‘If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck …’: India backs Australia on Chinese coercion

India has taken sides with Australia against China’s policy of using trade bans as a political punishment. Beijing has imposed restrictions on more than $20 billion worth of Australian exports to China but insisted on Friday that it is not using “economic coercion” against Australia.

Asked whether Beijing’s actions constituted economic coercion, India’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said: “You know that bit – if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck …” Dr Jaishankar was in Melbourne for a meeting of the foreign affairs ministers of the Quad countries – the Indo-Pacific democracies of Australia, India, Japan and the United States.

At the same time, Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan was in Delhi negotiating a free trade agreement with his Indian counterpart.

Dr Jaishankar said the outcome should be “a much larger quantum of trade and investment between Australia and India”. The pandemic had exposed an overconcentration on particular markets, he said, and the new agreement should help ease such problems.

“A lot of the progress and prosperity of the last 70 to 80 years is because of the fact that trade has been governed by rules and not politically influenced or driven or determined,” Dr Jaishankar told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in an interview.

“We were all very clear” in the Quad ministers’ meeting, he said, that “we all believe politics should not be conducted by coercion at any time.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week said that China’s economic coercion of Australia had backfired. “I think China has lost more than Australia has in its efforts to squeeze Australia economically,” he said. Beijing would be “thinking twice about this in the future”.

In response, China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing: “The label of ‘economic coercion’ cannot be pinned on China. All attempts to gang up with others to misrepresent facts and resort to malicious hype-up are bound to fail.”

He claimed that Beijing’s trade bans on Australian products were consistent with the rules of the World Trade Organisation. Canberra last year took action in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against China’s punitive tariffs on Australian wine and barley. Such cases typically take years to reach a decision.

Other Chinese trade bans against Australia are not officially declared by Beijing and are enforced informally and opaquely, making it difficult to test them in the WTO.

Dr Jaishankar emphasised that the Quad nations were drawn together “because we have a shared worldview and interests that converge” and “not because we have any particular immediate pressing anxiety”.

Its agenda was positive, not negative, he said. Most immediate was the group’s pledge to deliver a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine to the poor countries of the region by the end of the year, with half a billion provided so far.

Yet Dr Jaishankar also chided Beijing for violating agreements covering border disputes on land and at sea: “Right now my big concern after 45 years of a relatively stable, even peaceful, relationship on the border with China is that two years ago, for reasons still not clear to us and not credibly explained to us, China moved a very large force to the border.

“We had agreements for the last 20 years that neither country would bring large forces to the border. Unfortunately, we had a very serious consequence. People got killed.” The two sides clashed in 2020.

India reported the deaths of 20 of its soldiers and casualties of at least 45 Chinese troops. China reported four of its troops killed.

Dr Jaishankar said that, despite ongoing talks, “the two militaries are in very close proximity, which is a very fraught situation”.

He also said that nations that signed up to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea should submit to the decisions of its arbitration bodies, as India and Bangladesh had. This is implicitly critical of Beijing for ignoring an arbitration ruling that China has no legal basis for its claims to maritime territories also claimed by the Philippines.