Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australia stands with the United States of America and Australia stands against the government of Democratic People's Republic of Korea. An editorial in the Global Times, published by the Chinese Communist Party's official People's Daily, ran last week saying, 'China should make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten US soil first and the US retaliates, China will stay neutral. If the US and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.' While these words from a Chinese state-run newspaper have been analysed by many a Western commentator over recent days, few have sought to glean the message China may be sending North Korea, instead focusing on China's likely message for the United States. The Chinese are strategic and the Chinese are smart. If, indeed, this editorial was in fact a message from Xi Jinping's Communist China, what it signals to Kim Jong-un's North Korea is far more enlightening than that which it might be signalling to the United States and her allies.

Chairman Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People's Republic of China, is renowned for having written in March 1926 the words—

Mr O'Brien then spoke in Mandarin

Womende diren shi shei? Womende pengyou she shei?

'Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?' Mao saw these as first-order questions for the revolution, arguing that previous revolutionary struggles in China had achieved little, due to a failure of revolutionaries to unite with real friends, to attack real enemies.

It is not for me to advise China on who their real friends or enemies are. What is crystal clear as we look at the crisis unfolding on the Korean Peninsula is that North Korea is acting like anything but a friend with respect to China. China knows it was North Korea that was the aggressor that instigated the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, which saw the shedding of so much Chinese blood. China knows that since the armistice in 1953, the North Korean regime has indulged in extreme brinkmanship with the international community, including breaching resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, of which China is a permanent member. China also knows that North Korea has breached the terms of the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Corporation Friendship Treaty of 1961. Article 2 of that treaty declares that the two nations guaranteed to adopt immediately all necessary measures to oppose any country or coalition of countries that might attack either nation. The treaty says that both nations, and this is vitally important, should safeguard peace and security. Aggression and provocations by North Korea, especially when it involves the threat of use of nuclear weapons, is deeply inconsistent with this duty.

For those who may be unfamiliar with north-east Asia, do not assume that China and North Korea share that much in common. North Korea, after all, is a country that markets itself as a proud nation amidst an ongoing socialist revolution. In truth, it is a closed, failed state under totalitarian rule—under the perverse, so-called juche ideology that, in practice, oppresses its own people while threatening those abroad. It is a state that consistently defies China and the international community's request to cease development of nuclear weapons—rather, accelerating their development—while unashamedly threatening the sovereignty of other peace-loving nations that are abiding by an international rules based order.

When it comes to dealing with North Korea and ensuring the peace and stability of our region, I say to China: the United States and her allies, including Australia, are your real friends, and we need to work together to bring North Korea to its senses through economic and diplomatic means.

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