The fourth edition of the Quad foreign ministers meeting ended in Melbourne on Friday with a commitment towards keeping the Indo-Pacific free, open and inclusive. Though none of the leaders named China – barring Japanese foreign minister Hayashi who clearly outlined how South China Sea and East China Sea have become restive due to Chinese aggression – the message was clear that Quad nations will not tolerate China’s attack on other nation’s sovereignty.
Australian foreign minister Marise Payne also highlighted the point of economic coercion and in the joint statement all the foreign ministers condemned coercive economic policies and practises, indirectly again warning China and also warning the ‘free world’ against its economic ambitions.
Earlier in January, General HR McMaster, US’ former National Security Adviser who served during the Donald Trump regime, in a podcast with Joe Rogan, highlighted the same economic coercive policies that China uses to subdue nations. McMaster tells Rogan that China tried to subdue Australia and Lithuania by coercing them economically, referring to the trade war that China started with Australia when the latter called for a probe into the virus origins and banned 5G technology by Huawei. In the case of Lithuania, it was the opening of the representative office in its capital city Vilnius using the name ‘Taiwan’ which irked China.
“What I would often hear from my friends in southeast Asia and beyond and these are my counterparts I was engaging with when I was the NSA was, ‘Don’t force us to choose between Washington and Beijing,” McMaster said. “I told them that it was not the choice they faced. The choice you face is sovereignty and servitude! The United States is on the side of sovereignty,” McMaster told Rogan on his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.
‘China wants servitude. Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party want to establish exclusive areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific. They want to rewrite some rules of international commerce and political discourse and isolate regional rivals Japan,” he further added.
The former NSA who is also a decorated military personnel also urged US companies to look beyond profits to ensure that China does not gain an economic or military edge over the US. “Don’t invest in Chinese AI companies extinguishing people’s freedom or weaponizing people’s social media against them. Don’t compromise the long term viability of your company for short term profits,” McMaster said.
‘Grip On Critical Supply Chains’
McMaster also went on to explain that the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and Xi Jinping want to establish a ‘dual circulation economy’. He further says that China wants to get a grip on international critical supply chains. “If you want to look at human rights abuses, look at what China is doing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, extracting rare earths at a horrible humanitarian price which they need for manufacture of microelectronics,” he said. He says that Xi wants to grab the supply chains and create enough domestic demand which will ensure that China does not need anyone else. The same fear has been reiterated by many experts as well who see the Belt and Road Initiative and the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are CPC’s tools to subdue nations economically by lending loans for infrastructure in lieu of using them later as Chinese proxies.
Read all the Latest News here
Comments
0 comment