notional foes. China and Australia really do have a common cause when it comes to the environment, and they could and should act on it. 

Yes, this does all sound a bit unlikely. But if we are to survive in anything like a civilised state, unprecedented levels of cooperation would seem to be an inescapable part of limiting the damage our current policies have inflicted on the environment. In this context Australia and China really could lead the way by simply agreeing to implement coordinated domestic actions designed to set a good example and address a critical global problem.

Leading by example

As two of the biggest consumers and producers of coal, Australia and China could make an outsize contribution to a global problem that would almost certainly win near universal praise – not to say disbelief. In short, China could agree not to build any more coal-fired power stations and Australia could commit to not opening any more new mines and rapidly moving to closedown existing ones.

This would be a challenge for both countries, no doubt, but if we are ever going to address the climate challenge in a serious way, this is the sort of action that will be needed. There are no easy or painless solutions. But voluntarily abandoning the use of one of the most polluting fossil fuels is a potentially feasible and effective gesture that would make a difference. After all, China is a world leader in the development and use of green energy already, so the transition would be difficult but doable.

Australia has a shameful record of exporting carbon emissions, and could live without the coal industry - which produces most of them - altogether. Coal extraction doesn’t employ many people and Australia is a rich enough country to compensate those affected by the loss of what are awful jobs in a dirty industry. If Australia can find $368 billion for submarines that will likely never arrive, to counter an entirely notional threat from China, it ought to be able to find a couple of billion to deal with a real one.

No doubt there would be significant pushback from coal industry lobbyists and politicians who think their future depends on being ‘realistic’, even if it means wrecking the planet. And yet it is possible, even likely, that such actions on the part of Australia and China would be very well received by regional neighbours, who would directly benefit from their actions, and who might also be encouraged to consider meaningful cooperative actions themselves. Given the failure of regional organisations like ASEAN to tackle these issues, normative pressure could be useful.

China might even get a significant boost to its soft power and regional reputation. Xi Jinping frequently talks about the need to develop an ‘ecological civilization’. Moving away from coal and collaborating with an unlikely partner for the collective good would be an opportunity to demonstrate China’s commitment to this idea, and to offer some badly needed environmental leadership. If that’s not an example of what Xi calls ‘win-win diplomacy’, it’s hard to know what is.

A sustainable world order?

In the absence of what Bernie Sanders calls a ‘revolution’ in American foreign policy, multilateralism may well be in terminal decline. Indeed, it is an open question whether interstate cooperation will survive another four years of Trumpism, especially when the United Nations faces a funding crisis and politics in the European Union is moving in a similarly populist and authoritarian direction.

Cooperation between Australia and China could send a useful message to the Trump regime and other countries around the world about both the possibility of developing alternatives to failing American leadership and the institutional order it did so much to create. American hegemony was frequently self-serving, violent and seemingly indifferent to its impact on the global South, but we may miss it when it’s gone.

If multilateralism is likely to be less effective for the foreseeable future, perhaps minilateralism or even bilateralism can provide an alternative pathway to cooperation. Narrowly conceived notional strategic threats could be usefully ‘decoupled’ from the economic and environmental varieties. In such circumstances, geography may be a better guide to prospective partners than sacrosanct notions about supposed friends and enemies.

Someone somewhere has to show leadership on climate change and restore hope that at least one problem, arguably the biggest one we collectively face, is being taken seriously. There really isn’t any choice other than to contemplate unprecedented actions for an unprecedented problem. Australia and China may not save the world, but they could make things a bit less awful and inject some much-needed creativity and hope into international politics. 

Mark Beeson, Adjunct Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney.

Photo by Valentin Antonucci