The PLA-N task group that set pulses racing on both sides of the Tasman in late February had sailed from afar to test us, and we failed that test, writes chief editor Nicholas Dynon.
In Act III Scene II of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the eponymous prince, convinced that his uncle Claudius has murdered his father to claim the Danish throne and marry his widowed mother Queen Gertrude, sets out to confirm his suspicions.
As part of his probe, Hamlet assembles actors and stages a play about a murder – The Mousetrap – to test whether watching it will elicit a guilty reaction from his uncle Claudius.
As they watch the Queen character in the play-within-a-play melodramatically declare that she would never remarry if her husband were to die, Hamlet turns to his mother to ask what she thinks about the play. She replies with the immortal line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
In the 400 years since Hamlet was first performed, this line, of course, has become a favoured turn of phrase for conveying the idea that an excessively voiced protestation – overacted indignation – is a giveaway indicator of untruthfulness or deception.
It’s a line that might well have been on the minds of Chinese Foreign Affairs and Defence officials as they clinically critiqued the reactions of the Australian and New Zealand governments to the conduct of live fire drills by three People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA-N) warships in the Tasman Sea the other week.
The live firing exercises, conducted in international waters approximately 345 nautical miles off the New South Wales coast by a task group of three People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA-N) vessels – a frigate, a cruiser and a supply tanker – provoked an instant tirade of indignation from Canberra and Wellington.
Did the governments Down Under protest too much?
HMNZS Aotearoa conducts replenishment at sea with HMNZS Te Kaha. Image: NZDF.
Protest and panic
Both governments were quick to complain over Beijing’s lack of transparency in relation to the deployment of the task group into the region and, in particular, to a lack of notice around the live fire exercise that had led to commercial flights in the vicinity changing course.
“There was a warning, to civil aviation flights, that was basically a very short amount of notice – a couple of hours, as opposed to what we would consider best practice,” New Zealand Defence Minister Judith Collins told RNZ.
While stressing that the task group were not breaking any international laws and that New Zealanders shouldn’t “be worried,” the minister nevertheless implied that perhaps there is good reason for New Zealanders to be at least a bit worried: “The weapons they have are extremely capable,” she suggested.
Journalists and commentators on both sides of the Tasman were quick to weigh in on the issue.
Tim Hurdle, a former National Party senior adviser, and a director of Wellington public affairs consultancy Museum Street, described the exercise as “gunboat diplomacy”.
“China knows exactly what it means to sail one of their most advanced and powerful warships unannounced along the Australian coast,” he wrote in an opinion piece published in The Dominion Post. “Our difficulty to respond shows New Zealand needs to take seriously the threat of Chinese ambitions in our region.”
Dr Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst in defence strategy and capability at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that the traditional assumption that distance insulated Australia from any foreign threats was “long gone” as a result of China’s Tasman drills. “Here you have a Chinese naval flotilla operating off our coast… close enough to essentially do damage in a crisis,” he told 2GB.
University of Canterbury Professor of Political Science and well-known Chinese politics specialist Anne-Marie Brady opined that the task group’s presence was an attempt to intimidate. “It’s a threat, it’s a signal that China wants to change the strategic order,” she told RNZ.
“These are all deliberate signals to New Zealand, and Australia, and the other Pacific governments with military force, such as Fiji and Tonga, that China is wanting to establish a permanent military presence in the region,” she said.
University of Waikato Law Professor Alexander Gillespie suggested that the controversy would draw New Zealand closer to its “traditional allies”. It was also, he said, “a gift from Beijing” to those pushing for an increased New Zealand defence budget.
Indeed, in news reports from 24 February Defence Minister Collins stated, “we cannot hide at this end of the world anymore,” making the argument for a significant increase in defence spending.
Amid the moral panic, nimbyism, and virtue signalling, however, several commentators cautioned against overreaction.
Jennifer Parker, an Expert Associate at the ANU’s National Security College, and former RAN officer, cautioned against over-reacting. The PLA-N’s Tasman drills were not aggressive, “it’s just what warships do on the high seas”.
“The Chinese naval task group’s deployment in our region is clearly aimed at sending a message and testing Australia’s responses – not only on the military front, but socially and politically,” she wrote. “The worst misstep would be to overreact and hand China a propaganda win that could undermine Australia’s legitimate military activities in the South China Sea and North-East Asia.”
University of Auckland professor of international relations Stephen Hoadley similarly commented that when Western warships are off China, as they frequently are, “we don’t want the Chinese to over-react”.
Former NZDF Chief Information Officer, Air Commodore (Ret) Carl Nixon ONZM, commented on LinkedIn – prophetically perhaps – that in the months to come, “this event will be used as a case study on Information Warfare courses and how actions test reactions – both operational and political.”
Actions testing reactions… Hamlet anyone?
Zhang Junshe. Image: Xinhua.
The lady doth protest too much
The Chinese Ministry of National Defense was quick to respond to Canberra’s criticisms over the drills, with spokesperson Wu Qian commenting on 23 February that “Australia’s remarks are completely inconsistent with the facts.”
Wu highlighted that the live-fire exercise had been preceded by the repeated issuing of safety notices in advance, that China acted in full compliance with international law and international practices, and that the exercise would not affect aviation flight safety.
“We are deeply surprised and strongly dissatisfied with the unreasonable accusations and deliberate hype [my italics] against China by the Australian side”.
Commenting in major Chinese language newspapers, respected military commentators made various links between the Tasman Sea situation and Australia’s involvement in freedom of navigation operations in disputed waters in the South and East China Seas.
“The Chinese Navy should go to the far seas more often and carry out various training activities to gradually get used to the international community.” Zhang Junshe, a naval colonel told nationalistic tabloid Global Times. “Some countries are accustomed to the US Navy sailing in their nearby waters for many years, but they are still not very accustomed to the normal sailing of the Chinese Navy in these waters.”
Colonel Zhang emphasised that the task group’s manoeuvres were “completely different” from Australian military aircraft intrusion into the disputed airspace of the Paracel Islands a few beforehand. “According to international law, a country’s military aircraft has no right to fly over another country’s airspace without authorisation and must obtain the approval or consent of the country where it is located,” he lectured.
Song Zhongping, a Chinese military affairs commentator and former PLA officer, told the Global Times that PLA-N drills in international waters will become more frequent, and that “some countries should adjust to this trend.”
“In fact, the United States and its allies, including Australia, have been conducting joint military exercises in the South China Sea and the East China Sea for many years, with a large number of troops, high intensity, and clear targeting,” he continued. “They are accustomed to this, but they are pointing fingers at the normal training activities of the Chinese Navy.”
The Beijing Daily’s ‘Capital News’ column zeroed in on New Zealand Defence Minister Collins comments about the task group vessels’ “extremely capable” weapons, arguing that Ms Collins was invoking the “China threat” narrative, which Beijing denounces as regressive cold war thinking.
RNZAF Boeing P-8A Poseidon. Image: NZDF.
The play within the play
The ‘deliberate hype’ (蓄意炒作, xùyì chǎozuò) line taken by Beijing in response to Canberra and Wellington’s recent reactions is ordinarily used in official Chinese government statements responding to protestations over controversial PLA-N and PLA-AF manoeuvres in the South China and East China Seas. In fact, it’s something of a mantra.
Beijing used the line recently, for example, in response to allegations levelled by Australia of irresponsible and unsafe practices against RAAF and RAN assets operating in the South China Sea. In one such incident, Australia’s defence minister said a Chinese J-16 jet released flares within 30 metres of an RAAF aircraft. In another, Australian Navy divers received minor injuries after being subjected to sonar pulses from a nearby PLA-N vessel.
The problem for Beijing and its ‘deliberate hype’ mantra is that it’s always just been one side’s volley in a war of words with no real substance attached to it. Now, having provoked Wellington and Canberra via its Tasman performance into committing an unequivocal act of overacted indignation, the PLA-N has skilfully given credence to the idea that the governments Down Under are indeed prone to deliberate hype.
The PLA-N’s action tested the trans-Tasman allies’ reaction… and it would appear that the latter did indeed protest too much.
More importantly, their vociferous reaction to the pantomime now enables Beijing to accuse Wellington and Canberra of a ‘double standard’ in relation to the conduct of naval exercises on the high seas. This will serve to undermine the ‘freedom of navigation’ narrative used to explain NZDF and ADF involvement in South China and East China Seas FONOPS.
The PLA-N’s flexing in the Tasman (and subsequent circumnavigation of Australia) was no threat or an act of aggression. Neither was it necessarily a demonstration of power projection. Chinese naval vessels, for example, have been involved in several exercises in the Indian Ocean over the past decade, and it’s been over two decades since a guided missile destroyer and replenishment ship completed the PLA-N’s first circumnavigation of the globe in September 2002. We already knew that the Chinese Navy’s surface and submarine fleets are capable of long voyages.
Neither does the exercise appear to have served as a demonstration of national power to audiences domestically in China. The event was covered in the Chinese press, but it was not used or amplified as a major media moment.
Nevertheless, the task group’s route, the location of the live fire drills, and the lack of notice appear intended to serve a performative purpose, a pantomimed mockumentary of the ADF and NZDF’s own involvement in South China and East China Seas FONOPS and transits of the Taiwan Strait. And it carried a message of deterrence: that we can expect more frequent Chinese naval presence in our littoral high seas assuming that our involvement in the South and East China Seas remains unchanged.
In the Chinese strategic maritime universe, there is nothing more important than the consolidation of what Beijing regards as its sovereign territory within the nine-dash line.
In Shakespearian terms, if Beijing’s pursuit of sovereignty claims over Taiwan and the disputed features and waters of the South China and East China Seas represent ‘the play’, then the PLA-N’s Tasman performance is ‘the play within the play’, a piece of theatre envisaged and executed to test the reactions and resolve of its target audiences in Wellington and Canberra in relation to what really matters.
And that’s the point. The pantomime is – in itself – of no strategic value to Beijing. Rather, its value resides in its function as the play-within-the-play and the extent to which it performs that function to the benefit of Beijing’s execution of the bigger play.
Should tensions in the South China and east China Seas continue to escalate – and assuming ADF and NZDF vessels continue to participate in FONOPS in those waters – we can expect to see more PLA-N pantomimes (or other equally unwelcome performances) in our neighbourhood into the future.
And ultimately, as Hamlet might quip, therein lies the rub.
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