Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking at Davos:
We’re engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.
He then makes nice with China.
Australia was committed to returning a key northern port leased for 99 years to a Chinese company to Australian ownership, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday after Beijing’s envoy to Canberra warned of trade reprisals.
The Northern Territory government sold Darwin Port to Chinese company Landbridge for A$506 million in 2015, a move criticized by the United States.
China’s ambassador to Australia says plans by the Albanese government to remove the Port of Darwin from Chinese ownership will put at risk future trade growth and force an intervention by Beijing.
Ambassador Xiao Qian hit out at Labor’s policy to force the Chinese-owned company Landbridge to sell its 99-year lease on the port, sparked by pre-election national security concerns from both Labor and the Coalition.
The government is yet to announce a timeline for the forced sale.
When Landbridge, owned by the Chinese billionaire Ye Cheng, first bought the port in 2015, it did not require federal approval, but the sale quickly sparked complaints from national security agencies and even the then US president, Barack Obama.
Something that may explain heightened Australian concern was the presence of the Chinese naval task force in the country’s vicinity (although in international waters) last year.
Airservices Australia has detailed how a Virgin Australia pilot first alerted the danger of Chinese live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea on Friday morning.
Officials have told Parliament 49 flights had to be diverted on Friday, as well as more flights over the weekend. . . .
The government says it is yet to receive a satisfactory response from Beijing about the inadequate notice given about the military drills.
The Chinese force then circumnavigated Australia. If Beijing was intending to send some sort of message (probably), it may not have thought through the possible consequences.
And (also from The Guardian, a week or so ago):
Australia has long regarded Solomon Islands as its patch. After a breakdown of law and order in the early 2000s, Canberra spent more than $2.3bn on a regional assistance mission, Lowy Institute analysis shows. The mission ended in 2017 with a reconstituted local police and sense of mission accomplished.
But in 2019, Solomon Islands switched its diplomatic support from Taiwan to China and three years later, signed a controversial security deal with Beijing. The subsequent arrival of Chinese police and advisers created anxiety in Canberra that Honiara was inching away from its sphere. Other countries are involved too — New Zealand supports Solomon Islands police as does, more distantly, the US.
Back in 2022, I wrote a bit about China’s interest in the Solomon Islands here, here, and here.
Landbridge should be properly compensated, but the lease has to go.
In August 2024, The Council on Foreign Relations prepared an interactive survey of Chinese ownership positions in international ports:
The database supporting this interactive includes 129 port projects of which Chinese entities have acquired varied equity ownership or operational stakes. China operates or has ownership in at least one port in every continent except Antarctica. Of the 129 projects, 115 are active, whereas the remaining 14 port projects have become inactive due to cancellation or suspension by the end of July 2024.
Seventeen of the projects were majority Chinese-owned, and 14 of those had the “physical potential for naval use,” although potential is not, it should be stressed, the same as what is realistically possible. Just because warships could use a facility does not mean that a national government would allow them to do so.
Focusing on naval use, however, may be missing the point. As the authors of the report write, China’s real leverage over the West in these areas may rest “in its varied degrees of investment and ownership in the world’s busiest and most-connected ports, which underpin the global flow of goods.”
That is not a reassuring thought.