Australia faces down China in high-stakes strategy

I'm not over worried about this. While China is by far the biggest trade partner of us Australians. Australia actually has a low proportion of trade as a percentage of GDP and the products being blocked by China are all fungible (perhaps wine being the least fungible). At worst this will cause harm to some sectors for a few years, or drive down the the Australian Dollar or Australian commodities and give China's competitors an advantage. I can't see it having a large impact on Australia being more pliable to Chinese demands or the Australian economy as a whole. I don't think it will even serve the purpose of disuading other countries from taking actions Chinese finds provocative. They are alienating so many countries at the same time, including; Sweden, Czech republic, India, Japan, South Korea, United States, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Canada at once.

I think the discussion of trade here misses two points.

First, it can be argued that Australia started this trade war. Long before China put any restrictions on imports from Australia, we were putting "anti-dumping" tariffs on Chinese steel. The ban on Huawei is a bit dodgy. You wouldn't want every mobile router in Australia to come from the same Chinese vendor. But the choice we actually have is between N networks with western hardware, or N+1 networks where the extra one uses Chinese hardware (and is possibly a lot cheaper and a bit shonkier than the others). It's not clear how that extra network would cause the collapse of Australian democracy: no one is forcing us to use it. On the other hand, it's very clear how it might cause a collapse in the profit margin of a monopolistic telecom company with close ties to the Liberal Party.

Secondly, there's that thing which everyone knows but pretends not to: trade benefits consumers much more than producers. For farmers in Australia, this means plowing some crops into the ground and delaying buying their kids the latest smart phone. For farmers in China, it means feeding their kids a diet of mercury, cadmium and melamine, when they lose access to safe and unadulterated produce. That isn't a very smart way for the Chinese government to spend its political capital, and you have to suspect this is more about vanity than deliberate strategy.

If I owned China I'd see the biggest threat is Western influence.

I'd see two fronts on that.

Hollywood and students studying overseas.

Every student you convince to not study in the West means you have a greater internal control.

I would have waited a few years, but Covid-19 gave the time to strike.

I'm sure it's not all of it. But I think it's a factor, Australia needs to be thought of as more of an enemy.

[edit] "bipartisan group of parliamentarians who call themselves the Wolverines"

And the Red Dawn remake was of course against China, until the Chinese shut that down.