April 15, 2021 (Joseph Thomas - NEO) - Australia had until recently been enjoying economic growth alongside the rise of China. This all changed when Canberra began following Washington's lead, antagonising China, and in what would snowball into a costly, self-inflicted economic crisis.
Today, Australia not only faces mounting barriers to trade erected by China in response to Australia's systematic antagonism, but now is seeing what had been temporary trade disputes transform slowly into a Beijing strategy to permanently eliminate dependency on Australian imports.
Once set into place, the ability for Australia to return to previous levels of lucrative trade with China will be unlikely.
Australia's Self-Inflicted Economic Ruination
In 2018, Australia buckled under US pressure to ban Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from nationwide 5G infrastructure contracts citing still unfounded "national security concerns."
The BBC in an article titled, "Huawei and ZTE handed 5G network ban in Australia," would claim:
"...the Australian government said national security regulations that were typically applied to telecoms firms would be extended to equipment suppliers.
Companies that were "likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government" could present a security risk, it said.
Even the BBC and the Australian government were clear to use the word, "could present," versus the demonstrated security risk US-made hardware poses as revealed by the Western media itself in articles like MIT Technology Review's, "NSA’s Own Hardware Backdoors May Still Be a “Problem from Hell”," which would note:
In 2011, General Michael Hayden, who had earlier been director of both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, described the idea of computer hardware with hidden “backdoors” planted by an enemy as “the problem from hell.” This month, news reports based on leaked documents said that the NSA itself has used that tactic, working with U.S. companies to insert secret backdoors into chips and other hardware to aid its surveillance efforts.
Quite clearly then, the threat of compromised hardware is not the real reason this ban has been leveled against Chinese companies since similar bans have not been used to target US-made hardware. Instead, the most likely motivation fits in with Washington's wider strategy of encircling and containing China, including the blunting of its economic rise as a whole, and the sabotage of individual Chinese companies poised to overtake their Western rivals.
