Why Australia’s response to China must be measured

On February 14, exactly one week before China’s naval flotilla began live-fire drills off the coast of Eden, New South Wales, Japan’s defence minister released information about his nation’s interactions with the Chinese navy. In the previous year, Minister Gen Nakatani revealed, Chinese naval vessels had passed through the waters surrounding Japan’s southern islands 68 times en route to the Pacific Ocean. The data on Japanese contacts with China’s air force shows a comparably high tempo: in 2023, Japan scrambled its fighter aircraft on 479 occasions to shadow Chinese aircraft operating near Japanese airspace.

Given these numbers, Japanese military officials must have observed with wry amusement the overwrought reaction to the three Chinese warships sailing off Australia’s east coast and then circumnavigating the continent.

This is not to downplay what China has done. To send a destroyer – one of China’s largest and most modern – a frigate, a replenishment ship and possibly a submarine to conduct weapons drills close enough to Australia’s biggest city to disrupt air traffic is a novel and concerning development. Australians are right to take it seriously. Japan may be used to this kind of thing by now, but its defence forces have not always been so busy because China’s military has not always been this big, this active and this ambitious. Like Japan, Australia should expect Chinese activity near its shores and airspace to become more frequent.

Still, there are sound military and political reasons for Australia not to make too much of this affair.

Shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie used the term “gunboat diplomacy” to describe China’s naval deployment, and he has a point. Beijing was trying to send an intimidating message with its warships. China’s military brass didn’t choose the route for this deployment randomly. It did so to make a statement about its new military capabilities and to signal to Australia and the region that the Pacific Ocean is no longer an American lake.

Yet, as worrying as it was to see these advanced vessels within missile range of the Australian mainland, the deployment also illustrates the limits of gunboat diplomacy. Take the Renhai-class destroyer that led the flotilla, one of the largest and most capable such ships in the world. It is equipped with 112 missile-launch canisters, stacked on their end beneath the deck of the ship so that all one sees from the outside is a neat grid of square lids, each one hinged. When the lid is flipped open, the missile stored beneath emerges in a plume of smoke and rocket fire.

As for the kind of missiles, the Renhai-class destroyer is designed primarily to create a bubble around itself and its accompanying fleet that no enemy can penetrate. The missile load would therefore typically be biased towards weapons that can sink ships and shoot down incoming aircraft and missiles. But the Renhai class can also carry some weapons used to hit land targets from long range – Chinese equivalents of the Tomahawk cruise missiles that Australian destroyers now field.

What must be resisted is the occasional Australian compulsion, in moments of stress in the relationship with China such as the present moment, to retaliate against provocations. In such an unbalanced relationship, the larger party will always enjoy what strategists call escalation dominance, which basically means China can always up the ante.

If the Renhai carried, say, 30 such missiles, each with a 500-kilogram warhead, it could destroy a handful of large buildings in Sydney. That sounds terrifying, but in military terms it’s not a huge return on the effort and expense of making the arduous journey from China. If Australia and China were at war, we would be unlikely to buckle under that kind of pressure. Once the ship’s missile battery was exhausted, it would need to make the long trek home to re-arm. All the while, our navy and air force would stand a fighting chance of sinking these ships, which would make the return on investment look even less appealing for Beijing.

It’s important to stress that, even though this is a wartime scenario – and an extremely unlikely one at that – it nevertheless makes a difference to the way China and Australia conduct their peacetime relations. Gunboat diplomacy only works if the side being threatened with violence has a realistic fear that this violence will be on a scale it cannot endure. That fear alone will drive their policy without a shot needing to be fired. In the present case, Australia can reasonably conclude that China’s gunboat diplomacy has failed because this fleet simply isn’t strong enough to strike that kind of fear into us.

Of course, the fleets will get bigger as China’s navy continues to modernise and grow. In turn, that should drive Australia towards developing more formidable defences against them, and also against a Chinese air force with ambitions to field bombers that can reach Australia. Our aim should be to build a defence force capable of credibly signalling that, while Australia can never stop China from conducting provocative manoeuvres off our coast, they must be conducted on Australian terms, because China will know that, in the event of a crisis, those ships would be sent to the bottom.

What this calls for is a modern version of the “Defence of Australia” doctrine developed in the 1980s. Back then, of course, Australia had no worries about the reliability of its great ally, the United States, and China had yet to emerge as a maritime power that would eventually challenge American dominance. American reliability has been in doubt for some years, but the edifice crumbled a week ago in that infamous press conference pitting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky against President Donald Trump and his deputy, J. D. Vance.

Today, the job of defending Australia is harder because we need to plan on doing it independently and against a great power. The task is nevertheless achievable, because the technology of modern warfare favours us and because we are so far from China. The only way for Beijing to project a lot of military force against Australia is with big ships and long-range aircraft. The Ukraine war demonstrates it is possible to blunt both. Ukraine is winning the naval war against Russia despite not having a navy. Instead, it relies on drones and missiles launched from land, and this has worked spectacularly well against the Russian fleet. The air war, meanwhile, is at a stalemate, with neither side willing to risk sending crewed aircraft through the air defences of the other.

This is not a call to abolish the Royal Australian Navy; our circumstances are different from Ukraine’s. What is needed is a strong, defensively oriented Australian military that can blunt an attack against us by making it too dangerous to operate aircraft and ships in our air and maritime approaches.

This is not a formula for winning but for making it too costly for China to win. It’s a constrained and narrow goal that won’t set military hearts racing, but it is an appropriate posture for a middle power facing a great power, alone.

What must be resisted is the occasional Australian compulsion, in moments of stress in the relationship with China such as the present moment, to retaliate against provocations. In such an unbalanced relationship, the larger party will always enjoy what strategists call escalation dominance, which basically means China can always up the ante. Sure, Australia could respond to the Chinese flotilla by sending a destroyer into the Taiwan Strait to conduct missile drills, but that would escalate the dispute. China could then escalate again. China will always have more resources and therefore more capacity to keep upping the ante. It enjoys escalation dominance.

For a middle power such as Australia, escalating means losing. Of course, you can also lose by giving in. The appropriate settling point is somewhere in-between, where we practise a kind of stoicism. Australia must be prepared to endure occasional pain but remain composed and refuse to make concessions.

That posture worked well for Australia during China’s economic coercion campaign. At no point did Australia contemplate retaliation by imposing its own trade restrictions on China. We did not escalate. Instead, we endured pain but refused to give in to Chinese demands. Thanks to the strength, flexibility and openness of Australia’s economic model, exporters affected by China’s bans found new markets and, as a result, the cost of Chinese sanctions amounted to a rounding error for the national economy. When Labor won office in 2022, Beijing saw an opportunity to walk back these measures and pursue a less belligerent policy.

Unfortunately, Australian defence policy has yet to incorporate the lessons of its successful economic policy. The AUKUS project to equip the Royal Australian Navy with eight nuclear-powered submarines cuts directly against the stoic mindset. These submarines are expressly designed to operate thousands of kilometres to our north off the Chinese coast, and even to fire missiles onto its mainland. They are the weapons of a country that feels it can afford to escalate a dispute, particularly because it assumes it will always have the US in its corner.